Shading Inks Testing, Reviews, and Selections

When I recently did this sketch and discovered the joys of Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses ink, I decided that I need to find more inks that give me that kind of variety in both color and value, otherwise known as inks with "shading". I started to revisit samples I'd acquired previously when I wasn't looking for that particular characteristic, and ordered a bunch of new samples to try too. I started testing them with three different dip pens: a glass pen, a Speedball B-5 nib, and a Brause 2mm italic calligraphy nib. I also drew a crosshatched section on each sample with each nib, and once dry, went back and brushed it with a water-filled brush to see how much the ink would (or wouldn't) wash, the color of the wash, and if it would leave enough of the lines behind to hold onto my drawing in sketches. I should have included Black Swan in Australian Roses in the tests just so I'd have the samples to show, but since I already had a bottle of it and already knew I loved it, I didn't have to prove that one to myself!

The fourteen inks tested here are:

• Noodler's Golden Brown
• Noodler's Apache Sunset
• Private Reserve Orange Crush
• Private Reserve Shoreline Gold
• Noodler's Habanero
• Noodler's Cayenne
• Noodler's Antietum
• Caran d'Ache Sunset
• Private Reserve Blue Suede
• Private Reserve Naples Blue
• Private Reserve Tropical Blue
• Private Reserve Sepia
• Private Reserve Copper Burst
• Rohrer & Klingner Alt Goldgrun (misspelled in my test --- sorry!)

These tests were done in a 5.5x8.5" Stillman & Birn Alpha Hardbound sketchbook. It is an archival, acid-free paper, 100 lb (150 gsm), internally sized and surface sized, with a vellum surface. I selected that paper because it is one I use often for my art journals, so it was most important for me to know how the inks would perform on that particular paper. You might get completely different results with different paper, different pens, and even a different amount of pressure or speed in your writing. In other words, your mileage may vary!

I tried to get the color as good as I could in the images, but there was so much color and light bouncing around the white pages and light filters that I could never even get both sides of the page to light up the same way. So, my apologies for my poor photography skills, but I still think you can get a pretty good idea of what these look like. Each image can be clicked to enlarge it.

 

I have to say that I was thrilled with almost all of these. A couple of notes from these samples:

• Noodler's Golden Brown and Private Reserve Sepia are both great inks with wonderful shading. They are not exactly the same, but they are certainly in the same color family. You probably will want to choose between the two of them. Golden Brown is more yellow, and Sepia is a yellowish raw sienna color (sort of like Winsor Newton Raw Sienna, if you're familiar with it).
• Private Reserve Copper Burst did not shade for me. However, it is such a fabulous color that I plan to get a bottle to use with watercolor. Most browns veer to yellow, orange or red when dissolved with a wet brush. This one does not. It holds its color, which is neutral enough to be of great use to me. Also, in writing with it, it has a lovely shimmer. Bonus!
• Noodler's Antietum was another ink that didn't provide much shading, but is such an interesting and highly saturated color that I think there is a bottle of it in my future.
• Rohrer and Klingner Alt Goldgrun seemed to shade well in these very wet dip pens, so it was one of the samples I inked up in a fountain pen. But in an 0.5 Preppy, the result was highly disappointing, and much too light to be useful to me for drawing purposes. So, I am still looking for a good green with shading....

I inked up a vintage Eversharp Symphony piston-fill Flex pen with a Fine nib with the Noodler's Golden Brown, and one with a Broad nib with the Private Reserve Suede Blue, and quickly dashed off a couple of pages of quotes to see how they'd look with these pens. Surprisingly, the Golden Brown didn't shade in that particular pen. (You'll have to click this one to get a sharper image if you want to see it better.)

I inked up a bunch of pens with these and other favorites from the samples, to see how they'd perform in various fountain pens. The ones I felt worthy of putting into fountain pens were:

• Noodler's Apache Sunset
• Noodler's Cayenne
• Caran d'Ache Sunset
• Noodler's Golden Brown
• Private Reserve Sepia
• Private Reserve Naples Blue
• Iroshizuki Kon-Peki (not shown in the test samples above)
• Private Reserve Tropical Blue
• Noodler's Black Swan n Australian Roses (not shown in samples above)
• Private Reserve Blue Suede

If you click the images below, they will enlarge so that you can read about my impressions and what pens I used. (In posting these photos, I can see that the image below isn't as clear as I thought it would be, so I will type out the handwritten text when I get back later today or tonight, to make it easier to read.)

Special mention should go to two wonderful shading inks that I did not put into fountain pens only because there was so much similarity in this color range. They are

• Private Reserve Orange Crush and 
• Noodler's Habanero.

They are both highly saturated inks with orange-yellow-red components that wash well and provide a lot of value and color variation.

I hope this write-up was helpful to those of you who share my current quest for inks that provide shading. I'll be doing some lightfastness testing of these inks too, and will have some preliminary results to share in another month or so. Hopefully there will also be some artwork to post with these new inks!

Studio Assistant

As I've been working my way through this Stillman & Birn Alpha journal, and doing my multi-part review, many people have asked me, "What if I work on the white paper instead of pages prepared with a colored ground? How will the paper perform then?" Of course with a sketchbook, that's how most folks work! So I saved several page spreads of plain paper toward the back of the book, and will write something up about working on the plain paper in a couple of days.

I've been wanting a studio assistant for a long time! This particular one doesn't do much, but she can manage to hold onto my wonderful TWSBI ROC 100,  which is more than I can do sometimes. This sketch was done across a two page spread using a 6mm Pilot Parallel with blue ink. I've used this pen often for title lettering, but have never tried sketching with it. It has a very wide, stiff nib, so unless the paper is absolutely, perfectly flat, the pen skips spots. That means it doesn't write evenly in a sketchbook. I thought that might make it interesting for sketching though. The pen is designed to give that very wide 6mm line on one end, and very thin line about 0.3-0.5mm when used on its side. I'm not quite sure yet how I feel about the result, but I think it's worthy of further experimentation. I have these pens in all the other sizes too, which I've found much more useful so far than this 6mm one, yet there's something I really like about the way this pen lays down the lines.

My initial intent was to leave the entire sketch blue, coloring in only the TWSBI pen with red and purple. (It's currently filled with purple ink.) But then I thought adding the red to the cloth all the objects were resting on would give the blue a bit more pop and add another dimension to the sketch. I used Winsor Newton Cadmium Red and Permanent Rose watercolor. It wasn't necessarily a bad idea to do that, but it did completely change the focal point away from my studio assistant holding the pen! So I decided that since I did that, I may as well mix up a little of that Schmincke bottle of gold gouache powder, and color the bottle and a bit on the red beside it. Sometimes it's better to stick with the original plan, and sometimes it's better to let the painting lead you to a different idea. I'm not sure which one this was!

Eerie Creatures at the Aquarium

 

Can you believe how ugly these creatures are? As if the dead birds I'd sketched weren't enough, I rounded the corner and came upon this eerie tank of Wolfish and Sculpins. It was dark and mysterious, and the colors were all muted except for the brilliant yellows and oranges of the Sculpins. Incredibly strange as they were, I just had to sketch them. The Sculpin was actually on the other side of the tank when I began, and I'd not planned to put him into the sketch, but when he swam around and came to rest nearly under my nose, with his bright coloring and fascinating shapes, there was no way I was going to leave him out of the picture.

This paper started off as white pages in my Stillman & Birn Alpha hardbound sketchbook. The brown and gold background and page borders were done in advance in the studio using Golden Fluid Acrylics and F&W Acrylic Inks. Working on a toned surface often helps me to set up the scene for a sketch. The only down side is that I end up having to skip around the book when I look for just the right background color and border for a particular page. Even though the six pages of aquarium sketches I did that day seem like a cohesive group, they are not all on adjacent pages in the book.

I started this sketch with two fountain pens --- one filled with Noodler's Midnight Blue, and the other filled with a mix of Private Reserve Velvet Black and Private Reserve Chocolat. I figured those would give me a warm and a cool, and with the addition of a waterbrush for shading and wash, I'd have everything I needed. But that was before the Sculpin forced himself into the scene, and I decided to add in quite a bit of watercolor when I made the decision to include him.

It was really dark in the room! Dim lights were on inside the tank, but I could barely see what I was sketching, and wished I'd had the foresight to leave my little book light in my messenger bag. I'd removed it to lighten up the bag as much as possible, but I'll definitely bring it next time. It's a Mighty Bright Music Light and has a clip to affix it to a music stand, which I use to clip it to the book. It has a little arm that opens up and it's highly adjustable. It folds into a small pouch and is fabulous for nocturnes, candlelight sketching opportunities, or power failures, as I recently learned!

The text was written with a TWSBI Broad-nib fountain pen and Noodler's La Reine Mauve ink when I returned to the studio. The TWSBI is a really bold, wet writer, and La Reine Mauve is one of my favorite inks --- deep purple and waterproof. Once I added the purple watercolor into the sketch, I knew that would be the pen and ink combination I'd be using to write the text. I generally do the writing after I get back, using a color that I feel will help tie it all together.

Part III Stillman and Birn Alpha Review and Creating a Font

To read this review starting with Part I, click here.

Somebody wrote to me yesterday and asked, "Isn't part of the pleasure the feel of the paper itself?  Wouldn't gessoing it, or adding any other sort of prep to it ruin that?"

It's a really great question! Yes, the feel of the paper is important to me, and in fact, most of my sketchbooks to date have been done with traditional sketching media directly on the paper. I will definitely be including that kind of work in a future installment of this review. Perhaps I should have done that first, since that's how most folks use a sketchbook! But I am really eager to branch out into different types of page layouts and materials, so my current need is to find a sketchbook that can not only work for traditional dry sketching media and watercolor, but for other types of page preparation as well --- acrylic, pastel ground, collage, etc.

As for the preparation of the surface ruining the feel of the paper, it really depends on how much is applied. A very light coating of acrylic or acrylic ink, heavily diluted with water so that its only use is to lightly tint the page, has surprisingly little effect on the paper. The more pigment and medium you add, the greater the change, and of course gesso would totally transform the surface. When I did the watercolor over the shimmery iridescent acrylic, I purposely selected a heavily painted page to test the limits of the combination of materials, even though most of the time I'll be working on a surface with so little acrylic on it, if any, that it won't matter.

I do plan to also review the book with examples of various types of pencils, inks, watercolor, and ink and wash over just the plain paper, since I'll be working that way as well. Issues such as paper smoothness/tooth and transparency do become much more significant then.

In my previous journals over the past six months or so, and in this one so far, I'd mostly used a writing font that had been sent to me by a calligrapher friend. It was a really nice tall, informal font that was quick to write. I found it pretty ideal for my journal writing to accompany the sketches. But one thing I found out is that it didn't photograph very well. It was a very thin, monoline font, and was sometimes difficult to read when photographed and posted. I also wanted a font that was more personalized, so I spent a few days developing Jamie's Journaling Font! I wanted the font to be clean and easy to read, with bolder lines, few flourishes, and no serifs. I'm sure that I'll make a couple of changes to it; I still need to make some decisions regarding the upper case Y and lower case r and d. Other changes will probably evolve too as I use it. My plan is to use it while I do this experimental journal, so that it will be flowing better by the time I move to a larger one. Here is the unveiling of my new font!

The letters are rounder and bolder. It seems to work well with both italic and round nibs, and with or without a slant. I can't wait to try my flex nibs with it, but haven't had a chance to do so yet.

I wrote out the font with various pens and inks on a page that had been previously prepared and then coated with Matte Medium. Using a template, I drew the lines for the writing with pencil. I learned two things while doing this page:

1. Pencil lines over Matte Medium are almost impossible to erase. I gave up and decided to leave the lines on the page. But much more importantly
2. The Matte Medium will destroy my fountain pen nibs! It was like writing on sandpaper. Just the other day, I took a scratchy-writing fountain pen and dragged it across a piece of very find sandpaper in a few different directions to see if it would improve the nib, and I totally ruined the pen. Matte Medium puts a lot of tooth on the paper, much like a very fine sandpaper. So please, folks, do not use fountain pens over Matte Medium!

I started wondering what would happen to the stitching and binding with all these extra layers of medium on the pages. The paper itself handles it great, but by thickening so many pages with extra mediums, paint, collage, etc., I knew pretty soon the book would not be able to close completely, or might die in trying!  I thought it would be wise to start removing some pages to allow extra room in the book. I'd already prepared pages beyond the center of the first signature, so I went to the center spread of each remaining signature, where the stitching can be seen, and carefully removed the middle two-page spread from each. I'll see as I go through the book if I need to do more than that or not.

After all this testing in the studio, I was really eager to take the book out on the road and apply all of this to a real sketching situation. Experimentation in the studio is one thing, but working out on location is quite another. Other issues come into play, which I'll be discussing in tomorrow's post. Click here to go to Part IV.