Ink and Wash Vignettes from Weekly Art Challenges on Instagram
Ink and Wash Journey of Discovery
There’s a famous saying about the journey being more important than the destination, and that’s so true when you’re on a creative path to discover your urban sketching style. I’ve been sketching outdoors on a regular basis for about four years now, and during that time I’m been on a mission to find my sketching style.
I believe that our sketching style is already in us, and we simply need to build the techniques and skills to develop it to a level of competence we’ll be happy with. So I wanted to share part of my journey of discovery, and hope it’s useful for you too.
Let’s look at an overview of the Ink and Wash technique, and I’ll share some of the artists that have inspired my journey so far, and how I evaluate their work to narrow down my ideal inking and painting style.
Watercolour Tutorials I’ve Learned from
I’ve been doing a fair few urban sketching tutorials recently, and the more I do, the more I’m becoming aware of my sketching style preferences. Some of my recent tutorial attempts feel too overworked, and there’s a heaviness about them because there’s too many layers of paint, and not enough areas of space/white for my liking.
Examples of Recent Tutorials
Here’s examples of some tutorials I’ve done in the past couple of weeks. They weren’t a complete waste of time. Each sketch I do teaches me something, even if I’m not 100% happy with the outcome of the sketch.
For this trio, I was happy with the perspective and ink lines, but there’s just too many layers of paint, which creates a heaviness to these sketches.
The tutors seem to encourage mixing too many colours together for my liking. They all cross the warm/cold combinations on the colour wheel, and many of the combinations cause desaturated watercolours. There’s nothing wrong with this, if you’re a fan of desaturated colours, but I really like creating sketches with bright, transparent, and saturated colours. An example of this style choice is evident in the feature image at the top of this post – which is more bright and saturated, than desaturated.
Finding your Style Preferences
Ink Lines and the watercolour styles are personal style choices. There’s no wrong or right. It’s just, what’s wrong or right for you.
So if you like a simple-looking scene, with light washes of paint, and plenty of white areas, then maybe the ink and wash (aka line and wash) style of urban sketching is something you should explore too.
What is Ink and Wash?
Ink and Wash is pretty self-explanatory. You can dive straight in with ink, or do some pencil sketches first and then restate the scene with ink. Then you add watercolour washes to colour your scene.
Transparent colours are optimal to help give you painting a light and airy feel. When I set up my urban sketching palette, the majority of my colours are transparent or semi-transparent. These are excellent for glazing. Where you add multiple layers of watercolour, allowing them to dry in-between each layer. Alternatively you can work wet-in-wet, and let your paints blend together on the page.
Unless you want to incorporate ink-bleed into your art, you should be using a waterproof ink, so that it doesn’t run when you apply your watercolour.
Depending on how you want to define your focal point, you may want to add some additional ink lines after you’ve applied your watercolour layers, or beef up the focal point with a more extreme tonal variance or colour choice.
Pencil vs. Ink
I’ve seen some artists that do Line and Wash, using just pencil lines and watercolour. But for me, this style of sketch looks too much like traditional watercolour where you don’t see any lines. It creates a softer feel to the paintings, but my personal preference is to use ink lines, because it brings an illustrative feel to sketches.
Ink and Wash Artists with a Unfussy Style
Felix Scheinberger
One of the artists I’ve always been really drawn to for his use of colour, is Felix Sheinberger. He has a very distinctive inking style, but it’s a bit too loose for my liking, but I love the confidence he has using a bright palette of watercolours. Think, pinks, turquoises, bright yellows, and lime greens!
Horadam has released a set of watercolours selected by Felix, which includes 524 may green, 509 cobalt turquoise, 494 ultramarine finest, 485 indigo, 229 Naples yellow, 655 yellow ochre, 654 gold brown, 663 sepia brown, 216 pure yellow, 214 chromium orange hue, 341 geranium red, 367 purple magenta.
In conjunction to this set, Felix also used 217 quinacridone gold hue, 344 perylene dark red, 480 mountain blue, 472 quinacridone purple, 510 cobalt green turquoise and 537 transparent green gold.
Peter Sheeler
Peter Sheeler is a self-taught artist who uses an ink and wash style. His paintings have a real unfussines to them. He’s uses continuous and broken ink lines with multiple layers of watercolour in his urban sketches.
You can purchase his ink line sketches, so that you can focus on painting the scenes. Use the back-feeder on your printer with some 200gsm watercolour paper to print the sketches. But if you want to develop your ink and wash style, it’s best that you get some inking practice in too, and sketch the scenes for yourself. Another option is to print out his ink line sketches and use them to create a tonal study, before going ahead and inking and painting your own sketch.
Peter has started doing small scenes with ink and wash, and this approach and style is very similar to Nil Rocha. In fact, when I saw his art, I thought it was Nil’s.
Nil Rocha
When I first started doing urban sketching, I used to copy Nil’s art, because of the simplicity of the scenes, and because they were always really small (no more than 10cm square). But then I moved towards more complex styles of painting, and I find it funny that all these years later, I’m attracted to the style that first got me interested in urban sketching.
Nil also uses continuous and broken ink lines in her sketches. I also love how she does her skies. There’s a real light and airy feel to them. Often she skips adding a sky and places her buildings against a white background. This is a little too much white for me.
Matty Burnham
Matty is one of a group of Yorkshire-based artists who sketch in a similar style. He has a very precise way of getting accurate perspective (thanks to a ruler! — which is not for me). He also seems to use the minimum amount of ink lines to depict a scene, and has a delicate way with adding watercolour shadows.
He has recently started selling downloadable step-by-step worksheets to get an insight into his approach to inking and painting, and sells a book of ink sketches on watercolour paper, that you can use to practice your painting techniques. He also has an online class which includes a step-by-step approach for three scenes.
John Harrison
Another of the Yorkshire-based artists with a pleasing ink and watercolour technique is John Harrison. He has a very tidy and neat inking and watercolour style, and it’s a little too clean-cut for me. But his compositions are really pleasing to the eye, and I like how his sketches just peter out erratically, instead of being a tidy border.
He recently brought out a paperback book called Pen and Wash, an artist’s guide to combining ink and watercolour.
Albert Keifer
Albert has a really loose style of ink sketching, and uses more continuous lines than John and Matty. He calls his style of ink and watercolour “energetic and expressive” — read … wobbly lines!. The energy of the ink lines is balanced out with the limited colour palette approach and playful use of perspective. He also has a keen focus on the use of shadows to add depth. This approach means that you lose some of the light and airy feel that other artist’s create, but it’s very dynamic.
He has published a book which includes 15 step-by-step projects to take you through Albert’s process in detail, and the book includes links to video tutorials for these projects.
Finding your Ink and Wash Style
Out of all the artist’s I’ve featured, there’s specific things I like about their ink or watercolour approach, and there’s also some elements I’m not too keen on. The key to beginning your own ink and wash style of urban sketching is to find a sketcher whose style you covet, and then use their books and tutorials to learn their inking and watercolours techniques.
From here, you can develop your individual style of sketching that is natural to you, and it’s not just a replica of another artist’s style.
Evaluate your Sketching Style Likes and Dislikes
Start by evaluating what you like most about their inking and watercolour techniques and style, and use that information to emulate what you like, and discount what you’re not interested in learning. For example, here’s my recap of the artist’s I mentioned above:
| Artist | What I like Most | What I don’t like |
| Felix Scheinberger | Bright Colours | Ink Lines too Loose |
| Peter Scheeler | Nice Clean Simple Lines | Not Enough White |
| Nil Rocha | Simple Skies, Limited Colour Palette | Subject Matter too Fantasyesque |
| Matty Burnham | Simple Line Style | Perspective too precise |
| John Harrison | Line weight variety. Composition/layout of the scene. | Sketching style not loose enough |
| Albert Keifer | Expressive Lines and perspectives (but too loose for me) | Heavy shadows and desaturated colours |
So just looking at the styles of these six artists, I now have a clearer idea of the urban sketching style I want to develop:
- I like bright and saturated colours, and want to avoid desaturated colours and dark shadows.
- I want line weight variety within a simple line style. I don’t want the lines to be too wobbly, but they need to be expressive.
- I don’t want pictures with uniform edges, I like how some of the scene elements just peter out, like John Harrison’s style.
Weekly Art Challenges on Instagram
Just recently I’ve been taking part in a variety of weekly art challenges. This week is the first time I’ve used five of the prompts to create quick sketches of different scenes to help to practice the line style and watercolour techniques I’m trying to develop.
Not only is that good line and wash practice, it’s also a good opportunity to play around with vignette layouts in my sketchbook, and to develop some good habits around colour harmony.
My search for more ink and watercolour urban sketchers is continues. I’ll share some lessor known artists I encounter, as well as sharing some of my own ink and wash journey.
