A Course In Drawing P&i Landscapes: Week I

October 5, 2016

I am very happy to announce release of completely free course for learning to draw pen and ink landscapes. You can get an overview of the course in this video and access the course here.

Starting today, I will present activities from this course in my weekly posts. Do follow along and start your creative journey today.

We start by looking at some of the choices for pens to use for drawing. As you become more proficient, you can try different choices, but to start with, it is sufficient to have a quality gel pen and a small sketch book to practice. In this video, I discuss some of the choices.

Understanding some of the simple pen strokes that are used for drawing landscapes is very useful and we will do this next. In this online tutorial and video, you can study some of the basic pen strokes for drawing landscapes. Following is an overview of 'parallel line' stroke that we will practice this week.

Do practice this stroke extensively this week as this is the most basic stroke in P&I drawing.

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Parallel Lines:

This is the most important and basic technique to create a tone in P&I. Practice drawing lines equal distance from each other.

It is important to make sure that your hands are not hesitant when drawing a line. In other words, DO NOT draw a line very slowly and deliberately. This will cause the line to have edges and bad impression. Instead, slowly bring your pen down to the paper and create a confident FLOWING line with a swift stroke. Don’t hurry it either. Key is to find the balance between slow deliberation and fast impatience to create a line that is confident and inviting. This will come with practice as every person has their own rhythm. Practice often and find your own rhythm. You will know when you get it.

The lines also don’t have to be exactly parallel and equidistant. The key is to create an impression of ‘uniform’ tone with a set of lines. In other words, the deviations in the distance between the lines should be small enough so that our mind and eye don’t notice them. Instead our mind should instead see and focus on the lines as a whole to see a uniform tone.

Initially, don’t attempt to draw longer parallel lines as this requires movement and control from the shoulder that takes more time to attain. Lines an inch or so long can be drawn using the movement of wrist and should be attempted initially.