Materials: A very cheap Jinhao 992 fountain pen from China (£1.25 on eBay, inc. postage) with Lotte flavour SketchINK, my new Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolours (i’ll get around to swatching these soon), and a Pink Pig 270 gsm hot press watercolour book (we like Pink Pig).
Plan: I wanted to give my new watercolours a play so i followed along with Peter Sheeler’s tutorial of this old barn.
Learned: That the Pink Pig watercolour books are very good. This was a much better experience than painting on the Handbook sketch book, and oddly these Pink Pig watercolour books are much cheaper. I already own a Pink Pig sketch book which i used for this drawing. I think they’re incredibly good value for money with paper and everything made right here in England.
Soooo: I’m fairly happy with how it turned out for my second ever watercolour. Obviously plenty of space for learning and improving, which i’m looking forward to doing very much.
Next: I definitely need a few more brushes. Peter was using a flat brush throughout this tutorial and the only two flat brushes i have were either way too big or way too small, so most of my painting was done with a number 7 round with a number 2 round for the fine lines. So i think my next purchase is going to be a Da Vinci Casaneo size 12 flat to have a play with.
Here’s the ink drawing before i painted it:
This was drawn mostly using the reverse side of the nib, which works incredibly well with this pen and gives these amazing consistent fine lines.
For £1.25, including postage from China, this Jinhao 992 pen is really sweet. Yeah, you read it right, £1.25 including postage from China. And it works lovely with the SketchINK which is super important. If you like spending lots of money on disposable pens, wrecking the environment, then carry on, but if you have a couple of pounds to spare get on eBay and buy one, or several, of these pens and give it a go with some SketchINK — i think you’ll be surprised. The pen comes complete with the convertor as well.
Back soon with another picture.
