Ok, this isn’t going to look that impressive, but for me it’s a personal breakthrough…
I am working on a lengthy illustration project for which I had chosen ink with gray wash as the medium. I had started by using a croquill dip pen with India ink, followed by a bamboo brush with an ink/water mixture. But I was getting really frustrated, mostly because even when I got an inked drawing that I liked, it was easy to mess up at the wash stage.
I continue to have a love/hate relationship with dip pens. Love the line they give. Hate the fuss and mess. To complicate this relationship, I have this Cross fountain pen which I got in high school:
It’s supposed to be a writing pen, not a drawing pen, but the line quality is superb. Plus it’s portable, and you get several hours’ supply of ink before having to refill, rather than a minute or two. Only catch is, the ink isn’t waterproof. (You can buy waterproof ink for fountain pens but it doesn’t work very well.) So I had ruled it out for this particular illustration project. Until now…
What I did was scan in my line art as a black-and-white bitmap in Photoshop, as per FAMA’s excellent tutorial : I scanned at 2400 dpi, which may have been overkill but worked.
I could then have done my coloring in Photoshop, but because I was working in grayscale, not CMYK, and because I wanted a hand-painted look, I instead printed the line art out on medium-heavy stock on my laser printer. Then, I painted onto the printed outline with a mixture of India ink and water. To my relief, the laser-printed ink was waterproof, and the paper didn’t even buckle that badly! (I used what I happened to have on hand, which was 44 lb Epson Matte Inkjet paper. Worked ok, although next time I’d like to try using heavier stock.)
When I scanned the new image with ink wash, I was concerned that I would get weird pixelation or jagged edges on the ink outline from re-scanning it, but at 600 dpi resolution it appears to be fine–most likely because the line art was a bitmap and not a halftone.
So, there you have it. I can use my favorite fountain pen and experiment endlessly with hand-painted ink washes, without fear of damaging the original line art. And the process isn’t even all that cumbersome! Now I just need to work on improving the drawings themselves..