A LOOSER WAY TO INK: WASH FIRST

As promised, here is the beginning of doing a pen and wash doing a wash first. 

Step 1: Find a subject you are interested in painting. In this case it is sunflowers and daffodils.

Step 2: Do a wet into wet funwash, using the purest color of your main subject, plus a few analogous colors. (This is to keep the color fresh from the start)

Step 3: Make sure to leave lots of white.

In this one, I know I want to do some sunflowers, so I found a few references. I put the main yellow and orange and pink colors generally where I will position the flowers. But the color is other places also.

NEXT STEP; Lightly sketch in generally where some important shapes might be. 

Then, with background colors (I used blues, pinks, and greens) I negative painted around some of the important shapes, WET INTO WET. While wet I put wrinkled plastic wrap over it and let it dry. 

In this case, it is done twice because I couldn't keep the whole painting wet enough.

I'll finish that one later. This pic below shows what my daffodil picture looked like after the first steps.

I then found a number of daffodil references and drew in my composition with pencil. Then I inked the outlines. Please notice: My flower petals often are drawn right into green background. That's more than fine...it adds interest. I'm not trying to make perfect static looking flowers.

Now I begin to ink places that I want to have more definition or value. I mostly used

contour lines, going with the shapes of the petals and leaves. For most of the inner lines I used an 03 Micron black.

For the final steps, I lifted out some areas, such as the blotchy green on the left leaf; the green on the tip of the lower petal; a highlight on some of the petals. Then I plushed over it with some pale pink in areas.I also darkened some green leaves where it needed more contrast in value.

I like the way it turned out. And the process was fun. You do a lot of composition on the fly,

allowing the background to help make decisions about placement of objects.