Ink, colored pencil, and charcoal on paper, 7″ x 5″
This time I wanted to try using ink from a bottle. Originally I was going to use a dip pen that makes very thin lines, but in my idea sketches I tried a bamboo pen, a palette knife, and then a foam brush. They all worked well and produced unique results. I especially liked how the foam brush produced many parallel lines when it had only a little bit of ink on the tip, which is how I made the falling water, and how easy it was to cover larger areas with it, so that’s the one I choose. The ink started to bleed through the paper just a little though, so the next drawing on the other side of the paper will need to be planned to cover that up.
Once the ink was dry I could color over the top of it with pencils or white charcoal to add highlights and various details. The dark areas of the water at the bottom are black charcoal smudged smooth with a rolled paper blender.
Here’s all of the tools I used for this drawing.
Too Much White Paper 
Really effective – thanks for explaining your experiments. I might have to invest in a foam brush, methinks…
Thanks 🙂
This might be the first time I’ve actually used a foam brush to make art, rather than sometimes things like spreading glue over large areas. They should be cheap at a craft or hardware store, and this was just a 1 inch one. Using a palette knife to dip into the ink and then spread it around actually produced very interesting results too, but it was far harder to control because all the ink clinging to its surface was transferred into the paper pretty much all at once. There’s an element of chance whether the ink streak will look like rocks or whatever else, and not much you can do if it doesn’t.
Thank you for the good advice, it seems I have a lot of experimenting to do. I quite like a bit of random chance when I’m making a picture (otherwise I couldn’t be friends with watercolour); for me, sometimes that’s what’s needed to bring that extra spark. As you imply, other times, you just have to suck it up! 😉 I always enjoy seeing your pictures, please keep them coming…