Artists and illustrators drawing in pen and ink

 Spanish Olive and Tulip Wood Apples #1

6" x 10", pen and sepia ink on Saunders Waterford HP

copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I can feel a series coming on!  These are my two new wooden apples.  One is pale and made from Spanish Olive wood.  The other is a crimson russet colour and is made from Brazilian Tulipwood (which is not the same as the American tulipwood).  The chap who sold them to me at Patchings was keen to emphasise that I was buying expensive wood!

I've always loved drawing in pen and ink.  My technique favours a very fine line which can be feathered.  These apples were drawn last night using my current favourite pen for sketching - a Pilot G-TEC-C4 gel ink rollerball in brown (sepia) ink.

Resources for Artists

On my Pastels and Pencils website I have web page devoted to Art Materials that I use.  This includes a section for Pen and Ink.

See Pen and Ink - Resources for Artists.  This is the website I created to provide a place to organise and store all links to information and advice from various websites for artists using pen and ink. Topics covered include information about pen and ink brands and associated products and tips and techniques for working with pen and ink. 


Artists and Illustrators working in Pen and Ink

One of the other purposes of the resources for artists site is to provide links to artists who can show others what they can do when using pen and ink.

Below are links I've already collected - many of the ones in the first section come from the very excellent blog  Charley Parker's Lines and Colors (pen and ink).  Many of the artists in the second (contemporary) section are English Illustrators.

Artists and illustrators using Pen and Ink (History)

• Lines and Colors - Franklin Booth  Booth was one of the greatest American illustrators and one of the absolute masters of pen and ink drawing
• Lines and Colors - Howard Pyle  Pyle's impact on the art form known as illustration is hard to overstate. His Durer-influenced pen and ink illustrations are among the finest ever done. 
• Lines and Colors - Pen Drawing by Charles Maginnis on Project Gutenberg There are some good resources out there on pen drawing if you dig for them, and you'll occasionally find some for free. 
• Lines and Colors - Sir John Tenniel  John Tenniel is best known (and rightly so) for his beautiful, imaginative, definitive and absolutely perfect pen and ink illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There.
• Lines and Colors - Arthur Rackham Rackham was a deft pen and ink artist and most of his paintings started as pen and ink drawings into which he worked layer after layer of transparent watercolor glaze, a painstaking method associated more with classical painting than modern illustration.
• Elizabeth Nesbitt Room Illustrators Project The Illustrators Project:Arthur Rackham (1867-1939)

Artists using Pen and Ink (Contemporary)

Here are some of my favourite contemporary artists and illustrators who work in pen and ink

• Ronald Searle Pen and ink drawings by Ronald Searle - a very successful graphic artist and pictorial satirist. I particularly love his drawings of cats 
• Gerald Scarfe who has worked as editorial cartoonist for The Sunday Times and illustrator for The New Yorker.  I've watched him draw with dip pen and ink in a lecture about drawing at the National Gallery - and he's very fluid and very fast.
• Henry Moore - whose drawings in ball point pen I saw earlier this year.  The set of drawings of an elephant's head and of sheep are particular fine. 
• Quentin Blake the man behind the Campagn for Drawing
• Lucinda Rogers the artist behind the Weasel (for The Independent)   Those suffering withdrawal symptoms after the demise of The Weasel can find an archive of Rogers/Hirst material at www.theweasel.co.uk. 
• Cheeming Boey - who draws on syrofoam cups with a sharpie 
• Paul Heaston - who has been drawing his surroundings on his blog Three letter word for art 
• Andrea Joseph - Her Sketchblog is one of my very favourite blogs.  I just STARE at her drawings for a long time.  I'm very sad that her laptop has died and that she's currently offline.  This is her Flickr site where you can overdose on her wonderful drawings

Can you help?

I'm wanting to expand the links to artists who work in pen and ink.  If you have any other artists or illustrators you'd like to recommend please leave a name and a URL where I can see their work as a comment and I'll review the work.

Please note I'm don't consider mechanical rendering as artistic!