Putting Pen to Paper

Hello all!  Thanks so much for stopping by.  I've something a little different today... I'm taking a deep breath and sharing some of my first experiments with dipping pen and ink drawings.

It's all very doodly at the moment - the start of a journey - and a long journey, I suspect, since I know daily practice is the key to developing new skills, and it's a good month and a half since I last managed to put pen to paper!  Must do better at carving out a few minutes each day despite busy rehearsal schedules.

So, here are some spring flower tags that came about as a result of my first playtime...

These were done way back in February (you can see the ivy's only just starting to get eaten - it's pretty much completely gone now, very sad).



The nib on the dipping pen I got is very fine so that you get a really delicate line.

I thought I'd try out some meadow grasses, since they're my favourite things amongst my stamps, and somehow that led to flowers (not botanically accurate, I hasten to add - just figments of my imagination!).

I used Distress Stains and Gelatos to add my colour.  That sheen on the red flowers is all Gelato!

With the pink flowers the colour came first and I added pen work afterwards.

For the golden ones, the pen work mostly came first and then the colour.

I tried to keep things loose and fluid - no colouring inside the lines here - in a deliberate attempt not to freeze up by trying to get things "right".

And it's all on watercolour paper tags (by Prima), so you get a lovely softness in the colours to balance the fine, scratchy lines.












I even tried out some green drawing ink for some of the stems and leaves - rather like that!

I've got quite a few drawing inks for messing around with in Mixed Media work, but I usually forget they're there.











Hopefully using them for this will move them nearer the front of my brain, and I'll remember to reach for them when I'm playing with other mediums too.









I was just experimenting, so I could have left off once I'd done the drawing and colouring, but I thought I'd be kinder to my first poor efforts.  So I added some background stamping, some spatter and hints of Treasure Gold, doodled some frames around the edges of the tags and mounted them on cardboard packaging (an Amazon envelope, if memory serves).

I dyed some crinkle ribbons to create co-ordinating toppings.









Got to have some words of course.  My own writing... eek!










I also added some Idea-ology Muse Tokens, attached with rusty wire, naturally.



And while we're on the pen and ink, here are just a few doodlings from my "pen and ink journal" - the place where I'm supposed to be doing at least something daily, though these are again from back in February.  I'm hoping that by sharing the intention of daily work here, I'll maybe actually put it into practice (like when you tell people your resolutions to try to encourage yourself to actually do them!).

It was hard to break the virgin beauty of the page, so I started with words - my comfort zone - "The tiniest steps in mark making," and a command: "Begin...", then literally some mark-making - cross-hatch work to stop the page being so bare.  Then I set off again with the meadow grasses, and a slightly fantastical woodland dwelling.

Trees, of course... (these were inspired by the ones outside my window at a song weekend I went on - which is how come I know when all this arrived on the pages).

This tree happened as a bit of an accident - too much ink on the nib blotting onto the paper, so I turned the nib over and used the back to start spreading it into a tree shape.  As so often with accidents, I think this might be my favourite little sketch.

And faces...  I've doodled faces like this in the margins of scripts for years, always in pencil though (and only while discussions turned to fight/dance considerations so that my attention wasn't required!).  Feels a lot more committed in ink...

So, just the tiniest steps in putting pen to paper, and it's bizarre how much scarier this feels than most of what I share on here. And even more scary because I'll be out of internet reach for much of the weekend, so I won't even know what you're making of it all.

But if I'm sticking to Words and Pictures as a record of this journey, then here is where they need to be.

Now all I have to do is convince my fingers to hit the Publish button!!

Have a lovely weekend, everyone.



The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
William Osler

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
Lee Iacocca

He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom.
James Huneker

I'd like to enter my floral tags into the Spring Blooms challenge at the Inspiration Journal, sponsored by the Inspiration Emporium
And as another entry in the Anything Goes theme at A Sprinkle of Imagination