Learning about Ink

The last couple of weeks I have played around with drawing with pen and ink. It has been fun and one thing that is kind of interesting about using real tools and not digital ones is that now I am the absolute expert out of all the world on my nibs. Even other people that use pen and ink and might know just from looking at my nibs how they will perform more or less don't know how it will work as well as I do.
It is like knowing exactly how to close the door so that it won't jam.
A couple of things I learned.
Pen and ink is amazingly forgiving. If you don't put the first line exactly where you want it you can just draw another line over it. I didn't love how the hindfoot of this mulgara turned out so so I just drew the tail over it and you can't really tell.

Pen and ink is amazingly unforgiving. If the proportions are off when you start with those first couple of lines you will fail. That's why after a while I started using pencil to sketch out my pictures and then followed with ink. These fighting gemsbok are the first sketch that I started doing this with, and is probably my favorite.

Being familiar with the nib you are using is very important. While working on the gemsbok above I think I accidentally broke my favorite nib. The next image I drew in pencil and I thought it turned out quite well (especially because it is a person and I struggle with people), but then my nib had broken so I was trying out other ones and the one I choose was too thick for what I was trying to do here so it turned out kind of weird, especially the face and shading.

Overall I think I like drawing animals best. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise to me,but here is one of the plants I did, a canaigre plant.

I really haven't worked with pen and ink for a long time (all my ink was dried up so I had to keep pouring water into it the first couple of days), but it was fun to play around with it again. Especially because when I did ink drawings before I mostly did it with modern markers and used the nibs and ink for calligraphy.

A couple of other things I noticed is that I do SO much better when I have a good reference picture, even if I modify it after I draw it. I also realize that I have a hard time scaling down from my reference picture.