Many times I have said, simple things can bring me so much pleasure. I just discovered bamboo pens to use with liquid ink. Not calligraphy ink pens bought from a store, but homemade, ink pens made from dried bamboo! My discovery started when I bought a book named, One Drawing a Day by Veronica Lawlor. I love this book because it encourages me to get back into my creative state of mind and draw.
One of the first exercises in the work book is painting a picture using bamboo pens. Even though I have many different types of calligraphy pens, I didn’t have any pens made out of bamboo lying around my house. In fact, I never even heard of them. I knew about quill pens; you know, the ink nib with the long feather on top (I bought plenty of those as a teen). Venturing further and having to look it up on the internet, I learned about this traditional Japanese and Arabic art of using bamboo reed pens for calligraphy and how to make them yourself. How fun to create a pen made from a bamboo plant!
I love glass bottles of ink with their rich colors and have lots of them in my art storage for calligraphy and drawing. But, since I didn’t have a bamboo pen on hand, I would need to create one for the project from my book. I went into my garden to find some old, dried bamboo sticks I remembered seeing lying around, brought them inside, found my paring knife and proceeded to carve the bamboo with wells to hold the ink and wooden nibs on both ends. They are so easy to make! Mine may not be perfect but they work beautifully and I love them. The art really does take on a new, ‘Look‘ and I have an art tool which is ancient, but to me, brand new! The nice flow of ink makes it feel more like painting instead of drawing. So cool!
Sonoma Harvest 