Sketches & Underlays for an Ink Project

Sketches / underlays for an ink project (20/3/2026)

I've been wanting to start a new ink project for a while now. I find it's very easy to overthink this kind of composition, and I think this is because ink can easily become too "deliberate". There's a lot of great hi-fidelity ink drawing out there to look at and much of it is masterful, but I think the most timeless schools of thought in pen & ink always respect the gestural heritage the medium shares with calligraphy.

The theme I'm working on is "revelations." The way I like to work with ink nowadays is to do a lot of small composition sketches in pencil, scan those drawings, and "shop them up a bit," meaning manipulate / collage / scale them into underlays that I can then tape to my 11 x 17 inch light table. If things go in a bad direction while I'm inking, then I can always abandon that iteration, scan it in, and use any salvageable parts as underlay elements in the next iteration.

Here's two of the manipulated underlays:

Here is the sketchbook page that both of these underlays emerged from. Sometimes this process involves a lot of random doodling (and I get caught up in other ideas way too easily):

One reason I'm trying to keep a better record of these things is because a good catalog of drawings can jog your brain when you need to dig for ideas later on. It's often like looking back at a dream journal, especially if you can get yourself into the habit of sketching absentmindedly once in a while. Since it's a Friday today, we can be a little whimsical and call that "surrendering to the Muse."