Fun With Parallel Pens

Pilot Parallel Pens are a wonderful addition to any art journal page. As do all parallel pens, it writes a broad smooth line, a tender fine hairline, and decorative strokes. The pens come in four widths: 1.5mm, 2.4mm, 3.8mm, or 6mm. The ink feeds across the writing edge and when I try it, it’s smooth and even. (Pen and Ink Arts has some exclusive sizes: 1mm 2mm, 3mm, and 4mm and 6mm slant)

Four Pilot parallel pens from http://blog.shopwritersbloc.com/writing_instruments/

If you have used parallel pens, you know how they write–you can use them for the traditional calligraphic strokes. But, I’m not calligrapher, so I misued mine immediately. Each pen comes with a red and black cartridge, and packages of cartridges are easy to buy– and come in 11 colors including red, black, blue, green, and a box of mixed colors. Each package also comes with a converter bladder device, so you can use Higgins, Dr. Ph. Martin or other inks.

To my great surprise, you can pull out the cartridge and use the barrel itself as an ink reservoir. This is wonderful for mixing your own inks or gouache. You can also use the barrel to create one kind of ink–Payne’s Gray, let’s say, and then dip the ink in another color, you get wonderful blends. (The Harmless Dilettante has some great examples.)  Of course, you can do this with traditional colors–blue to green, purple to black. But that’s not what I did.

Color sample of Dutch Blue, Interference Blue, Shimmering Black on black Artagain paper.

I found two incredible watercolor inks–an interference blue made my Dawler-Rowney, that looks watery white in the bottle. And a water-based acrylic ink called Shimmering Black, which I put in the pen, made sure it was writing well, then dipped the nib into interference blue and wrote with it.

The result was an incredible blend of shimmer and shine in each letter. Unfortunately, I dropped the wet sample I was working on face-down on my desk before I could photograph it. Interference and sparkle colors don’t photograph well, anyway. I hope the  sample on the left will do to describe the color.

The point (I’m just going to ignore that) of this is that the Pilot parallel pens are versatile, easy to use, and come with cleaners for people like me who use acrylics that aren’t meant for those pens in them anyway. If you are going to experiment, buy an acrylic ink cleaner right away. I’m glad I did.

You can also turn the pen up on its corner and write like a monoline pen. I did that with the ink mix and while it’s not as obvious (the line is thinner, after all), it makes a great new kind of calligraphy.

Disclosure: I purchased all my Pilot pens and inks myself. I was not compensated in any way to write this article.

Quinn McDonald is the author of Raw Art Journaling, Making Meaning, Making Art.   Quinn will experiment and possibly ruin pens and inks in pursuit of meaning-making,  and not mind a bit.

Knowing When It’s Enough

When are you done? When is the art complete? When do you quit? All good questions, and all with similar answers.

This weekend, I was working with ink on watercolor paper. It’s a new technique I’m puzzling out, and the most critical element is knowing when to stop working. It’s incredibly easy to overwork the ink, and once it’s overworked the piece simply looks like a clean-up towel.

Here’s the first step:

Which actually can be left alone. But I wanted to add another layer. The next step promptly overworked it.

So why didn’t I know that? Because I was willing to see what would happen if I tried another layer of ink. So the first reason you don’t quit is curiosity–seeing what will happen if you continue. When the urge to continue is  more interesting or compelling than the need to quit, you push on. If I had been perfectly satisfied with the results, I could have quit.

Another way to know you are finished is when the elements of design you had in mind are all in place. On this paper, I worked  in three stages. When working with ink pieces, it’s important to let one layer dry completely before the next one is started, or the ink will blur. Waiting allows time to make the decision to continue or decide the design is fine the way it is.

In the case of this piece, the black and gray sections were complete, but there was not enough contrast in the overall page. I added the yellow, which was interesting, but still not enough of a contrast. So I added the orange-red over the yellow, allowing both colors to show.

I knew I wasn’t done when the yellow didn’t achieve the purpose of contrast. I knew I was done when the branching edges completed a pleasing design. In other cases, you would continue when you cannot explain how your work is complete.

Ink on watercolor is a fairly tricky medium. You have to balance not being in control as well as controlling color choice and water amount. The medium doesn’t allow erasing, covering with gesso or not clicking “accept” and starting over, as you can with digital work in steps.

It was a mistake to add gold to this page. Not only was the choice in the yellow-green-gold color range, of which there was already too much,  but the eye can’t find a resting place, a catch with everything in one tone. The ink on the upper left looks like a three-legged blowfish sticking out its tongue. The lesson: knowing what you are doing and why. Here I knew why, but the what was a bad choice. Had I given the choice of shimmering ink more thought, I would have realized that I should have stopped after the background was still wet when I applied the second layer.

In this case, the shimmer worked far better.

It was right to choose the shimmer because there was a large, dark center that needed more definition. I left the lower right hand corner (which I love) alone, but did not expect it to carry the entire piece. Adding the shimmer ink gave the middle section texture and made both colors–the blue/gray and the violet, more visible. Knowing how strong (and how much space) the strongest part of a visual piece can carry is a way of knowing when the piece is complete.

These same decision-making questions work for other “should I quit?” questions, too. If one small and excellent part of a relationship can’t carry the rest of it, it may be time to add something to the relationship. But you have to know what and why.

Discovering that art answers are a bigger part of life is one of the reasons I do creative work. Because (you already know what’s coming) it makes meaning out of part of my life.

–-Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who is exploring the relationship between ink, water and paper, along with the rest of her life.