# Ink Illustration: Bold Lines & Fearless Style - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/ink-illustration-bold-lines-and-fearless-style/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Quick win · Rated 6 /10 # Ink Illustration: Bold Lines & Fearless Style By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Ira Marcks · Graphic Novelist Intermediate · 50 min A brief celebrity-adjacent inking tour that teaches through imitation rather than fundamentals, best for illustrators who already draw. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fink-illustration-bold-lines-and-fearless-style%2F2082831655) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A short course built around one repeated drawing Ira Marcks structures this class around a single recurring image, a cat asleep on a log in a jungle, which he inks and reinks across the lesson. After a quick tour of his traditional light table setup (Winsor & Newton ink, a cheap calligraphy nib, Arches hot press paper) and his digital rig (a Yiynova tablet, Clip Studio Paint), the course moves into composition. Marcks shows a grid built from a diagonal and a rule-of-thirds breakdown, then works through two sketch passes, a loose gestural one and a tighter structural one, before a timed, breath-held inking exercise meant to strip out hesitation. That drawing becomes the base for the rest of the class. The middle stretch on shadow is the most technically useful section. Marcks talks through picking a light source, then deliberately overinking, pushing more black into the piece than feels comfortable, to let shadow shapes take on their own identity. It is a legitimate and slightly counterintuitive piece of advice for anyone whose ink work tends to stay timid and thin. ## Imitation as a teaching method The back half pivots into the class's real hook: reinking the same cat three times in the styles of Quentin Blake, Maurice Sendak, and Edward Gorey. Each segment pairs a short bit of art history (Sendak's crosshatching traced to his admiration for William Blake, Gorey's work on Dracula covers and stage design) with a live demonstration of the associated technique. Blake's segment is about speed and loose, uncorrected line. Sendak's is about single-direction hatching that builds into crosshatching to create the "perpetual dusk" quality of his books. Gorey's is about horizontal hatching for texture, heavy solid blacks, and turning soft shapes into pointed, more menacing ones. This section works as inspiration and as a demonstration of how a mature illustrator studies influences, but it is thin as instruction. Marcks narrates his choices as he redraws the cat rather than breaking the techniques into steps a viewer could practice independently. Someone who cannot already hatch confidently or control a brush pen will struggle to extract a repeatable method from watching him work fast through three variations in quick succession. ## Where it lands The class project asks students to pick their own inspiring illustrator, design an animal-in-a-setting composition using the provided template, and ink it in that artist's style, mirroring exactly what Marcks demonstrates. That's a reasonable prompt for someone who wants a structured way to study influences, but it depends heavily on the student already having inking chops. At 50 minutes across twelve short lessons, this plays more as a demonstration and a mindset primer than a skills course. It does not teach line control, pen pressure, or crosshatching mechanics from the ground up, and viewers hoping for that foundation should look elsewhere first. What it delivers well is a model for how to look closely at artists you admire and translate their formal choices, composition, hatching direction, black-to-white ratio, into your own work. For an intermediate illustrator already comfortable with a pen, that reframing of imitation as an active study technique, plus the overinking and shadow advice, is worth the short runtime. For anyone earlier in their inking development, the course will move past the fundamentals too quickly to be useful on its own. The standout The side-by-side exercise of inking the same cat-on-a-log composition three times in three masters' styles, which makes stylistic imitation a concrete, repeatable technique rather than an abstract idea. ## What you will learn - · Building a formal compositional grid using a diagonal and rule-of-thirds template before sketching - · Working through two rounds of sketching, loose then refined, followed by a rapid confidence-building ink pass - · Placing a single light source and building shadow density to define form and mood - · Reproducing three distinct hatching and line approaches: Quentin Blake's loose gestural line, Maurice Sendak's dense crosshatching, and Edward Gorey's directional hatching and heavy solid blacks - · Basic traditional and digital tool setup, including nib and brush choices, paper selection, and Clip Studio Paint brush usage Best for: Illustrators and comic artists who already have basic drawing and inking skills and want to consciously study and absorb specific influences. Skip it if: Absolute beginners looking for step-by-step instruction on how to hold a pen, control line weight, or ink cleanly from scratch. Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples Clarity of Instruction Organization of Lessons [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fink-illustration-bold-lines-and-fearless-style%2F2082831655)