It is a dark and rainy day here in France. We are “stuck” in front of the fireplace, with books and music, some red wine….and ink.

The piano…..unipen # 5, splattering with ink-pot lid, moleskine

Cloches, a crystal and a branch…………unipen, brush-pen, splattering with brushpen, moleskine.

Pens and nibs….uni-pen, brush-pen, speedball pen and nibs, splattering with nib(C1), moleskine

I am really enjoying the ink sketches. I feel liberated in just picking up a pen and just letting it rip without thinking about perspective or depth or realism or truth or good or bad or right or wrong! On the contrary, I feel inspired and creative, and this is a wonderful exercise for me, just letting my hand and the pen flow. My sketches are very wonky(not attractive wonky), real wonky, but for now I’m ecstatic about them. As it turns out, Laurawas also bitten  by the “ink-bug”, so keep an eye open for her upcoming ink-posts, which sound full of promise.

Today(1st of December) is our first day of “celebrating” the festive season here at home. It is the “official” decorating day, switching on the fairy lights, start burning our special Christmas candle, listening to Christmas music and ending the day with a special dinner by candlelight. I did some pen sketches of some candle holders, mostly holding tea lights. We light candles every evening, starting from 17:00.

These were done in my moleskine, which is full of watercolour splotches, so I thought I should just worsen it with a few shakes of my ink-pot lid, and now I like it. It is a bit overdone, because I first tried with the brush-pen, which made too fine a spray for my liking.

In this week’s figure drawing class, I decided beforehand I was going to WORK!! I wanted to use many different mediums, which was a bit ambitious. In the one and two-minute drawings I tried changing mediums in-between poses, causing me to fall behind and stress etc. But I did succeed getting a few ink ones down. It was a great class, I enjoyed it and however chaotic and unorganized my methods were, I enjoyed working in different mediums. I will continue doing it in future. I did some drawings in graphite sticks, charcoal, pen, sanguine, conté, pit artist pen, brush-pen, pencil and I finished with a pen and WC.

Two one minute sketches and the last is two minutes, all of them in Staedtler pigment liner # 5 on sketchpad.

I can only sleep 4 hours a night and if I’m lucky, I’ll reach 6. Thus being awake at 4:30 this morning, I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat in front of the computer(where I have a comfy swivel leather chair) and felt like doing just some ink sketches.  I like the line and especially contourwork of José who prefers more and more to put just ink on paper. And I’ve always admired Suzanne, who is a magician with pen and line. See also nice ink work from Genine (who gets beautiful detail in her inkwork), Gabi (who is using some washes lately, but his inkwork stands so well on its own!), Joan (who does great cross hatching), Nina(see her post ” 30 minutes by a zeba crossing…I can’t link to it) Anita (who can just do about anything!) and Casey (who has always loved penwork and adds just that slightest watercolor wash),  Bambi (who has the steadiest hand with ink I have ever seen!), Anna (who does such delicate linework),  from time to time Claudia does great sketches from the garden outside her office in ink, you’ll have to browse her blog) Dave’s ink sketches(beautiful!), Deb‘s interesting line work, France‘s stunning drawings, Judi‘s ink lines filled with spirit and not forgetting the amazing work of Russell Stutler. There are so many many inksketchers out there from whom I draw inspiration when it comes to inkwork…

All these sketches were directly done in ink in moleskine.  I just chose different things that I could see from my swivel chair.

Ink and moleskine(cross hatching)

Ink and moleskine(contour)

Ink, graphite and stump, (because it was lying around on the desk) in moleskine