Pen and ink is an excellent medium for depicting animals with a lot of linear qualities, like long fur or wrinkled skin.
You can use dip pens to build up tone using line techniques, or you can paint in tone with brushes.
Before beginning a finished work, practice the different strokes that you’ll need to be comfortable with.
Hatching is making a series of parallel lines to develop tone. Thicker lines produce darker tone than thin lines, and the closer the lines are together, the darker the tone will appear.
Crosshatching is crossing a set of hatched lines with another set of lines perpendicular to the first. The more passes you make, the darker the tone will become.
You’ll also want to practice making lines that are thick and thin,
… broken,
… and grass strokes.
When you’re comfortable with the different strokes, you can begin adding ink to a pencil sketch.
Begin by outlining the most important exterior lines, using the broken line technique to make sure the animal doesn’t look outlined. Erase the pencil lines, then add interior line to develop the shapes of legs, trunk, ears, and the eye.
Begin to develop tone by hatching, then cross hatch to darken the darkest areas.
Outline the shapes of shadows first, and then fill them in with hatched lines.
When the line work is done, you may decide to thicken some of the lines with a brush.
If you do, make sure that you use the technique in more than one or two spots on the picture, or they’ll look like mistakes.
You can also use diluted ink to paint in washes of tone if desired. The ink dries quickly, so to make even washes, work quickly and with the largest brush possible. When the washes are dry, you can go back over the top with more line or tone.
Want To Learn More…
Animal Mastery is what you need to successfully learn to draw your favorite animals.
We give you clear videos showing you step-by-step how to draw animals.
With clear (and fun) instructions on how to draw … you’ll learn at your own pace in the comfort of your home.
The artist has chosen popular animal pictures and will show you how to draw each one in color.
Each image has high definition videos outlining the animal in pencil and adding color to the image.
