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"Stone Wall in Pen and Ink"
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Author: Kitaye, Contributing Editor

For centuries we have been using stone to build walls. Earlier stone walls were nothing more than field stones layered on top of one another, sometimes using only gravity, balance, and age to hold them together. As our ancestors developed the skills, they began dressing the stones. Dressing a stone refers to the act of shaping the stone to make it easier to stack and mortar.

Today, most stone walls use a dressed stone. Granite, marble, and sandstone are all commonly used building stones. In this tutorial, we will be concentrating on sandstone blocks. Sandstone is a fine grained stone that can be shaped and smoothed easily, yet it is hard and strong enough to last for centuries. Sandstone can be found in a variety of colors, ranging from off white to a deep blue grey.

Older stone buildings will mix and match different sizes of stones to create an overall texture within the wall. If you look closely at these stone walls, you will notice that the wall is broken into layers approximately two feet high. The stones are stacked vertically and horizontally to achieve a level surface. To make the wall higher, an additional two foot high section of stones would be placed on top of this level surface.

Arched entrances through the stone wall are built with heavily dressed stones. The stones used for the arch are shaped specifically for the position they will hold within the arch itself. Sometimes the stones will be of a different kind or all one color. See the images above for examples of stones that have been cut to fit their respective place in the arch. These images also show a more modern style of layering the wall which entails cutting each stone the same height and using them like bricks.

A sandstone wall can be created using pen and ink. The amount of detail needed depends on the size of the artwork and the distance from the wall that the viewer appears to be standing. The closer the viewer, the more detail; but conversely, you can use a larger pen size, up to a point, to create the texture.

This is the second article in the series for creating a stone wall and arch in pen and ink. My first article walked you through the steps needed to draw the arch itself. In this tutorial, we will ink the arch created in the first article and add an inked wall to support the arch. We will be using the stipple technique to shade the stones that make up the arch and wall.

So, grab your supplies and let�s go.
Materials needed:
-A piece of heavy weight watercolor paper (I am using 9" x 12")
-Pigma Micron pens by Sakura(sizes 005, 01, and 03 should suffice)
-Ruler
-Pencil
-Eraser
First we will ink the support stones. The support stones are the big blocks that support the arch. If you followed the step by step tutorial for drawing the arch, you will remember that the support stones have more than one face. This is because we drew the arch using geometric perspective to create the illusion of space.

This image shows what two of the support stones will look like separate and then stacked on top of each other. Building stones, unlike bricks, tend to have slightly rounded corners. As you can see, we represent this roundness by creating a curve in each corner of each facet of the stone.
Using the Micron size 03 pen, ink each support stone as if it were separate from the one above or below it. Ink each face separately from the face near it. In the image to the left, you can see where I inked the upper edge of the face, along with the curve in the corners of each face. In the image below, I have inked the bottom of each stone face. Notice the curve in each corner.
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