So I bought some Dr. Ph Martins ‘Bombay Black’ ink (should be Mumbai, now .. right? :) and a dipping pen to try out making ink lines over pencil. I also tried using tracing paper on the ‘fourfold motif from the previous post.
The tracing of the pattern worked well, although getting the alignment right is a bit tricky, and it seems to get less accurate the more times a tile is copied. On the other hand, the ink attempts were much less sucessful:
This is an attempt at inking a single tile, so I tried tracing and tiling a few times to get a larger image - as I say, this went pretty good:
However, when I then drew over this with ink, it again did not work too well:
Actually, I later realised that this was due to a combination of letting the ink dry on the nib (use warm water to clean them as soon as possible) and not holding the pen at a 45 degree angle. The good thing, is that after painting it (quite quickly and messily) the contrast between the dark black of the ink and the green of the watercolour (gouache) looks quite good:
Overall, an interesting test to see what is possible, and how to do it, but I need to get better at it.