Using my Ink Bottle and Lamy Safari for this Line Tutorial
Develop a Looser Sketching Style and Find Your Art Style
Back In May 2021 when I was trying to find my style I did a lot of research into how different artists approached this common dilemma, and went through a bunch of video tutorials on You Tube.
It’s taken me until now to actually get comfortable with the lines I’m making. But just when I thought I had nothing left to learn on the topic, I came across a Skillshare Tutorial by Jen Dixon called “Find you Line: Develop your Drawing Style”, which I found really useful to reiterate some of what I already knew but had discounted.
In this post I’m sharing my key takeaways from this art tutorial, but if you want to explore the topic in more details, make sure to go through all of Jen’s lesson for tips about how to develop your art style.
Two Ways to Change your Line’s Style
When I was exploring Jen’s tutorial, what really attracted my attention was the two-part exercise of drawing what you see, and then giving it soul (evolving what you see into a sketch that screams with your style). To inject that soul there’s two ways to dramatically change the style of your line to develop your personal art style:
- Sketch Speed
- How you Hold your Pen
I’ve already been experimenting with sketch speed, and although I knew about the option of holding my pen differently, it wasn’t something I’d played around with.
Sketch Speed
The key example of how I’ve been using this is the fast pen speed I use to urban sketch people when I’m sketching live vs. the slower speed I usually use to sketch from photo sources.
Just this week I had a breakthrough where my sketching from a travel photo had the same loose lines that my urban sketches have. Up until recently, the subjects I chose had dictated the style of line I used. But by speeding up my sketch speed to sketch from a photo, it was effortless to achieve the same loose style of by urban sketch style.
It feels like an evolution that has a foundation in confidence. I’ve already completed a sketching challenge of 365 days of drawing people (from photos, TV, and life), and now I’m at doing 365 days of urban sketching people. When you draw the same topic so many times you become adept at going into automatic pilot on specific elements. You begin to draw intuitively, rather than struggle with each line you create.
That’s not to say you don’t HAVE to draw what you see, and not what you think you see. But what happens with confidence is that you’ve built a stronger connection between what you eye sees and how you hand moves to recreate it.
How you Hold your Pen
I started my sketching journey using fine-liners, and it’s difficult to get the same marks from them, that you can with a fountain pen. I think that’s why I’d always discounted the advice of trying to hold my pen differently.
This wasn’t a sketching technique I’d even contemplated to help me develop a looser sketching style, even after I switched to using a fountain pen. But it seems like this tutorial was in the right place at the right time.
Now that I’ve seen the benefit of sketching speed, I’m in the right place to experiment with pen-hold positions.
For this part of the tutorial I played around with holding my Lamy Safari fountain pen close to the nib (my usual style), then changed to half way up the pen, and then at the end.
For each of the pen positions I sketched quickly. The further away from the nib I got, the less control I had of the line. In each attempt, the ink bottle was still recognisable and believable. I only did a handful of examples, but Jen recommends filling an entire page of drawings using the same subject.
(For good measure I also did a blind contour while holding my pen loosely at the end. This was the loosest of all, and I’m looking forward to trying this style with a portrait, or to do some urban sketches of people.)
For my final sketch of my ink bottle (with soul) I held the pen at the far end, but drew slower, which gave me more control over the lines, but I still managed to achieve a looser look.
I liked the ink lines I created, so I took this sketch further by adding shading with a couple of Tombow brush pens, and a couple of dabs of watercolour.
My key learning from sketch speed and pen position experimentation is that they need to compliment each other to achieve the type of line that feels natural.
I want a loose line, but not so loose that it borders on scruffy or abstract. So to achieve my type of loose line I need to:
Hold my pen closer to the nib and draw quickly.
Or, hold my pen further away from the nib and draw more slowly.
Both options help me to achieve the style of line with just the right amount of soul.
I was able to come to these conclusions by only drawing a few examples, maybe because I’ve been drawing so avidly over the past two years, but if you’re at the beginning of your sketching journey, it may take you a little longer to discover what you’re comfortable with.
Each creative journey is different. You may want to develop a more controlled line, or an extremely loose and abstract line. It’s a personal choice that you’ll know is right for you when the marks you’re making, excite and inspire you, and Jen’s line making tutorial provides loads of different tips to help you explore that part of your creative journey of discovery.
Style is Repeatable
Jen Dixon
This quote from Jen’s tutorial impacted my perception of my art style. I use different lines depending on the subjects I’m sketching or my environment, and Jen believes that no matter what type of line you use, your natural style will still shine through. I discovered this for myself this week when I changed my sketch speed to achieve an urban sketching style when sketching from photos.
I feel I’ve found my line with soul and can use it to sketch what I want, and even if I adjust my sketch speed or how I hold my pen, my natural style will still shine through.
