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PSA: my sketchbook fell in a puddle at the bus stop on 5th and Main, and tracing it with a ballpoint saved it
I was waiting for the 42 bus in the rain and a car sprayed water right into my open bag. Every page in my sketchbook got soaked, and the ink on my morning doodles ran into gray blobs. I let the pages dry flat overnight, then went over the whole thing with a cheap ballpoint pen once it was dry. The blobs are still there but now they read as shadows behind the lines, and honestly the page looks better than the original. Anyone else ever fix a ruined doodle by just drawing on top of the mess?
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william_hunt883d ago
The thing nobody talks about with water damage is that it changes the paper itself, not just the ink. Once that page dries it gets this slight buckle and roughness, so when you go over it with ballpoint you're drawing on a different surface than the original, and the pen catches in ways it didn't before. That texture is probably half of why your page looks better now, the line has more tooth to grab onto. I had a life drawing get rained on in a backpack once and the same thing happened, the wet spots dried into these soft gray fields that made the shading look intentional. You basically got a free underpainting out of a bus stop.
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