Another Shot of Ink(tober)

It's about a week into the event called Inktober, and I've somehow managed an ink a day up to this posting. As mentioned in the post before this, drawing with ink, whether using a flexible nib, tech pen, or a brush pen has taken some getting used to. 

Real world media have drawbacks, as any medium does. With ink drawing one problem is correctibility--you can't really correct a big mistake very easily. Another problem is adaptability, by which I mean certain kinds of unfocused and/or indistinct effects are tough to bring off. But those aren't insurmountable. For one thing, great care in measurement and initial lay in are critical skills to acquire in any event. Second, you can lay in an ink drawing with faint pencil lines before doing the main drawing (it's not cheating). As to effects and the use of line, some kinds of smoother passages can be achieved using ink with brushes.

In the first ink drawing (left) posted here, the drawing is completely dependent on line--there are no massed uniform values. It's a drawing of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was photographed in relatively frontal light during a press encounter. Here any achieved likeness depends on accurate drawing and very little on values.The drawing was done using a disposable flexible nibbed pen and values were achieved with hatching.

In contrast, ink drawing on the right was done using both a set of 0.01-0.05 mm tip technical pens but a significant amount of drawing was done using the pointed tip of an ink-filled waterbrush. I charged one with full strength ink and the other with ink diluted fifty percent with water. I used the brushes to achieve various effects, as well. Ink and brush can be employed not only to add smooth darks but also as a drawing tool, provided your brushes come to a sharp point. Later in the month I'm going to try an entire drawing using only the brush.
(Incidentally, this drawing was done from a photo, not from painful personal experience.)

Another drawing of a bottle. Glass and its transmission of light have fascinated me for decades, so I did another bottle (left), this time intact. In this one the style reverted to a similar line and hatch technique like that in the first image above. In this one, strong light from the right results in a very bright motif, so only the ink in the bottle carried a very low (dark) value. The liquid in the bottle and the cap are the two darkest values, made using cross hatching.

Inktober has already given me fun, practice, and provoked some learning. We'll see what the rest of the month brings forth.