 Hey there, it's Sandy Allnock and I have two projects to show you one game-changing tip for those who like to draw in fountain pens and it's how to get two different line weights with one pen nib. I'll be doing this large project and then a smaller red fox. The smaller one is actually going to have the full video available elsewhere and the printable. So you can just go get the printable and color it if that's all you want to do. The fox and his little mouse friend and I'm going to do a deep dive on the Ellington pens. Let's get to it. I have become such a fountain pen nerd. I really just got to stop with the fountain pens. When Ellington messaged on social media and asked if I'd be interested in trying one, I sort of reluctantly said yeah because I got burned a while back when I said yes to somebody but these come in an outer box and then they have this nice black box inside with embossing on them which is kind of a sweet touch. I like things that are packaged well because I'm a nerd that way and the pens themselves come in a plastic sleeve that's real easy to get off. It's not one of those child-proof ones that makes you get out your scissors or anything just slips off and there is the first of the two pens. This one has a green and black striped body to it and the black cap with gold trim on it and inside these little boxes, there's one in each of the pen boxes. There are three of these cartridges. One is blue and two are black and they are as I believe they're all non-waterproof so they will make washes if you add water to your drawing. The other pen is the one I just keep drooling over every time I pick it up. It's so beautiful. The rose gold is so unique. I haven't actually seen rose gold. There might have been rose gold pens out there and I just missed them but all of the trim is rose gold. The body is white which is not so great because I get ink all over my fingers. So there's that but let's talk a little bit about filling a fountain pen. I've done videos on this before but let's fill these up. Screw off the back side of the fountain pen and most fountain pens will work this way. These come with a piston converter. The piston converter is where you put your ink if you're going to get ink out of a bottle. But if you're going to use the cartridges that they give you, you take them out of the box and there's two ends to them. I match up the end that came out of the piston converter and just shove it in there. You do have to push it in there the first time a little bit hard because it does have to kind of break the seal on it because otherwise if there wasn't that seal all the ink would spill out in the box and after a couple seconds, shall I say, a couple strokes of scribbling I got it to write and it worked really well. Quite nice. It does take it a second for the ink to come down into the nib itself and I was pretty impressed just for first little doodles on my little scrap piece. The other pen, I will show you how you actually use that piston converter. The thing goes up and down. That's like a turkey baster so you put it all the way down there and you stick that in your ink bottle and then you turn it the opposite direction to lift it up and of course my big fat fingers are going to be in the way. I've never really quite figured out how you could film this without your fingers being in the way. But you can fill it by leaving the cartridge thing, the piston converter in the pen and then stick the pen nib in the bottle or you can do what I did and get your fingers all inky by holding the piston converter with your fingers and then you don't end up with ink on the actual nib itself. Easy to clean off but there you go. Both pens write just fine and had a very nice writing experience as with any fountain pen just let that ink have a second to flow down into the nib and you're good to go. The fountain pen experience, I put that in air quotes, is something that is individual for everybody. I like a pen that looks and feels beautiful. This one has Ellington wrapped around the cap on that bottom portion. The top has just a really nice design to it. There's some that are just flat and clunky and they're fine but when it's pretty it's nice. The nib has the company's E engraved on it but this is my favorite little feature. It's when you put the cap on. It's a pop off not a twist off cap and when you slide it back on it snaps on but not with a click it just poof it just goes down. The pen posts well which means the cap sits on the back of the pen very nicely and that's some of the things that I like about the fountain pen experience. You might like something different and I found something different when I went out sketching the very next day with some friends of mine. Pen was new to me. I wanted to try it out and they were going out to the windmill garden so I went with them with my epic sketchbook which is just about done now and I sketched this and I was doodling along just going fine making all the textures and the plants and the buildings until I got to the windmill and I ran out of room so I had to make it inset. So yay for that you know sometimes that's just what you have to do. I did find when I handed the pen around to a bunch of artists who were there some of them were like oh this is really nice one of them did not like it at all. She doesn't like a pen that's heavy so your opinion of whether a heavy pen is good or not is up to you. I like the feel of it and this drawing was one that started out very different than this. I had started making these trees. I was trying to make them in a variety of density and a variety of types of branches wanted to see if I could just make them look like they were different breeds and you can see by the lines there that's the kind of work that's underneath of that wash but then I had a bloop and it wasn't the pen that blooped it was me knocking over something on my desk and I got a big blob of ink so I made a night sky but that was with platinum carbon black ink which is a warmer black and the ink that was in the pen the rose gold pen is the cartridge the cartridge that came with it remember I said that that's not waterproof ink this is how I found that out well I ended up putting the wash over it and losing all the pen lines I had to go back in with more pen and ink because it was one gray blob but when you're choosing your inks figure out whether you think you're going to add some water to it eventually or not and know what kind of ink you're putting in the pen because that's going to be important to you to be able to figure out okay after I finished this I rinsed out the nib in the sink and put on the piston converter with the carbon black ink for the rest of the projects you're going to see today so the game changer technique getting two different line weights out of one pen nib we'll check this out turn the pen upside down and you'll get a thinner line that some pens you can also use lighter pressure and on certain papers that will work better but this is more reliable when you know what kind of line it makes and you'll have to test different pens that you have most pens I find will do it some will do shorter lines better than longer lines and this pen does shorter lines better than longer lines upside down but it will give you more variety to use in your drawing so if you suddenly need a small pen nib you've got one right in your hand and throughout the rest of the drawings I'm going to be using this technique of flipping the pen upside down repeatedly and I'm going to start with the underpainting I'm going to apologize right now because this is all the footage I have of the underpainting I had a hitch with the camera it's it's just the thing that happens I wasn't about to repaint this so that was why we have two foxes in today's video because I wanted to have a little bit more drawing going on for you so the other one will be a printable and there's also well I'll talk about that later anyway I sketched out my fox first on arches cold press paper and then just started putting some color on it I wanted the fox to have you know that nice orangey color and I don't know why I was so obsessive about leaving that eye open there because I ended up doing other things with it anyway beside the point and then I just started putting some color behind it I had this idea to do a background that's different than just let me draw treats let me draw forest behind this this fox and that just led me to well what if I do a really loose painting and an ink work and stuff and just do some doodling and can I do that in combination with something that's more realistic so that I just get a totally different effect for the finished piece and I started with a dish of ink and just using a couple different brushes making different kinds of marks and different shapes of marks different amounts of color sometimes I would use more water in the brush to get more grayish color onto the paper and sometimes it was thicker ink just playing around with leaving myself smaller spaces to do the doodling and larger areas where I just get a nice flood of ink I did get them very crooked here because I wasn't measuring anything I wasn't trying to be straight but I'll fix some of that later on this is my fancy needle brush and I've talked before about loving to do calligraphy and I thought that would make for some nice grasses in the foreground of this piece so that there's something organic and loose and I don't know flouncy in this in in contrast to all of those big bold black shapes that we're going to end up in the background and then I wanted some more of the little lines and little details up there in the top so I just started painting shapes and almost doodling with that liner brush just to see what would happen and what would I end up coming up with when I got to the pen and ink works I am going to get to the pen and ink see promised you that and I started experimenting with here using the nib the right side up and then turning it upside down and I could get thicker lines and thinner lines and since I know this pen works better with smaller lines I didn't do some of the really long lines on this with the nib upside down but I did on some of the shorter ones start using the nib upside down so I could get a variety in that line weight it also helps if you're trying to do some stippling with the nib right side up and you want to get something in between to fill in a spot and make it a little even you can go in with the smaller nib and micro target where you're going to get that line and not end up getting two dots next to each other that make a big blob I also wanted to include some of my more flowy lines because in my doodles some of the lines that I like the best are the long flowy ones and I made these flowy but a little on the wiggly side so they weren't all like you know kind of really nice curves they were a little looser to go with the looser grasses in the front it's kind of trying to play off that but with the normal lines of the fountain pen rather than that fancy brush just to to get some more organics into that background it was just it was a lot of fun thinking through the process of am I getting too straight edged or am I getting too organic and balancing those two out here is a little close-up you can see how messy my lines are and I end up going back and fixing things all the time and this this is like such a micro shot that I'm just sitting here watching the replay while I'm doing the voiceover and thinking that's really messy I have such a mess but nonetheless when you're not looking at it with your eyeball this close to it it looks great so there's that look at the difference in the line weight that I can get using the upside down nib to create some extra detail in the fur and I use this upside down nib a lot in the fur because there were some areas where I wanted to have bigger bolder shadows between the chunks of fur and then there's other areas where I wanted something just a little bit softer and a little bit lighter so I could get some transition going from light to dark as I was working on the fur I was trying really hard to pay attention to what direction the fur was going that's the direction the lines should go and I would first put down the darker sections so anywhere I saw shadows and then as it moved into a lighter area I'd start with the nib upside down and make lines that were closer together and as I got into lighter and lighter sections I spread those lines out further so that I would get a transition from dark areas into light areas so that's just one way to think about all that for when you're drawing animals I went back and forth between working on the fox and working on the background because I would get really bored doing all these little lines for all this fur so I would go work on the background some and it's one of the reasons why I don't tend to have one kind of line in everything I do I like variety I get bored quickly so even on the fox that back section on the far right side of the fox I ended up making those long lines that were reminiscent of all of the grasses that were on the left hand side in the background and in the background as well one of the other things I did was clean up some of the edges any of the lines that looked like they should be vertical I made them actually vertical I got at a t-square to do that I didn't clean them all up but I clean up enough of them so the whole thing didn't just look like it was completely kiddy wampus the eye didn't quite come together with the stippling so I decided to add some green watercolor to it was super glad I had switched my ink to something waterproof so I could add extra color and I did add a few touches of extra color some extra bright orange in the background a few areas where I added more of the pains blue gray but I had more fun than a barrel of monkeys working on this this was so much fun I want to do this on a card because it'll be smaller and it won't take so long but I think it would be really fun to do something like this so stay tuned in the next couple days on social and I will give it a try this drawing is actually on my fine art website so if you want to get it for somebody for Christmas present feel free to pop over there I'll put a link in the doobly-doo this Fox is actually you're only gonna see a minute of it here because the full real-time video is over at art venture and that is my community platform if you go to the pen and ink students group there and it's all free if you go to the pen and ink students group there and there's video there's also the outline of the Fox so you can draw it yourself if you're someone trying to learn to draw animals in pen and ink there is no voiceover in that video it's just music because I am out of time right now I am trying to get my tag series ready for this year it's gonna be done very differently I'm super excited about it I think you are going to be as well but I need some time to go get that underway and stuff because it's hopefully gonna come up later this week we'll see so if you want to see the Fox go watch that go draw your own Fox or you can just download it if you want to color this Fox and make cards or any kind of projects with it or just practice coloring then you can get it for a couple bucks over at art-classes remember art-classes different than art venture different websites all me okay so I will leave you with that for the time being I colored mine in colored pencil because I think it was beautiful in colored pencil and that is about it for today I will see you again soon hopefully cross your fingers with the tag series and an explanation of how that's gonna work this year and I will see you soon bye bye