Ink's Not So Bad

winter roots of Dahlia 'Manhattan Island'
Laura Allen, 2020

This week, three separate people have asked me about teaching. I've taught classes and workshops in the past; before I moved to Seattle, I made much of my living doing community courses, adjunct teaching, and adult workshops. 

(One memorable summer, I even taught a set design course for a large children's theatre program. Never ever mention "High School Musical" to me, and especially don't hum the songs. I have

trauma.)


Aside from that, though, I love teaching and I plan to do it again. One of the reasons I'm taking this botanical illustration course from Cornell is to build my nature art portfolio. It's always tough to do finished work in the rush of a class, but this dahlia is a keeper. 

The main reason this turned out so nicely is that I'm seriously intimidated by ink. My crosshatching is cruddy and so's my stippling; I'm just a bit too heavy-handed for ink, or something. So I made a very detailed pencil underdrawing, and used every pen trick I knew.

The best advice I've ever heard is from artist Alphonso Dunn. He recommends saving pens that are running out of ink to use for shading.

It works. This dahlia root was shaded almost entirely with running-out Micron .005 pens. I took my time; it's an eight-hour drawing or so, maybe a little more. Making sure all the root paths matched up was the challenging part. 

I drew the main roots first, with their major mixmaster intersections clearly indicated. There are one or two that got drawn over, but you'd have to get a magnifying glass to find them, I think. The

drawing is life-sized, by the way, as is common in botanical illustration. It's on 11 x 17 Bristol and I used .005 Microns almost exclusively.

So, for now, still brushing up the skills...be back next week.