 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnock, and I have a chicken that I'm going to share with you today that I'll be drawing, as well as giving you some tips for using pen and ink to create an intricate kind of drawing like this. Lots of questions have been coming up lately during Inktober, so I'm going to share some of that. First is correct supplies for the task. I will be using my favorite paper today. This is a Hanamula paper. It's linked in the doobly-doo down below, along with the supplies, but let's open this up and get started. The paper is one that is not going to feather, and I suppose I haven't tested it with everything to know that it won't, but I can use fountain pen on it. I can use multiliner like I'm using here. Lots of different pens will work. A fountain pen stays a little bit wet longer than, say, a pen like this. Since I tried this once and leaned my hand into wet fountain pen ink, I decided I would start over, but I would actually use a pen that I will not smudge because I didn't have time to redo it again, and sometimes I just don't think, and I lay my hand down in something that is still wet, so that is generally a problem. Second tip is to choose a suitable style, and this style is just one that I picked for today. It's going to be very linear, and I want to use a lot of cross-hatching because I've been talking quite a bit about cross-hatching and doing a lot of it in my inktober pieces all month long, and I've had lots of people wonder, like, how do you do that? And I thought I would show you some of the ways that I think through it. There are some areas where I'll put just a few lines to get started on creating some kind of depth, some kind of shadows, and the face I didn't want to put a whole lot into in terms of cross-hatching in lines because that is going to be one of the focal points. There's several focal points in this drawing, and I wanted to keep that a little bit lighter because a lot of the feathers were going to get relatively dark because I was going to draw a lot in them. So I used some lines for a portion of the shading on the head, and then other places I just used squiggly lines. So I alternate between what kinds of lines that I use, and sometimes for some drawing, squiggly lines are what you need for everything, and sometimes long straight lines are what you need for everything, and it really depends on your mood and what you're drawing and what kind of style you want the drawing to be done in. So think about that a little bit. Now, draw to the destination is something that I learned from John Muir Laws. I was watching a video of his where he talked about when you're trying to make a line that's going to end in a place far away. It's going to be a long line. He was talking about straight lines, but even on something like where you're making a curved line, if you look at the place where the line is supposed to end up instead of following the pen along the way, then you actually end up with a lot better line. You're going to actually end up in your destination. Reminds me when I was learning to drive. Sister Norma used to tell me to keep my eyes on the road, not looking at what's in the ditch because I would drive in the ditch if I kept looking in the wrong place. So watch your destination. I was also considering the line length when I was doing this drawing. The feathers that were coming down the chest were much more compact. They were shorter. They were darker. And if I used smaller shorter lines, it conveyed a whole different character for those particular feathers. They're very different than the long flowing ones coming out from the head. So using a different type of line actually communicates that difference in the type of feathers. I mean, this bird was just amazing. In the number of different feathers there were when I started really looking in detail at the bird itself, at the photo and zooming in to see where the feather stopped and started because a lot of that chest was just a massive dark color. It wasn't actually something where you saw every feather individually. So I wanted to give it that, that mass feel, but I wanted to have some detail in it as well. And I was also considering the value. You can see that there's more richer value in those smaller feathers because there's more lines that are closer together. And there's one section of feathers that has just longer lines, but it's right in the middle of all of those smaller feathers. So you can create all kinds of textures by paying attention to how they affect the value, the light versus dark. And the feathers up on top, this long, flowy stuff has more white in between all the lines. I left more space so that I would have some lighter value up there. Then there's crosshatching as you come down to the bottom. I'll add more of that as I go. This group of feathers is one that I wanted to draw attention to. So how do you do that? You treat it a little differently than everything else, either in value or in how you render the lines. What I decided to do here was leave more open space by making some of the lines dotted or just portions of each of the lines dotted. So I'd make a long stretch of line and then do some dotting and then go back to a long line. That's going to give these feathers a slightly different feel because this chicken could turn into one giant cacophony of lines and nobody could tell when one starts and the other ends. It just would not make a whole lot of sense. There's another set of feathers here and these do something completely different. They go in a different direction. So follow the direction of whatever the thing is that you're drawing. And here I had a whole different feel for these. They were just kind of floppy and hanging down as opposed to feeling like they were pointed left to right or anything like that. They were just pulled down by gravity quite heavily. And in order to make them look like they were just kind of thick and droopy, I'm adding shading underneath of them, just lines going from the inside edge, the place where each of the feathers tucks into behind the others, just making darker lines down there. I did go back in periodically to a few places to bump up the contrast. Just seeing how much darkness I put in some areas made other areas look very washed out. So I started just kind of periodically going back and sharpening some things up, adding in just a little bit of crosshatching on even my featured feathers to give them some depth. So they round out into the bird itself and then continuing some of the crosshatching that I had started on the bottom because I needed that whole bird to feel like he was rounded. And then we get to the parts that I really wanted to draw on this entire drawing. This was my absolute favorite part of this particular rooster. It was these back feathers. And when you're going to do any drawing, figure out what your favorite thing is. What is the part that drew you to wanting to use that reference or the part that's going to convey whatever it is you want to say in the drawing? Whatever that is, spend the most time on it. I slowed down on this section. I know it's sped up here in the video, but I slowed down so I could start to create that focal point. I wanted these feathers to be the ones that people looked at. And just so you can see what I'm talking about. This is the real speed of this drawing, at least the back end feathers. One of the reasons that I wanted to really focus on this is because the shading from the feathers, the darkest parts in a bunch of them, was coming right out from the shaft down the middle of the feather. And that meant my pen had to start in pretty much the right place. I did have a little filling in to do occasionally because it's really hard unless you're going even slower than this to be absolutely perfect. And I wasn't trying to be botanical perfect in this. I just wanted that white shaft to kind of stay white-ish. And I could have done that with a white pen, but I prefer when the drawing looks like it's all been done with black pen as opposed to seeing a big chunky white line or white something on it. That just tends to not look like it fits the character of the drawing itself. And I had so much fun with these feathers creating the 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% dark values because those are what give something roundness when it goes gradually from one tone to another or that there's really darks next to dark grays. And you get some variety. It starts to look like real, like touchable feathers. Now you can see we're looking at it really close on camera that you can see all my lines and the crazy wackiness of them. But when you pull back from it, it actually looks pretty decent. Now my last commendation to you is to finish well. And what I suggest is to walk away from the drawing for a bit and leave it on your desk or wherever you were working, close the front of the pad, whatever you need to do to walk away from it and then come back and give it another look. And what you want to do when you look at it is squint. You want to see if you can see shapes and values when you're squinting at it because that eliminates a lot of the intermediate stuff, all of the detail because you're just looking at the shapes themselves. And that's what I was doing here is just looking at each one of the shapes. I wanted to create an extra difference where the light feathers come down from the top of the head onto the body. And I just wanted to increase some of the contrast in a few areas and then go back into a few of the spots where I'd done crosshatching and it wasn't really great crosshatching. There was just some areas that needed a slight touch-up. And there is my finished chicken all clucking and ready to go. Now if you would like to download this chicken, you can go buy a copy of it over on my website. Links down below. You could color it, put it on a card or whatever project you want or you could just examine it and use it as a template and try to draw this chicken yourself and see if you can get these kind of rich values in your own pen and ink work. And if you would prefer to just take a class then my pen and ink classes are on sale this month so link to that is in the doobly-doo as well. And I will see you again very soon with another video because you know that's how I roll around here. Thank you for hitting the like button, for subscribing, and leaving a comment. I'll see you later. Bye.