What happens when you start inking with a little pen– and just don’t stop?  I like to think you get atmosphere, and sometimes a sort of creepy sense of peace that I personally find rather soothing.  So here is yesterday’s drawing of the day, with more than three hours in it:

January 16th, 2013
night
EF Lamy pen over pencil
©2013 Pam Bliss

I was trying to make pure whites seem luminous, while creating a full range of greyscale tones without stippling.  The above image is in full color, and therefore not quite black since the Aurora black ink I use is rather warm in tone.  For the sake of comparison, here is the same image with the colors decreased to 1 bit:

night
1 bit black and white

Every pixel in this version of “night”  is either pure black or pure white, and it reveals how much of the greyscale effect I worked so hard to achieve is actually an artifact of the color of the ink.  A better job of inking would look similar in both versions.  Since I usually ink with larger tools in a bolder hand, I usually like the one bit effect very much.  See Wednesday’s post of the drawing of Soup and Josef to see it working better than it does here.

That said, I started this drawing with the idea that I would draw an animal in the woods at night, with some weird flowers that glow in the dark, and I feel the results match up pretty well with the idea I saw in my head.  That doesn’t happen all that often.