The bold line: no erasing

Ink knows no going back. What you put on the paper stays there, and that is exactly what this lesson is about. Anyone drawing with pencil often corrects until the line no longer claims anything. With ink you have to decide – and those decisions remain visible. They give your sketch pace, attitude and a trace of yourself.

Why not erasing is a strength

An ink drawing is a record of your attention. You can see where you hesitated, where you were confident, where you really understood something. It is precisely these irregularities that viewers read as life. A perfectly smoothed contour often looks empty; a contour with two attempts looks built and genuine.

That does not mean you should draw sloppily. It means you no longer treat mistakes as a catastrophe, but as material. As soon as you stop fighting the mistake, your stroke becomes calmer – paradoxical, but you will notice it yourself after twenty minutes.

The wrong line stays, the right one goes beside it

Did you place the window too far to the left? Leave it there and put the correct window right next to it. Your eye then does something reliable: it reads the stronger, more decisive line as the valid one and demotes the weaker one to a searching trace. That is why it pays to draw the correction with a bit more pressure or a thicker pen than the error.

It is important that you do not scribble over the wrong line and do not cover it with a thick bar. Both only draw the eye to it. Just leave it, keep drawing, done. After three or four such spots they disappear into the overall fabric of the drawing.

Look slowly, draw quickly

Most beginners' problems arise not in the hand but in the gaze. Before every important line, take two or three seconds and really look at the edge on the subject: where does it begin, where does it end, how steeply does it tilt relative to the edge of the paper? Only then do you set down – and then briskly, in one movement, without braking along the way.

This rhythm, long looking and short drawing, is the opposite of how most people start out. Anyone who constantly looks at the paper while drawing and pushes the pen forward slowly, feeling its way, gets soft, shaky lines without direction. So spend a good half of your time with your eyes on the subject, not on the sheet.

Preliminary drawing: three shapes at most and one height

You may sketch in pencil first, but only very sparingly. Allowed are the eye level as a horizontal guide line – that is, the height at which your gaze lies – and the three largest shapes of the subject. For a portal that would be, say, the door arch, the block of masonry around it and the step. No more.

As soon as you pencil in window bars, decorative mouldings or cobblestones, you are drawing twice – and the ink line is merely traced over. Traced lines always look tired. The details belong directly in ink, with the risk that comes with it.

Begin and end with intention

Every line needs a clear beginning and a clear end. Set the tip down, draw the line to the point you determined beforehand, and lift the pen there. What you want to avoid is scribbling out of uncertainty: that repeated short back-and-forth with which many people "search" for an edge. It produces furry, indecisive contours.

If you don't trust yourself to do a long edge in one go, deliberately divide it into two or three sections with small pauses. Three decisive part-strokes are better than one woolly search.

Line weight: near and dark thick, far and light thin

Your most important design tool in this lesson is line weight. With a fineliner you change pens for this, say 0.1 for distant things and 0.5 for the foreground; with a nib or brush pen you control it through pressure. The rule is simple: what is near you and what lies in shadow gets a thick line. What is far away and what stands in the light gets a thin one.

This creates depth without any shading at all. A thick line at the lower edge of the door sill and on the shadow side of the pillar is often enough to make the portal look three-dimensional.

Where the contour may disappear

On edges where light falls directly, you simply leave the line out – in sections, in the middle of a stroke. This principle of found and lost edges makes the drawing breathe and lets the white of the paper work as light. A roof edge that fades out towards the sunny side looks brighter than any hatching.

Your eye closes the gaps by itself. Trust this ability: less contour usually means more light.

Exercise

Find a church portal, a café entrance or a striking front door near you and sit down diagonally opposite it. Mark only the eye level and three main shapes in pencil, one minute at most. Then set a timer for 12 minutes and draw the portal exclusively in ink. Erase nothing, paint over nothing: wrong lines stay, the correct line goes beside them more strongly. Work with at least two line weights and, in two places where light falls on the edge, deliberately leave the contour open. Then upload the sketch in the Coach and ask where further lines could be left out.

Key points

The wrong line does no damage as long as the right one stands beside it more strongly. Look long, draw short. Thick lines for nearness and shadow, thin ones or none for distance and light.