Hainbach - SYN-KET Studien: Part II

Starting the inking of this piece was a struggle, to say the least. Monday and tuesday were days of intense heat and my studio felt like a small oven. Heat is awful for inking: the ink feels thicker, you suddenly feel like your previous great control of the brush is mysteriously gone. You mix water drops into the ink, put ink cups in the fridge. But the right recipe is hard to find. You study old artworks for comparison, trying to prove to yourself you had once  managed to get much thinner lines out of your brush (It's true, I always do this when this phenomenon happens hahah).  

As always I start a piece by inking the hardest part, the part that if less than perfect (within reason) will haunt me. Usually faces, especially small female faces as was the case with this piece. With the heat and a growing frustration of my faulty tools I printed out the pencils (as I have detailed elsewhere, part of my process) some 10 to 15 times. No joke. All that paper wasted. At some point my printer even started to jam, just for fun I guess. 

I started to think maybe Golden Boy, my trusty Winsor & Newton series 7 size 000 brush (the size of a mice's eyelash as a friend once said) was on its last legs.

When the W & N series are good they are the literal best drawing tool for the work I do. But the quality control and the size of the tip is highly variable which is really frustrating.  A millimeter longer than I like and its totally unusable. I've tried to replace golden boy at least a few times in the past year with ZERO Luck. And at 15 euros a pop, It's not great.

My aristo technical pen decided to dry up just to add to the storm. It's a pen I use a lot for certain linework: parallel lines, stippling, certain lineworks like outlines of vegetation for it's speediness when compared to the brush.

I put the pen tip in a container with cleaning fluid and went out into the streets of  Lisbon in search of supplies. Went to the 3 shops and none had neither brushes or aristo pens. No stock online either. Nice!

The air cooled down by the end of the day, ever so slightly but enough to help a tiny bit. Managed to unclog the pen as well.  

By the end of the day I finally had something going and when I picked up where I had left off the next day the pen stabs me in the back and ruins the drawing. Swell! 

(By the time I'm less of a Jerry lamenting the near end of golden boy and more of a George screaming at inanimate objects).



ANYWAY. All good now. Golden boy is doing good too, now that heat as subsided a bit.
The aristo pens are sold out everywhere and after some testing my faulty one seems usable again.  It may have been my fault for not completely drying out after the cleaning session. Still, I'm using it with extreme caution. Wish me luck.