 Hey there, it's Sandy Allknock and today I'm going to talk about sketching using water-soluble inks. And you can do this with a fountain pen or with any other pen that is water-soluble. I'll show you a few tricks and some things that this can do that waterproof inks cannot do. So you might want to make some choices about the kinds of things that you're sketching with which kind of ink. I was cleaning during the holiday season and I found a few things that I haven't used in a while. My water-soluble Mont Blanc ink is one that I will link you to, something that I painted with it because it's got some other properties that are really interesting. But it's water-soluble. I also found my little hexagon pocket watch and I thought I'd put it on screen so you can watch the hand spin around during the parts that I speed things up and get an idea how fast it actually is sped up. And my Visconti pen, I have not used my mirage in forever and I forgot how fine the nib is. It was just so nice to work with this pen. So your first thing you're going to want to do is test your paper, ink and pen because the combination of the three of them is what's going to make this project work. Because if the ink doesn't move, if the paper doesn't let it move, you want to find out whether or not when you water it, whether that whole line is going to disappear entirely, it's going to disappear a little bit or disappear not at all. Because that's going to kind of tell you what sort of lines you need to make in order to use the water and move that ink around the way you want to. Now if something stays there and doesn't completely wash out, we're going to ink over top of it so it's not a big deal, but you just need to know that before you start. And this particular sketchbook is a Stillman and Bern Delta. They have a whole bunch of different sketchbooks in their series. The Delta, I just need to use the water quickly with it and I wanted to have a little bit of background behind the trees at the base because I just wanted it to feel like there was something back there instead of just a loose stand of trees out in the wilderness. Gosh knows what that would be all about. And then I added the water right away. If I add the water right away, the lines tend to disappear. But as I said, I'm going to draw over top of them so it's not all that big a deal. Get it good and dry and then draw tree trunks. Tree trunks don't have to be straight. Do not get a ruler out because Mother Nature doesn't work with a ruler either. So make them kind of broken tree trunks so that there's a little room for some snow to get in between because these are winter trees. And I'm just going to sketch them in apart from each other in uneven ways. So you want some to be tall, some to be short and have them a little different distances in between each other. Again, Mother Nature doesn't plot out exactly how far every tree is going to be. So we're going to just do it the way Mother Nature does. And then you want to spritz them with water and you'll have to practice with how much water it is. Start lightly and just let the water start moving the ink. Don't get it super soaky because then you'll just wash all the ink out entirely. The longer you let it sit there, the more it could do a little, you know, moving around. So be aware of that and then dab some off. You'll end up with a little bit of lines in there from the trees and then lots of just gray mushiness. And that's perfect for this because then we can add detail on top of it. I do a lot of different wash and ink things with watercolor first, with Copic first, with whatever. And this is basically the same thing just using the ink that I'll be drawing with that's in the pen. So I'm beginning now to put in some of that detail since everything's dry and I can control it more, go in and fix any of the washed out tree trunks. But then I'm putting heavier spots of ink just certain places where I'm going to put more ink because then when I use a brush and just start moving the color around with the water on the brush, then it starts making these broken places again where the snow can come through because we want this to be nice and uneven. And I'm doing this fairly small. This is a small size sketchbook. So if you wanted to make a postcard with this and send a postcard of the trees outside of your snowy window at the time that I am filming this, everybody across the United States is locked in a deep freeze. And I thought maybe sketching the trees outside your house would make you a little less grumpy about being stuck in the house in this bitter, bitter cold weather. So I hope you're all staying safe. But I thought this might be a fun little project that you could try out. Probably have the supplies on hand. Try a couple different sketchbooks, a couple different pens and inks. See what you've got that works. And then you can send somebody else a postcard who is also stuck in the snow. Well actually postcards probably can't get through the snow either. I don't know. You could you could just make something to send later when the storm breaks because I'm hoping it does. We had a whole bunch of snow and everything at my house. I live on the west coast and it was pretty atrocious for the week before Christmas. But on Christmas Eve, it suddenly shot up to like 54 degrees. So that's 54 Fahrenheit. I don't know what it is Celsius, but it was warm, really warm. All the snow melted and we have been fine ever since. So I am hoping that same for everybody else. So you can see how breaking up the trees so that I have some white spots coming through and just keeping it really loose and soft helps the trees to just look like a beautiful wintry forest. And then I took the pen and sketched in just a couple of footprints. I basically wanted some ink down here that I could move around to make a path as though a person or an animal had walked into or out of the forest. When you do that, make sure you kind of break it up. Don't make it look like a solid line. Let it be all kind of broken because you know when we walk around in the snow we kick things and animals do too and pretend there was like three of you walking along and then dab off the extra if it's too dark. And you've got a beautiful little postcard you could send. Just put it in your sketchbook. You could make a card with it. You could do whatever with it. Now this is another little project that I did. Very simple vase of lavender. Lavender is a really easy and forgiving flower because it's just a stalk. And I thought I'd include something springy so we can all be thinking towards spring and draw your vase whatever shape of vase you're going to make. And mine is a striped kind of vase. It's going to be ceramic. But I'm putting some stripes on it and I want to show you what happens when we water over top of things. The technique you're going to see here is similar to what's done in stamped watercolor. If you have not done stamped watercolor, you can search for that on my channel. You can also look for that as a class. There's a couple of stamped watercolor classes using Art Impressions rubber stamps. So what I'm doing here, you could also do with one of those rubber stamps. So if you are a stamper and you have a small flower, just put a bunch of them on each stalk. And they're really uneven. Let them kind of flop around in the vase. You're not going to sit all up at the same height. You want them to kind of feel kittywampus and casual. And I have some even hanging out the sides that are dangling down low and stretching out, which makes it look very natural as opposed to a bunch of soldiers in a row inside the vase itself. And I'm just kind of going back in to fill in some of them, put a little leaf onto maybe one or two of the stalks. Don't get too much into the detail. Because now we're going to take a brush and some water and just add water into each one of those blobs. And it's going to start to pull all those little flowers into groups, into clusters. You can even use the brush to join them, to get them to touch, so that they start to just kind of mush together very softly. And you can fuss at them as much as you like, but don't go too fussy with them. Because the more fussy you get, the less fresh your sketch will look like. So now for the shading on the vase. I'm going to give it kind of more shading up on the top and then just take my brush and go right down over all those lines that I drew in the same way as when I tested to see if the sketchbook worked. I just went right over top of it. And you can leave that as a really simple, clean line shadow. It's just a crisp, simple shadow. And if you have just a regular round vase, just make that C shape on the left hand side or the right hand side and that will be simple enough. What I did was go back over some of the lines because I wanted some of those stripes in there and the stripes would continue over top of the shadow. It would be dark within dark and just a stroke to pull color out to the left to create a shadow on the same side as the shadow on the vase itself. So I'm super grateful that I got the studio cleaned and I could find some things now. These sketchbooks organized. I found more mediums that I haven't used in a while. So looking forward to 2023 and seeing what comes out of this studio now that I can find things. Have you cleaned up your studio in advance of the new year? Let me know in a comment. I'm hoping I'm not the only nerd who did that. I will see you guys next week. Have a great New Year's celebration!