Ink and Shade

No colour. Just ink, water, and the space between them.

Weathered timber cladding, a crooked chimney, marram grass pushing in from both sides of the path, gulls floating gracefully above. The kind of place that looks like it’s been slowly returning to the coast for decades. The kind of place I’d want to sit inside on a grey afternoon and listen to the weather.

I’m realising that I’m drawn to the same things in drawing that I’m drawn to everywhere else. The texture of worn surfaces. The way light sits differently on something old and weathered. The suggestion of a life lived quietly in a particular place. No colour needed. The shading does what colour would overcomplicate.

It’s the same instinct as the black and white photography. Push the darks down, leave the lights alone, let the contrast do the emotional work. What sits in the shadows matters as much as what doesn’t.

And the feeling while I’m doing it, that’s what keeps surprising me. The same quiet I find making music. The same narrowing of attention that a good walk with a camera brings. Everything else falls away and there’s just the page and the pen and the question of where the next mark goes.

The kit is simple. A sketchbook, a paintbrush, a couple of Uni Ball Pin waterproof fine liners, and a Kuretake Sumi ink brush pen. The Kuretake is the key. It’s a soluble ink, which means once it’s down you can take a brush and water to it and pull the ink across the paper, blending it into shadow, softening edges, building tone from what’s already there rather than adding more.

I’m still very new to this. A few weeks in, learning as I go, making plenty of mistakes along the way. But that’s part of it. I’ve found something that feels right, a format that suits how I think and what I’m drawn to, and that alone makes it worth pursuing. I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing where it goes from here, how the lines get more confident, how the shadows deepen, how the scenes start to feel more fully lived in. It feels like the beginning of something.

That’s not a bad thing to find in a pocket of time.

Sam