Guptill’s Drawing With Pen and Ink

Book review and flip-through of the classic text on YouTube

Charles Dana Gibson illustration in Guptill’s Drawing With Pen and Ink

Thanks to my buddy

Patrick McGinley

for pointing out the YouTube channel Infinite Surface With Jesse Thompson, specifically the video embedded below. Jesse flips through Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur Guptill, previously published as Drawing With Pen and Ink and a Word Concerning the Brush, and makes a case for its usefulness nearly 100 years after publication.

Still useful 100 years later

In the video Jesse mentions first coming across the book at the RISD Library (my old school! Although we had the much smaller library at the time). Guptill’s covers basic concepts like how to create tone using different styles of pen mark making; the difference between fast and slow movement of the pen; and so on.

But then he goes on to cover more nuanced subjects—like the way the arrangement of tonal values alters how viewers enter into and explore the image. Two versions of essentially the same drawing, with slightly different tonal structures, can even change the story implied by the artwork.

In the vintage edition an especially useful demonstration was included that illustrates “reversals,” he says, and in subsequent editions it is missing. A reversal is when pen marks are arranged so that adjacent sections of the art show clear contrast—grays on the outer perimeter, then black inside of the gray, white inside of the black, and back to black within that white area, for example (see figures 4 and 7 below).

Illustration of tonal “reversals” from Guptill’s book—how to bring clarity through the arrangement of dark, medium, and light tones in different orders. This illustration was apparently slightly modified from an earlier edition.

Well I did some snooping and found the missing page—right here on Artist’s Cheat Sheet! Kind of. Go to my homepage and tap on “Artist’s Resource List.” Scroll down and tap the link found at Reading > Art Fundamentals. You’ll find a scan of this classic book and many others that you can read for free.

Check out all the resources on my list while you’re there; there’s a lot of useful stuff, including free instructional PDFs and a video about pen and ink from Denver-based pen artist Paul Heaston, who I previously interviewed.

Pen and Ink workshops

There’s even a section in Guptill’s book about pen and ink drawing outdoors. I took that unusual approach in this year’s Plein Air West Reading competition and won third prize, plus the People’s Choice Award! I’ll have to take a look at that section of the book to see what Guptill says about it. Maybe I used some of his techniques unwittingly.

Zoungy Kligge, June 14, Cat and Doe, pen and ink on primed cradled wood panel (winner of the 3rd place ribbon at Plein Air West Reading, Berks County, PA, in June 2025).

If you’d like to learn pen and ink techniques with me, I have three workshops coming up in late summer and autumn. The summer one is currently open for registration: The Art of Ink: Line, Light and Shadow at Historic Yellow Springs in Chester County, PA. We won’t be sketching outdoors this time, but rather inside the comfort of a studio.

Well, happy sketching to you, and hope to see you at a workshop!