I had a lovely day yesterday with the Friends of Ballarat Botanical Gardens FOBG; a wonderful group of talented artists who meet every Monday. The session I title 'BotanINK'; so drawing plants and botanical items in ink. Not strictly scientific drawings, more interpretative and free form. The challenge is to draw from a live specimen in ink, with NO initial pencil outline!
I use a specific method to demonstrate and teach this technique. If you would like a full description and step by step instructions, please contact me via the link on the right with your preferred email address and I will send you a pdf of the worksheet for this class.
The bare bones is to use four 'dots' to establish the top, bottom and sides of your image, then carefully draw an outline of the shape only using black ink and connect (maybe) those four dots. Once your outline is established, you infill the negative spaces and join shapes to create more defined leaves and stems. Finally, you can add detail using hatching, crosshatching, dots, sketchy lines, etc. It is challenging, but really rather fun. Each artist was given a sprig of Eucalyptus Baby Blue to draw using this technique.
Of course, then can use color inks to follow! There are many types of inks to try, and I brought along a selection to test out with the group. This included Adel and Staedtler color fine liner pens, Art Spectrum Acrylic inks, Sennilier Shellac inks, Inktense pencils, Inktense blocks, Inktense pans, and finally Prismacolor marker pens. Quite a selection!
Just some of the different types of inks that were available to try!
And of course, I did a few small demonstrations of different ways to use these inks and how they could work alongside and with the black line drawing.
Demonstration showing how different color inks work as tints, lines, and blocks of color. Each little demo took no more than 5 minutes.
To further show how color can be added to black ink drawing, I used my earlier demonstration from that morning of the Eucalyptus Baby Blue and went to town with the marker pens!
Added color with Prismacolor marker pens to black ink demonstration drawing. The black in drawing was done using Staedtler Mars fine liner pens ranging from .05 to .5 nibs. Paper used was Lana Bristol 250gsm.
Each artist then went away and experimented with the different inks using their own reference materials - from live specimens, color photos and digital tablets. They all did some fantastic work and seemed to enjoy the experience!
One artist had as specific problem; how to draw a pinecone? This is my demonstration work I did with her showing how to analyze the cone structure and then draw it with ink washes and fine liner pens (all sepia.) This was done on a Waterfords Cold Press paper, 350gsm.
It was a busy and full day with lots of fun drawing. And afterwards I had a delightful stroll through the gardens, admiring the statuary in the old conservatory, enjoying the colorful spring ranunculus display, and getting all nostalgic down the Sequoia walk. At only 160 years old they are still only youngsters!
Beautiful spring display at Ballarat Botanical Gardens.
Thank you to the Friends for a wonderful day of BotanINK!
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