Black and white thinking

Black ink on white paper, mostly.

Shadow is the big question with this medium – how do you represent shades of gray?

You only have two colors, usually limited at the minimum in line thickness by the width of your pen nib (I typically use 0.5 mm).

You can use hasing, stippling, and other techniques to create texture and the appearance of shadow. The denser the ink in a given area, the darker the area will appear from afar.

You can go all in on solid-black.

You can cheat and use pencil. Or chalk, or computer. Or colors.

But I always come back to the same two extremes, yin and yang.

Drawing of a log cabin I made up Done using sharpie on paper, based on the houses from Your Cabin in the Woods by Conrad Meinecke.

Ink dip pen drawing of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater Done using a dip pen and black india ink. This is Fallingwater, a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935.

Calligraphy done on a chalkboard …enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum.

A doodle I did in class I particularly like black ink drawings with that bold, all-black shading style, though it’s very hard to get right.

A doodle of an eagle On the flip side of that other doodle, I tried some pencil drawing, HB mechanicals don’t get very dark…

A doodle of a spartan warrior Digital logic class was getting boring.

A doodle of a ship “There are good ships and wood ships, ships that sail the sea, but the best ships are friendships, may they always be!”

CAD drawing of a RC helicopter Okay, a computer-aided drawing, but it looks dope.

Sharpie on the Walls

Something about finals week always gave me bursts of creative energy. This time, two of my best friends and I decorated my frat house bedroom walls.

Fun anecdotes about that house:

For a two month period, the front door was literally off the hinges after getting beaten down, and the back door “locked”, but an nonlocking window right next to it allowed easy access
My bedroom door had a one foot gap at the top that I had to duct tape over to prevent wasps from getting in. The wasps could stay in the hallway.
The hot water was broken for three months during winter, fine by me.
The house apparently didn’t have heat, my bedroom stayed a cool 55 degF during the winter.
During the summer, there was obviously no air conditioning, so the dudes that stayed there filled up a truck bed with ice, water, and natural lights to survive.

Doodles on my college bedroom wall Can you tell what my priorities were back then?