This new little arty rabbit hole has been a lot of fun - blotted ink line drawings. Firstly, I had to do some online shopping and buy a dip pen, which was cool. It is Japanese and has five different nibs, so I can do cool anime, if I could draw, which I can't. You just take off the nib and jam another one into the end. I didn't know about the sparkly yellow holder when I bought it, it was a pleasant surprise.
The technique is really simple; trace (or draw, I trace) outlines of a picture onto tracing paper, tape it to normal paper on one side like a hinge, use your dip pen to draw about an inch of the line onto the back of of the tracing paper, then fold it onto the normal paper and press it down, then lift up, do another inch, press back down etc. Because you can't quite control the amount of ink in a dip pen it pools and breaks in varying widths that make it look interesting. And you can do the same drawing many times if that interests you, which it does. I tend not to get better.
Andy Warhol used this technique and then filled in the outlines with solid colours, so I did a bit of that. These are from Oyster magazine, including number one, back in the modelling days.
You can also use pictures from "Baby Animals of the Americas" if your house only has one fashion magazine. One baby puma and one adult moose.
Art books should be good but are actually quite hard, because you have to make decisions about which lines to include. This is a Hilda Rix Nicholas. Hours of fun! Faces are very unpredictable.
I've just been at an embroidery conference for 4 days and learnt lots of new techniques. You are my inspiration to "just do it" and not rely on patterns or other people's opinions. But for what it's worth I do think these are very cool, the effect of the different line widths is really interesting.
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