Holidays in Ink Challenge 2020-21 -- Details and Prompt Lists

During the busy holiday season, I'll be taking this Holidays in Ink Challenge, enabling me to just sketch with pen and paper when the going gets tough! Come play along if your life gets as hectic as mine from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day, or if you'd like a challenge to push your artistic boundaries and inspire you. Many artists have asked me to include a list of prompts. As a result, I've decided to make two lists ("Subject Prompts" and "Process Prompts"), which are included below. It's posted well in advance of the start date, so you'll have time to gather whatever you need in materials or references to complete your personal challenge.

NITTY GRITTY DETAILS

The Many Sides of Mr Lute

11x17" across a two page spread in a 8.5x11" Stillman & Birn Epsilon book
Noodler's Zhivago in a Lamy Safari B nib
Private Reserve Chocolat mixed 1:1 with Private Reserve Velvet Black in an 05 Platinum Preppy
Noodler's Wampum in an 05 Platinum Preppy
Cacao du Bresil in an 03 Platinum Preppy
Noodler's Midnight Blue in a 6mm Pilot Parallel

I found this porcelain lute player in a post holiday sale at Christmas Tree Shoppe one year. He makes an occasional appearance in my sketches and doodles. I thought several sketches of him on the page would present good drawing challenges and a unified theme. I jumped right in with ink, and a Niji Waterbrush was used to do the washes.

I love the blend of the Private Reserve Chocolat and Private Reserve Velvet Black. It tones down the red of the Chocolat washes just enough, and amplifies the value range. Furthermore, after sitting in a Preppy fountain pen for a few months without being used, it started up immediately when I turned it over to draw!

Scrambled Easter Eggs --- Mixing Inks

The Goulet Pen Company has an "Ink Drop" program where they send you five fountain pen ink samples at the beginning of each month. It's a lot of fun to experiment with the inks that seem to magically appear in my mailbox every four weeks or so. In April they sent out five unnamed vials of samples as an "Easter Egg Hunt", and we were supposed to try to guess what the inks were. Great fun.

Yesterday I was looking at these five samples and it occurred to me that they might provide an nice muted, dark color that would wash easily when mixed together. So, I put one eyedropper full of each color into a vial, shook it up, and loaded up my Lamy Safari fountain pen with the resulting mixture. To test drive the result, I used photo references from the Weekend Drawing Event on the Wetcanvas website, and gave myself just a couple of minutes for each sketch, to explore the properties of the ink.

I was really surprised and pleased by how much the colors separated with the waterbrush wash after I'd done the initial drawing. The initial color was a beautiful navy blue, but it washed into shades of blue, blue-green, and violet. If you click the drawing above and take a closer look, I think you'll be able to see it. I love it when these unexpected things happen! I'll definitely be using this mixture some more. I think it might work beautifully for some architectural drawings.