Pointed Pen Calligraphy with Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bleed Proof White Ink

Hey friends, so today I'm going to teach you how to write in calligraphy with white ink and I have my very favorite white ink here PH Martin's bleed proof white so I'm going to show you how to Get this ink started so that it writes well for you because it can be a little tricky if you're a beginner So the first thing we're going to do is go ahead and unscrew the cap of the ink and you'll see that there is A slight layer of liquid on the top, but underneath this it looks pretty much solid white So you need to have something that you can stir the ink with Um a toothpick might not be quite strong enough in this instance. So I prefer to use an old paintbrush that has a pretty firm Brush on the end of it And I just go ahead And mix up the ink And you can tell how thick it is because if I pull out My brush the whole entire thing is layered With the thickness of the ink It's really important to continue to stir this really well And right now It's not looking like i'm gonna have to add any liquid to the ink But that's what the pipette in the water is for just in case we do have to take that step. So Let's pull an envelope over here And see how it works It seems to be a little thick but it might still write okay All right, so what's happening here Is actually not normal. Um, that's not what you want to happen. My upstrokes are extremely scratchy And not smooth at all so I need to Take a moment to add A little bit of extra water to My inkwell And my inkwell is actually already very full So i'm going to transfer some of this to a smaller container That I can use at a later time so that I can get the mixture in this one Correct for my project right now Put the cap on There we go, so i'm going to save this for later And i'm going to use my pipette to add in some water Just a little bit And by the way, this is tap water. It's not distilled water or anything special Tap water has always worked for me just fine with this ink So Let's go ahead and dip the nib again To see what happens Perfect. All right. I'm going to try to bring this up here to show you guys what this looks like But when I dip it into the ink You'll actually see that it's it's dipping or excuse me dripping Off the end of my pen when I give it like just a little bit of a slight shake Which is good. That's just about where you want it to be And i'm cleaning up my nib between every single Attempt with the ink just to get it nice and fresh And so i'm going to show you this so this the missus is what I wrote and the missus is starting to look better However, there were still some spots That were scratchy which means believe it or not you might still have to add even more water to the ink So i'm going to go ahead and add A little more And stir that up again with my brush and this is why I dumped out Some extra ink because there's no way I would have continued to be able to add water Um as much water as i've added at this point without it overflowing All right Once again, it's still dripping looks good Don't forget the key to Good calligraphy is often to write slow and slower than you think you need to And the ink keep in mind will act a little bit different on every single surface that you use it on So how it reacts on this envelope might be completely different how it reacts in another envelope. All right So the mister was super scratchy missus still has some missing spots and the word smith Pretty much is completely full. There's like no Nothing that looks like chicken scratch on it I'm gonna keep writing I'll show this to you again still looking great and The other thing is that I probably could even add a little more water to this and still have it look just as opaque And just as nice And that'll you know loosen up the ink a little more to make it flow even better Than what it is right now, but right now it's doing really well Uh, the other interesting thing to remember about ph martin's white ink is that you're most likely going to have to add Water to it every single time you're doing a new Calligraphy job. So if you put it back in your cabinet for like a week Before you do your next thing with white ink, then you're going to have to add Water to it again when you start the next project because the ink will have already thickened up again at that point. So Hopefully that was a nice and easy video to help you understand how to use ph martin's bleed proof white ink And to get it to work for you Have a great rest of your day