Linda – 25 x 16 inch color pen and ink drawing

I wanted to try to realize something closer to naturalistic color. I’d tested a Japanese pen (Pilot Choose) with pigmented inks which, unlike most pens I’ve tested, would continue to write until the ink was gone. These were advertised as permanent with excellent light-fastness. I needed to learn how the colors blended when overdrawn, so I devised a simple (and attractive) grid test in which bands of each of four ink colors were laid down in a sort of weave so that every color was drawn on top of  every other color. I hope that makes sense. The results helped me figure out a reasonably accurate way to separate color images into the particular inks I have available, in this instance, red, yellow, blue, black, and white (I’m only using white to reduce the value and saturation of colors, so I didn’t include white  in my test). Here’s the test:

Interestingly, even though these pens are from the same product line, the inks don’t completely like one another, so there’s some interesting skipping which creates moire-like patterns somewhat randomly (click each of the images above to see those).

Once I felt I had the relative color strengths and transparencies figured out, I made a small bust portrait of my wife using the five colors.

 

Here are some details of the “Linda” drawing: