This week’s sketch is watercolors and India ink, of a house up the street after the sun has dipped below the treeline, but is still above the horizon:
Back when I was a teen I was taught two ways to use India ink: dip pen and bamboo calligraphy brush. You can do a lot with either, but Jesus are they fiddly. Also, the old bottle of India ink I have is not waterproof, which is great for certain effects, but often maddening overall (esp. against watercolor).
So this was done with Faber-Castell Pitt pens, which are amaaaaazing. Yeah, a dip pen can give you a much finer line, and an ink brush can do really interesting dry-brush and textural things that you can’t coax out of a Pitt pen. But in terms of bang-for-buck (esp. when the “buck” translates to hair-pulling frustration), the Pitt pen is hard to beat:
The India ink is dark and flat and deep, water soluble/flowable when first applied, but then dries absolutely waterproof. They have a ton of different nibs. For this sketch I used a 0.3 fine liner and a soft-brush (the later nicely emulates doing wet-brush work with a Japanese calligraphy brush, giving you all the expressiveness and none of the sorrow). The color of the sky was me experimenting with wet-on-wet watercolor.