hello it's sandy and i want to talk about getting started with pen and ink drawing because you might think you need something fancy i'm going to go through some types of pens really quickly before we get to techniques ballpoint pen you probably already have right near you somewhere there's probably one within reach you can do art with a ballpoint pen a gel pen lots of us have entire sets of gel pens they come in all kinds of colors i recently did a video on how to unstick your gel pens if they get stuck and i will link you to that in the description down below felt tip pen again ubiquitous inexpensive you could easily do lots of different drawings with these fountain pen one of my favorites because i like the experience you fill the pen with inks and then you write with it and it's just an elegant experience a dip pen is a pen that's either got a nib that you can insert into a handle or you can use a glass pen and dip it into whatever liquid you want to draw with technical pens the one on the left is a fancy pen you can refill it with ink you can change out nib widths the micron pens are ones that just come in different widths and their disposable pens and a ruling pen which is fairly new to me so i will be doing a video on one at some point in the next couple months probably but let's get on to techniques because that's really what i wanted to talk about and these are techniques you can apply if you're doing an actual drawing if you're drawing a thing you can use any of these techniques you can also use them if you're just doing patterns of some sort and i'm not necessarily talking about zentangle zentangle is a type of drawing that people do with all different kinds of patterns and lines totally wonderful look up zentangle if you're looking for alternate types of lines to use and you can use those in your drawing as well but these nine and the variations on them are ones that i use on a regular basis when i'm doing pen and ink drawings of all different kinds depending on the subject matter and i'll use one of these techniques in just one section and then move to a different technique in another section so you don't have to just do the entire thing in one hatching is just making lines they can be close together or far apart and that gives you a different gray tone to them so you can have them closer together to make a darker color cross hatching is when you do the hatching but you crisscross them you can go vertically and horizontally you can go at angles and guess what you can do multiple layers of cross hatching you can do vertical horizontal angled to the right angle to the left you can do 45 degree angles and get many more layers to create deeper and deeper shadows it's a little difficult to get consistency as you can see i was trying to do this quick and it is hard to get it really consistent going really quickly when you're doing a dark area contouring goes around the shapes of the object so you can indicate the shape of it simply by the angle of the lines so if there's an apple that you're going around the edge of if there's ripples on the water if there's clouds in the sky lots of different things you could use contour lines for to indicate the shape of the object itself and there's broken hatching i use this in all different kinds of ways you can use them in continuous lines across the page you can use them as grasses and create different kinds of textures using that animal fur is a good one for broken hatching you can go from dark to light by varying the size of each of the lines making them more like dots as they get to the edge you can make them more like grasses and and create just all different kinds of textures and patterns that go from dark to light when you're using your your broken hatching stippling for some people it's very relaxing for others it's maddening i tend to use it not for an entire drawing but for a section of a drawing so if there's something that has a particular texture i can call attention to that by using stippling with it and the amount of stippling you put in how close you make the dots as well as how thick your pen is can make a real big difference in giving you lots of those gray tones you can go from very pale to very dark based on how much white of the paper is still showing through and then there's scribbling which can also be fun and an interesting way to add texture if you're doing hair curly hair you can do this kind of thing lots of different things where i just do some scribbling to indicate dark areas and the tighter you make your scribbles the darker your color will be your overall hue and i tend to make figure eight shapes if i wanted to get really dark i make really tiny figure eights as opposed to really large ones and that fills in more of the real estate on the paper with a darker hue quickly and then there's repeated shapes this can be any kind of shapes i'm doing circles here it could be squares it could be triangles it could be whatever suits what you are drawing whatever kind of pattern you're trying to put in it and just creating a whole bunch of those different shapes makes for whatever kind of gray you're looking for if you do small shapes and they're close together it'll be darker because you have more ink on the paper if you want less ink on the paper use larger shapes and i'm just filling in for the most part in between each one of those shapes you can use rectangles and this might look like bricks but picture this as the veins on a leaf you could use this for all different kinds of things to create interesting types of patterns and then very wide open shapes will leave lots of white so the more white paper shows through the lighter the overall tone is and you can do this for just a patterned background or you could do it for a drawing itself tiling is really fun i'll show you an example of tiling in just a moment in this video and it's when you create sections of any one of these patterns or other patterns and you're just going to turn the pattern in different directions so that it starts to fill in the entire area you can do them in a very random pattern like in the first square or here i'm doing a grid of them and going you know doing my horizontals and verticals in a pattern and the angles in a pattern so that you get some regularity to it more like tiles on a floor and then you can get very random with it as well you can do all different directions with your hatching in order to make a tiled pattern and you can do that with any kind of pattern that you're using the tiling technique for as well here i'm using very tiny tiny tiling little bits of hashing and then the more air you leave in between it the lighter overall it's going to be and finally is scallops scallops are a shape that you can use for lots of different things just for general texture you could use it for scales on an animal or feathers on a bird you can make them very random like in the first block very regular as in the second and then you can also add things in between if you have large scallops you can use some of the hashed uh dotted hash lines in order to create some depth inside each one of those shapes so you can combine any one of these in a myriad of ways and out of just nine techniques look at how many different types of patterns were gained from them so the things you can do with pen and ink are myriad so don't tell yourself oh it's just a pen and ink drawing it's just a little whatever it's a few lines no you can do all kinds of really interesting things with it and it can be very therapeutic and relaxing as well that's what i find it as especially when i'm doing something like tiling and that's what i'm doing here tiling with hashes and i'm just going back and forth vertical horizontal angle to the left angle to the right and just turning my hand and turning the pen so that i can fill in each one of these sections with those lines i'm working around a simple pencil drawing i did triangles for the trees and to create the moon i used the inside of a roll of washi tape and then i moved it over a little bit to make a second circle so i could create the other part of the moon and make it a partial moon instead of a full moon very simple to do you could do all different kinds of complex art using this technique and just use this for the sky and then do the rest of the drawing or you can do what i'm going to do which is leave it blank and just have the lines in the background as the drawing on the image you could make this in a size that's going to work to be framed and give it as a gift holidays are coming you could do something wonderful like that or do a card with no stamping on it whatsoever you can just do this with a ballpoint pen and a piece of paper trim it down put it on a card and you're done you could use gel pens you could do this in color so many different ways that you can approach something like this here's a couple other pieces of art that i have done with pen and ink and using these very same techniques to create landscapes you can see some of the different textures inside of them that i've showed you today so you can use them in different combinations different types of ways for different areas of the drawing to create something really really interesting if you would like to pin my graphic or download a pdf of it for reference next time you do your drawings that's all over on my blog link in the doobly-doo down below and on wednesday this week i'm going to be using one of the inktober prompts to create some christmas cards using a ballpoint pen and a gel pen so again you don't have to have fancy pens in order to do beautiful work and even make cards with your pen i already have on hand all right thanks so much for joining me i will see you again on wednesday you