India Ink--Expressive Meets Linear

Recently in my 2D class--surprisingly a difficult intro-level course in my  program--we were posed the task of incorporating illustration clippings into a unified whole. I love this sort of project, partially because I love illustrations, but the idea of using India ink both expressively and technically in the same piece is daunting.

I figured I'd get the expressive down first, because no one wants to mess up tedious hatching with a single splash or other mistake. To get the clean borders I used a thinner brush loaded with water, and then filled in the spaces with moisture before adding ink. Sometimes you can tastefully apply ink in one area to achieve a spectrum of value, but most of the time, you have to let it do its own thing. It's similar to water color in that respect. 

The linear is next! More coming soon.