Drawing is very important for different reasons. Designers create drawings to sketch preliminary ideas down when designing, so do architects and engineers. Many people also enjoy drawing but many others are afraid of putting pen to paper. 
Drawing is an activity that very young children love to do. My grand- daughters started drawing before they turned one-year-old. Drawing with felt pens has become a very important activity they practice first thing every morning at home.
Drawing with ink helps students to develop confidence when drawing; they cannot erase if they make mistakes, so they have to accept their mistakes and make the most of them.
In our studio/art room, students keep visual journals dedicated to drawing. They draw what they see around the room, they draw from their imagination, like super heroes and fairies and they also use references, pictures, they find in magazines, and art books to draw. Drawing takes place every day for 10 minutes.
Ink & Water colour Student drawing – year 2 
Bamboo pen and black ink MiddleInktober
I have recently participated in Inktober, drawing with ink during the month of October. I love drawing with ink and I have always encouraged young children to draw and specially to draw with ink.
Here I present some of the drawings that I have submitted to Inktober. I cannot tell you how much fun and how relaxing it was for me, each drawing took about 15 minutes and my idea was to draw from different sources. I drew from observation, directly from nature like the drawings above, I drew from photos and from a subject like Salty the dog.
These landscapes are drawn from the imagination and memory of the trips to the central desert in Australia. I like drawing using black pens and black ink but I also enjoy using a limited color palette like sepia, black, gold red and white. Every now and then, students engage in drawing or painting using a limited palette with amazing results.
Students spent about 45 minutes drawing seed pods from observation. Younger students used black pens for line drawing and watercolours. Older students used bamboo pens and black ink. I gave instructions on how to use the pens and ink to draw shapes, lines and textures. Students had the freedom to make decisions like composition and the kind of seed pods they wanted to draw.
The Different Emotional States of Salty
For this series of drawings my subject was Salty, the family dog, I find his face very expressive and charged with emotion. I drew Salty and his companions in a very loose way, I didn’t try to draw a realistic representation of Salty. My interest was to capture his emotional estates and to create a narrative about him.
I used black pens, fine paint brushes and black ink and grey washes, ink mixed with water to create different tones.
Children drawing emotions – mixed media drawing, pastels and ink.
These drawings by young children depict fear and loneliness. Students responded to the question: Have you ever felt lonely?
The results amazed me, every drawing is charged with emotion and some of them show fear. Students had a mini lesson on technique and then the freedom to create a visual response to the question. A girl standing on an island surrounded by menacing waves and a stormy sky, a girl and a boy on the beach being threatened by a giant wave and a bare landscape where a lonely boy stands are some of the drawings produced by young students.
To create the drawings students had sheets of black paper and used soft pastels and white and black acrylic ink to draw emotions using lines.
For information on how to set up the classroom for pen and ink drawing.
Drawing a Landscape
Older students drew landscapes using black ink, grey washes, bamboo pens and fine paint brushes.
Students have a selection of colour pictures of landscapes to choose one to work with. Their task was to “interpret” the pictures in black and white, using black ink only. They had the freedom to use the whole picture or part of it. I presented a mini lesson on using the ink with pens and paint brushes and on how to create grey washes by adding water to the ink. We talked about how to represent different things like bricks, clouds, trees, distance and foliage using different kinds of lines and textures.
