Yesterday it was announced the artist Ronald Searle had died at the age of 91. BBC news article.

On all the different new programmes they talked of his St Trinians work but not of his awesome cat drawings. He has created many many cat books with his wonderful and humourous cat illustrations. He was a fantastic artist and one that will be remembered.

This week we worked with dip pens and Indian ink. It’s something I’d never used before and I love to learn new things so I had a lot of fun (and made a mess :D)

It is so different to using normal pens. It is much wetter and so much blacker. Even the most black of my drawing pens don’t get such intense results. Making marks is really different too, it’s scratchy and lacks some of the smoothness that I’m used to with my drawing pens.

Once we’d got the hang of the pens, our teacher encouraged us to copy a picture, and try to work out how all the marks were made as well as experimenting with ink washes. I chose a picture from Ronald Searle’s Big Fat Cat Book

I’m pretty pleased with my results (if you ignore the giant splodge on the scales!)

What I’m struggling most with is that I can’t get smooth lines. The combination of my shaky hands and the scratchy nib means that all my work looks really messy. I want to get it to work though, the blackness makes scanning so easy, there’s depth that I just can’t achieve with other pens. I will keep at it and maybe share some more of my results in the future.

Have you drawn with dip pens?