@Lucie Y - Thank you so much for your kind thoughts about my copperplate. I hardly ever use it in real life, so despite having learned it years and years ago, I always feel like I'm perpetually relearning it, and never really mastering it. But it's the process that counts, and I feel like it's getting better this month! Your enthusiasm for it really made my day! And your layouts really show off your skills at drawing and calligraphy. The filagree of your vine and leaf work is so delicate, and really compliments your Ronde - and I love your color choices. I love your aesthetic all around!
@AnasaziWrites - you are too kind. But sometimes I do think that the drawings I don't labor at so much turn out better. The jellyfish has a kind of studied nonchalance, because bleach drawings make you work fast! There's lots of planning, but once the bleach hits the paper, there's no turning back.
* btw - if anyone was wondering how I'm getting that sort of neon effect, it's an ink wash, and then I dip a G-nib into plain laundry bleach and draw with it. Some of these dye-based inks react with interesting colors, like the bright turquoise blue in the jellyfish drawing.
* and the vividness of it sort of redeems my muddy passenger pigeon drawing - although to be fair, Martha was a female of the species, which, as
@Zivio noted in an early post, was built for hiding rather than strutting.
And yes,
@Erica McPhee - We got another inch or so of snow this morning. It's melting off now, but yeah, the North is like that this time of year. Duluth is the coldest city (of a certain size) in the continental US. It's also further north than 85% of the population of Canada. It's okay though - it means that the outdoor hockey season is just around the corner. We usually start flooding our neighborhood rink around Thanksgiving. In the meantime, it's good weather for drawing, and for thinking about warmer places, like the natural habitats of today's Armadillo.
I used a sort of new ink that I haven't done much with yet -- it's by an ink company in the Philippines called Troublemaker. It's a duotone ink called "Petrichor" that writes like an oily dark grey, but breaks into vivid jade greens and mauvy pink/purples. And the reaction with bleach is pretty spectacular and somewhat unpredictable.
So we have a companion for Mike's lovely loopy flourished armadillo. And rather plain capital A that's not even going to try to compete with the lovely flourished As that Karl & Erica gave us.