Why Ink Suits the Impatient Portrait

Ink is unforgiving, and that is precisely why it teaches us to look harder. A pencil lets you search, shade and smudge your way towards a likeness; a pen asks you to commit. In a five-minute portrait you simply have not got time for hesitation, and the marks that result carry a frankness that slower media rarely match. For those of us who work in watercolour, this is excellent training. The skills of quick ink work — reading a face, judging proportion, deciding what to leave out — are exactly the skills a watercolour portrait demands when the light is shifting and the sitter is losing patience.

The aim is not a polished, finished head. It is character: the tilt of a jaw, the weight of a glance, the way one eyebrow sits a fraction higher than the other. Chase those things and the likeness tends to follow.

Tools Worth Keeping to Hand

Keep the kit small enough that you will actually carry it. A tiny tin or pencil case that lives in your bag will teach you far more than an elaborate set that stays in the studio.

• A dip pen with a flexible nib. Nothing else gives you such a range between a hairline and a bold, loaded stroke. It slows you down in the best way.
• A fine-nibbed fountain pen or drawing pen with waterproof pigment ink — ideal for continuous line work and for sketching on the move.
• A brush pen for solid darks, hair masses and the shadow under a chin. One confident sweep beats twenty small strokes.
• Smooth paper. Hot pressed watercolour paper or a good smooth cartridge sketchbook. Rough tooth will fight a fine nib and break your line.
• Waterproof ink if you intend to lay a wash over the drawing. If the ink bleeds, embrace it — but know which result you are after before you start.

Line Variation: the Difference Between a Diagram and a Face

A portrait drawn with a single, unvarying line reads as a diagram. Life lives in the variation. Pressure, speed and the angle of the nib all change the mark you leave behind, and learning to control that is the whole game.

Press a little harder where a form turns away from the light: the shadow side of the nose, the underside of the jaw, the depth of an eye socket. Ease off where the form catches light — the bridge of the nose, the top of a cheekbone, the curve of a lower lip. Thin lines suit delicate features and the edges that catch the light; heavier ones suit hair, clothing and anything in shadow.

Speed matters too. A slow, tentative stroke wobbles. A fast one is clean and has energy in it. If you find yourself drawing carefully, draw faster and accept the odd stray mark. You can always adjust in the next study.

Hatching, Cross-Hatching and Knowing When to Stop

Hatching is not shading — it is a way of describing form. The direction of your strokes should follow the volume, much as contour lines follow a hillside. Hatch across a cheekbone to show how it turns, and down the side of a neck to show how it rounds. Keep the strokes roughly parallel and evenly spaced, or the result becomes muddy.

Cross-hatch only in the darkest passages: beneath the nose, in the corner of the eye, under the chin. Two directions are usually plenty. A third quickly turns mud.

The most common mistake in quick ink work is overworking. When you feel the urge to add more hatching, stop, hold the drawing at arm's length and look at it. Leave the lit side of the face completely alone — the white of the paper is doing the work. A study with three or four areas of hatching and a great deal of untouched paper will always look fresher than one laboured all over.

Working from Life, and from Photographs

Life gives you character; photographs give you repetition. Use both, but know what each is good for.

From life, sit close and work in three-minute blocks. Look more than you draw — perhaps seventy per cent looking, thirty per cent marking. Sitters fidget, blink and shift, and this is not a problem to be solved but information to be used. Draw the movement rather than fighting it; a slightly restless line reads as a living person. Keep the pen moving and resist the urge to lift it for every feature.

Photographs are useful for practising difficult angles and for studying an eye seen from below or the way an ear meets the jaw, but they flatten form and tempt you into copying an outline rather than constructing a head. Choose images with one clear light source and strong shadow shapes. Squint at them: the shadows should read as simple blocks. And never trace a photograph — a traced line carries none of your judgement, and the portrait will feel hollow however accurate it is.

Making It a Daily Habit

• One face a day, three minutes maximum. Set a timer and stop when it rings, finished or not.
• Draw the same person three times on one page — one minute, two minutes, five minutes — and see what the extra time buys you.
• Warm up with a continuous line drawing where the pen never leaves the paper. It loosens the arm and the judgement together.
• Keep a dedicated ink sketchbook so you can flick back and watch your confidence grow over a few weeks.
• Finish with a single wash of dilute watercolour over the dried ink, laid in loosely, to remind yourself how the two media can work together.

Do this for a month and something quietly shifts. Your eye gets quicker, your hand gets braver, and you start to see the shapes of character rather than the details of a face. Nothing could be better preparation for painting people in watercolour.