From skin inking to silk painting, people have been using a number of techniques to ink with metallic pigments. Inking has been around for many centuries. Chinese from the 7th century on have made inking popular with their calligraphies and drawings of the natural world. The invention of inksticks was attributed to Tien-Lcheu, 2500 B. C. To use it, artists grounded a small piece of the stick and mixed with water. Ink was made with soot (from burning pine trees) mixed with animal glue (gelatin made from horns or hides) and sometimes incense or medicinal herbs such as clove or comfrey in order to preserve the sticks. Good ink came from the quality of the glue. Oil soot ink was mixed with pigments to create different colors. For two millennia ink was the major medium of painting. The art gained popularity in Japan and Korea as well. Gold leaves were added to some paintings. See below how to paint golden bamboo: In the 3rd millennium BC, another type of ink was invented. It was from iron, salt and ferrous sulfate mixed with tannin obtained from gull nuts. The oxidation created the ink. Read more about it here: https://irongallink.org/igi_indexd7ce.html Ancient civilizations have used mica in paints and pots in order to give a reflective shine to objects. Mica is nowadays used in cosmetics and paints to add glitter. Mayans used glittering paint. “Ancient Mayan temple builders discovered and used lustrous pigments to make their buildings dazzle in the daylight.” (See the article here: https://www.sciencealert.com/mayans-used-glittering-paints) Other cultures also inked, like Egyptians thousands of years ago. Egyptians preferred metallic inks. They added a varnish to conserve the paint. In Egypt, they burned organic materials to get coal, such as wood or oil, then they mixed it with a binder to allow the particles of coal to adhere/stick to the paper. The red color on ancient papyrus comes from iron oxide. Red was used for headlines. They made the famous Egyptian blue by “heating together quartz sand, copper, calcium oxide, and an alkali such as natron.” (Rachel Danzing) Nowadays, a metallic ink is a regular color mixed with a shiny material such as copper, aluminum, bronze or zinc or micca. Meredith Dillman used metallic watercolors mixed with acrylics to paints some of the most amazing fantasy characters. See below: See more Metallic paints with watercolor below: See a demonstration on Inking technique plus metallic watercolors below:
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You might already know that acrylic painting doesn’t use true black. You never paint out of the black color tube. Instead, you mix up opposite colors on the color wheel in order to have control over your dark areas, making them cooler or warmer. Inking is the art of drawing with ink, sometimes from scratch, but also over fine sketch lines made with a red pencil. Inking uses true black contrary to the color painting techniques. But is it really true? While some illustrations techniques use overlapping colors and sometimes blurred contours, visual art using inking have clear and distinctive typically black contours. It’s because paints are meant to be used with brushes while inks are meant to be used with pens or quills. Inking is more akin to calligraphy and allows more details. Painting uses dots and washes. Inking uses dyes while painting uses pigments mixed with the medium used for painting. Dyes or shellac do not behave like acrylic or watercolor. While picture books seem to use mostly paints, illustrators are often asked to draw in black and white. Inking is a skill in demand and some artists are specialized in inking. Why inking? Inking requires the mastery of values. Inking requires an artist to control composition and viewpoint. Inking requires the perfect understanding of dark and light spaces, zones of contrast versus zones of less contrast. Finally, inking requires having a steady hand. That's a lot of skills! Sure inking is mostly linked to manga and comics books as well as graphic novels. Still, find examples of some popular inking picture books below. Beautifully Illustrated Black-And-White Picture Books https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/74975.Beautifully_Illustrated_Black_And_White_Picture_Books Inking doesn’t only use the art of hatching and cross-hatching lines and true black. Inking also uses diluted black ink to fill the grey areas and the shadows on the paper. Diluting black ink allows you to come up with diverse ink gradients. This way, you actually paint with your ink. See the tutorial from on how to sketch in ink and how to make ink gradients and bring more values into your drawings. True black (rich black) is always black in printing, but it can be swallowed by paper. Ah, thirsty paper! Do not underestimate the power of the paper! In printing or making a PDF file, black is not black, but charcoal or dark gray. Why, oh why? Because some of the paper absorbs the color and some of the white from the paper shows through the black ink. This is why when you print your design, it might look grey, not black. In professional Art software, you can set the preference to “Black accurately” when clicking on the setting "Appearance of Black". Rich black, in printing, is a mixture of black with other colors. A rich black might be 100% black, 60% cyan and 40% yellow. You get a warmer black by using more yellow. You get a cooler black by using more cyan. Just to let you know. Now that's you're more the wiser, go ink! |
In 2015, 2016 & 2017
In 2016 & 2017
Illustrator
I am Sussu Leclerc and I started writing and illustrating picture books thanks to the Smart Dummies event hosted on Facebook by amazing Dani Duck. Archives
October 2018
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