Beautiful artwork by the way.

Thank you—but to be honest, these are easy to produce via a mostly-mechanical process and require little-to-no artistic training. The above are, I think, something like the fifth and six inked images that I'd ever produced, and I could have done all six of them in less than a day. You could churn these out yourself if you wanted with a bit of hardware.

If you're interested in doing them, you need:

• A pen and ink (and given this community, it should naturally be a fountain pen :-) )

• Fountain-pen-appropriate paper.

• A computer with a decent image editor. I use GIMP, which is free and open-source, but Photoshop or whatever should work similarly.

• A printer loaded with regular printer paper. I use a Brother black-and-white laser printer.

• A light tablet. I got mine for IIRC less than $10 on Amazon, a batteryless USB version that should last pretty much forever.

• Four paper clips.

Here's the process I used:

• Obtain digital photograph that you want to use as a source. Doesn't need to be terribly high-resolution.

• Open it up in GIMP.

• Scale the image up to whatever size you want your inked illustration to be. Image->Scale Image... You're going to want paper units, inches or centimeters. Hit OK.

• Now we're going to need to put the contours on the guide sheet. Open the Colors->Threshold... dialog. You may need to drag the dialog to one side so you can see the relevant portion of the image. Check the "Merge filter" checkbox at the bottom of the dialog. Slide the black triangle left and right until the black-white contour follows whatever features in the image you want to highlight; following face contours is often done, or creating a silhouette, or whatever. It's likely that you can't get every single detail that you want with a single slider—I couldn't do either of the above images with that—but we'll just do the simple case now, and then add a bit more complexity to give more control later. Hit OK. You now have an image with only white and black pixels.

• If the printer is capable of printing too light-absorbent of a black shade of ink on the paper, it'll be hard to see through the black areas on the light tablet. Go to Colors->Levels and on the Output Levels slider, slide the black triangle up to maybe 75% or so lightness, so you have white and light gray instead of white and black. Hit OK. You now have an a white and light gray image.

• Print.

• Secure the fountain pen paper to the front of the guide sheet using the four paper clips, one at each corner.

• Put the paper assembly on the light tablet. Flip it on. You can now see the guide sheet through the fountain pen paper, so you don't need to deal with all the tricks that artists do to try to keep an image proportional to a reference image. Trace out the guide sheet on the fountain pen paper. My experience is that either Chou Kuro or Iroful paper (which has some coating) makes skin oil from fingerprints particularly noticeable, so you might want to work from right to left (or left to right, if you're a leftie) so that you don't get oil on the area that you haven't inked yet.

• Done.

For many images, that won't capture all the details that you want. For example, a single threshold won't capture the American flag on the USCG Eagle right at the black-white transition and also just a hint of rigging. On the "man and dog" image, it won't capture the beard and the ear highlights and a clean dog silhouette. So for those, we're gonna need to create different thresholds for different parts of the image and merge them. For mine, I did maybe two to six images and composited them.

GIMP basically treats an image as a series of stacked "layer" images combined, some of which may be partially transparent. We're going to create a "layer" for each portion of the image with detail that we want.

Going back to the "coutours" step, instead of doing that, we're going to need to instead follow this process:

• Choose Windows->Dockable Dialogs->Layers. You should see a sidebar with a single entry that shows a thumbnail of your image.

• Right click on it and choose "Duplicate Layers". Now there are two layered images shown in the sidebar. What you're seeing is presently only pixels from the top image, since both images are fully opaque.

• Select the topmost layer, so that it's the layer that we're modifying.

• Do the Colors->Threshold step that we did for the "simple" image on this layer, so that the black/white transition highlights whatever feature you want highlighted.

• Click the title of the layer in question in the Layers sidebar and give it a name for the feature, so that you can remember which is which.

• Now we're done with that layer for the moment; you want to make it not visible. In the Layers sidebar, there are three columns of checkboxes, so that there are three checkboxes next to each thumbnailed layer. The leftmost has an eye on it and indicates visibility. Uncheck the eye next to the black-and-white layer that we just modified, so that that layer is no longer visible and we're again seeing the bottom layer, which contains the source photograph.

• Repeat the above steps to create another layer that highlights another feature, starting at the "duplicate layer" step.

• Keep doing the above until you've got all the features that you want.

• In the Layers dialog, decide which the black-and-white layer that you want to use for most of the image. Click the eye checkbox for it, so that it's the layer that you see, and drag it to the next-to-bottom spot, right above the color source image. This will be the base layer. From now on, we won't see the source photograph ever again, since the base layer will be covering it up.

• Check the eye checkboxes for all of the other black-and-white layers, so that you can see them; they'll cover up the base layer.

• Now we're going to need to merge the images. For each of the black-and-white layers other than the base layer, right-click on them in the Layers sidebar, and choose "Add Layer Masks...". This will create a new black-and-white "mask" image that will define which areas of the layer are visible. For each, choose "Black (full transparency)". This will, for the moment, effectively make all of the images except the base layer invisible, since they'll all be fully transparent. Each time you do this for a layer, you'll see a new black rectangle appear next to the layer image; this is the layer mask.

• Windows->Toolbox. If your list of tools weren't already visible in a sidebar, they are now. Choose the paintbrush or hit "p". You should see the following:

  

  The large black-and-white squares in the upper right are the current foreground and background colors, and the small squares in the lower left are shortcuts for full black and full white. Click the large topmost square to be choosing the foreground color, and click the small white square to make it white. You are now painting in white.

• Windows->Dockable Dialogs->Brushes. Choose the large circular brush.

• Windows->Dockable Dialogs->Layers. If the layer sidebar wasn't visible, it is now.

• For each black-and-white layer other than the base layer, we're going to paint the feature that we highlighted into visibility. Click on the layer mask, that black rectangle in the layer sidebar, for one of the black-and-white layers (that is, click the actual black rectangle, not just the layer entry in the layer sidebar). With your white brush, start painting over the feature in the main area. You can make your brush larger with the "}" key and smaller with the "{" key. Undo is Control-Z, Redo is Control-Y. You can "erase" feature that you've painted by choosing black and painting with that instead of white (that is, click the small black square in the colors area and then paint with that).

• When you're done painting on the layer mask for each of the black-and-white layers other than than the base layer and happy with the way things look, we're going to merge all of the layers into a single layer. Choose Image->Flatten Image.

• Now continue with the "Colors->Levels" step that we did for the "simple" image, the one where we weren't dealing with all these layers.

Good luck!