Mark Harmon

I found three illustration board pieces that I'd cut up a while back and figured I'd make use of them.

Illustration board's not the most permanent medium (The paper on the Crescent 310 board I use is 100% cotton and acid free, but the gray-core board isn't quite so good.) but it works well for ink so that's what I use. I use a TON of water, and illustration board is the only surface that can handle it besides watercolor blocks. Clayboard would too, I suppose, but it's more expensive.

Crescent Premium watercolor board is the archival stuff: it has a white core. 

I took two scans. The first is about 1/3 of the way through, the 2nd is finished.

Mark himself is done in sepia ink. The background and shirt are black ink.

The wash method I use isn't exactly common. From what I understand, ink & wash was very popular earlier in the 1900s, but has become somewhat obscure these days. I recall reading about the technique in Rudy de Reyna's "How to Draw What You See" and thinking that it looked just dandy: thin ink with water and brush it on. How much more simple can it get?

The end result looks very much like a watercolor painting although it has very different characteristics:

• Ink thins with water but it sure doesn't lift like watercolor. Once a layer is dry, it's on for good unless you want to risk damaging the paper scrubbing.
• Ink handles a little differently. The vehicle for ink isn't gum arabic, so it behaves differently on wet paper. I can't describe it exactly, but if the paper is dry, it doesn't wander. It stays put exactly where you brush it. However, if there's a wet area nearby, you can count on that heavy ink you just laid down to go racing towards it and spread out. For fun, just wet a large area of paper and brush ink wildly throughout it. It spreads out in many interesting ways.
• It's very easy to layer ink. Since it dries waterproof, each layer goes on without disturbing anything else at all. This is an extremely useful property for tweaking gradients.
• As ink in a container dries, it thickens and becomes extremely easy to drybrush, much more so than watercolor. This is handy for adding texture to areas and doing hair, wrinkles, etc.

This is probably my favorite method of drawing. It's basically a western version of Sumi-e although I just use a cheap #6 white nylon brush, small script liner, and spotter. Drawing doesn't get much cheaper than that. I honestly believe even plain pencils would cost more in the long run.

I haven't seen it used much for portraiture but it works fine for me.