The chilly October newsletter…with warming content.
This newsletter was first published on Substack on the 26th of October 2023
Felicitations!
Sending you warm wishes of joy this week, whether your weather is warming or cooling, depending on your hemisphere.
Last month I ranted about the decay of language in children’s books. Today’s newsletter is about a more visual and tangible subject: ink.
“Oh dear,” you may be thinking, “I’ve had enough of ink this month thanks to Inktober.” (If you’ve never heard of Inktober, that’s ok too.) But I thought it would be helpful to me, and maybe interesting to you, to have a written account of what I’ve learned or discovered this month.
I used the social media challenge of Inktober for a few purposes:
It was an excuse to buy some acrylic ink and watercolour ink to play around with compare, because I’m very professional. *nods convincingly while holding eye-contact,*
I wanted to experiment and play with messy lines and ink washes, without putting pressure on myself to create a fully rendered illustration every day,
and I wanted my imagination to be stretched thanks to someone else’s prompts that I could manipulate to fit in with my own overall theme…
…with the goal of ending up with a full illustration, which I could put in my portfolio and maybe even make into a product (like a jigsaw puzzle).
P.S. my overall theme was The Garden Café of My Dreams. If I can’t actually own it, I could at least draw it.
What I’ve learned so far:
Scribbling the ink straight onto paper with a brush or dip-pen* without a sketch is a great way to pretend to be confident of your own drawing abilities, and to get some unexpected, fun results;
*I was very pleased to find 2 ancient dip-pens at a recent second-hand art-materials sale for 50p!
I bought a bottle of Ecoline liquid watercolour “ink” in sepia, and I love the way it spreads and changes depending on how much water is added, and how wet the paper is;
I already had a bottle of Daler Rowney acrylic ink in white, but I also bought their warm ‘raw sienna’, and was able to test out the opacity of both (note: raw sienna could not cover the dark sepia, but the white did surprisingly well.)
My “mixed-media” sketchbook couldn’t handle either of the inks: tiny dark dots appeared. Instead, I had to use a pad of watercolour paper;
However, coloured pencils that draw beautifully over the inks do not draw well on the watercolour paper. I can’t describe it, but they’re just not clear, and I have to press really hard;
Drawing anything is much more fun when you don’t have voices in your head telling you “that’s not what it’s supposed to look like,” or “everyone’s going to think you don’t know how to draw.”
*sigh* I wish I could not hear those voices! Note to self: just blob the pictures enthusiastically on the paper while singing loudly, to drown them out;
This brings me to my last point: the voices get louder when I know I have to share on Instagram, which is why, last weekend, I uninstalled the app and allowed myself to take a break from Inktober, especially since I had a big illustration I wanted to concentrate on and finish for my portfolio. The weekend has turned into a whole week, and now I’m considering getting rid of Instagram for a year! I plan to get back to the Inktober drawings though, after all, if it turns out anything like how I see it in my head, then I really want it as a jigsaw puzzle.
Now, for the moment you’ve all been gasping for… It’s time for the monthly Word Of The Week!
This month, the Word of the Week is:
atramentaceous: inky, or ink-like. This word is sadly obsolete, but I think it should make a come-back!
Let’s use it in a sentence: The entire month of October has become an atramentaceous experience, thanks to the popularity of Inktober.
Fun fact: the only evidence of this word’s use is from 1713, in the work of one man: William Derham, a Church of England clergyman and natural philosopher. One man used a word, wrote it down and now we’re all using it! Or, rather, we will be…
(Source: The Oxford English Dictionary website)
