Drawing ink questions

[DollyKim]

I am in the middle of making the jump to better art supplies and aren't sure if I need drawing ink. If I buy I'm pretty sure it will be Windsor and Newton or a similar quality brand.

Right now I have some calligraphy ink and a pen that I really don't use. What I do like to do is some water color, water color pencil, graphite wash, stuff like that. I have some Inktense blocks which work like water color pencils but when they're permanent and can't be lifted. Oil painting has been in my past so I understand thick opaque stuff too. I also work with wax based color pencils and other products.

What could/should I expect from drawing ink? Is it opaque? I don't work very big so it's not about coverage but what I can get out of the medium.

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

It's been a while since I last used Winsor and Newton drawing ink, so they may have changed the formula and thus how it behaves! From what I recall it's mostly transparent (in the same way watercolour is mostly transparent) and pretty much water resistant once dry. They do a liquid india ink, which isn't water resistant when dry, and I seem to recall the white is fairly opaque.

Hopefully someone else will have more recent experience.

As an aside, drawing inks and other similar inks generally don't play well with fountain pens unless you use and flush them very regularly. Some ink-pen combos work better than others.

[DollyKim]

I got my hands on a set ~eats Ramen for a week~ and I'm satisfied. The colors are vivid but transparent. While wet you can work them a bit, when they dry they layer nicely. Pen wise I'm not using the Speedball 2 layer nibs, know what I mean?, but the single layer one as I saw a demo video with it. Then again I never got the hand of using one of those pens. For brush work it's great, just rinse well when done.

I really like how this works for doing a nebula/galaxy and how it bleeds on the white paper. I am curious what these will do to fabric and will check my stash to see if I have some to experiment on.