Why ink?

I have always loved drawing on paper. Pencil, marker, ballpoint in the margins of everything.

Then design became my job. Then it became my classroom. The work moved to screens, and my drawing followed it. Procreate. Photoshop. An iPad that went everywhere I went. I loved it. I still do. Undo is a wonderful thing.

But something shifted. A machine can now make a picture in four seconds. It can make a thousand. People started looking at my drawings and asking if a computer made them. That stung more than I expected.

So I’m putting down the stylus and picking up the pen.

Ink doesn’t undo. Every line stays. The mistakes stay too, and you have to draw your way out of them. That’s the part I missed. Not the finished picture. The hours. The scratch of the nib. Turning the paper. Deciding where the next line goes, and living with it.

Ink Method is the experiment. Each week I roll a prompt on the front page, and that prompt starts a numbered piece. Most of them turn into doodles. That’s the point. Doodling is how I’m teaching my hand to love paper again.

And I film every one of them, start to finish. Not because the process is pretty. Because it’s proof. Proof that a person sat at a desk for hours and made something by hand. Proof that traditional art is still being made, one line at a time. Every video is a proof of life.

The doodles are the practice. Outside of Ink Method, I make other things too: real drawings, paintings, whatever the hand wants to try next. All of it made by hand. None of it undone.

You’re welcome to draw along

Justin Weinmann

See my work at justinweinmann.com

Draw along

Each piece is one 11 × 14 sheet of Bristol, drawn over a day or two and filmed from above. Here’s how to join in.

1. Get a prompt. Roll a new one, or take this week’s. Everyone gets the same weekly prompt, Monday to Sunday.
2. Follow the rules. Get everything on the card into your drawing. Use your imagination and fill the page. Nothing but ink.
3. Post it. Write the code in a corner and share it with #inkmethod. See what others drew →

The codes

Every prompt has a six-character code. Type one from a video or someone’s drawing into the prompt page and you get the exact same prompt.

Watch

Full timelapses go up on YouTube, with shorter clips on TikTok and Instagram.

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