Playing with Inks

Urban Sketchers Johannesburg (yes, we're now an official chapter!) was invited by Assemblage, a local visual arts community organisation to join a challenge to use only Lamy products to produce artworks or in our case, sketches. Lamy provided a range of their pens and inks to share among the participating artists. I have my own much-used Lamy safari pen plus a spare for just-in-case, so filled those and took a few extra colour cartridges...a cool pinky red, a viridian-ish green, another luminous yellow-green, purple, and a few drops of a dark prussian blue and turquoise in containers.

A shed at 1Fox - old industrial warehouses now restaurants, bars and event spaces... note the chandelier!

Most of my sketches ended up looking purply-green and I discovered that the luminous green was the only warm shade I had, and mixed with the pink had to serve to make skin tones and browns. With a high pigment load the intensity of the inks is amazing though, a little went a very long way.

Sketching friend Leonora and I sat on a busy street corner in the city and I sketched the traders. The guy selling cosmetics, combs and sundries in the "two Rand shop" never let up his call for a minute of "pondopondotworandi", interspersed every now and then by his neighbour yelling "Walalawasaba" which, I believe, means "you snooze, you lose!"

The same corner, slightly different experiment with the pens and ink. I tried swapping cartridges in the pens to see if they would show a progression from, say, green to purple, but as the pigments are so powerful, I would've had to put in a few km's of line to show the complete changeover.

Dismal attempt at the lovely old building on the opposite corner... need some architectural drawing workshops!

My Blog List has disappeared from my sidebar... I have no idea how - I reported it to Blogger Help and someone(?) said they were aware of the problem but so far nothing has been restored. Anyone else had this happen?