Stretching

Today was the kind of cold, rainy, grey day that forces you to stay indoors, even if you are anxious to go outside.

Fortunately, as the days get longer, my indoor plants are responding with flowers.

For a while now, I have been trying to decide how to move forward with sharing more of my drawings. Pencil drawing comes naturally to me. When I pick up a pencil, I am not thinking about how the tip will respond on the paper, or how the line will look. I just know... from many years of practice.

But pencil is difficult to reproduce. If I want to share natural history drawings, pen is a much better choice, even though I think the look of pencil is more lifelike.

So I've been playing around with pen drawings. I am stretching into territory I don't want to enter, really. But art that is real involves some risk. Sometimes you have to just try it.

Today, stuck inside, I picked up the Lamy pen that has been giving me headaches. I have been struggling with it, wishing I had a technical pen (which is on my list to try next, because I think it will be much more suited to my style!). The problem is not with the pen. It is with my tendency to press hard on the nib... with predictably disastrous results when you are discussing fountain pens! But today, somehow, I managed to lighten up a bit. I even managed to get a blind contour drawing of my African Violets done without feeling as though I had unleashed a squid full of ink at the paper.

I'm using a very dark brown ink by Sailor in the pen. I still don't care for stark black; my eyes rebel while I am drawing if I use that on white paper. Interestingly, when I spilled a bit of this ink, the color was bluish black. The stains on my fingers were black. But the ink is definitely a dark brown, a sepia to be more precise.

It is water-soluble, so I have more options to explore.

All in all, not a bad rainy day project. And I am still exploring reductive drawing, and enjoying it very much. More on that to come.

Pen, ink, and watercolor trials

The past couple of weeks have been a time to reevaluate my artwork, decide what is working, what is not, and, therefore, what I want to change. It's all part of a New Year's assessment, and a commitment to myself to draw more frequently.

A new sketchbook purchase didn't work out as well as I had hoped. The multimedia paper did not absorb enough of my fountain pen ink to prevent smudging (though it was great with Microns). I think I am going to end up back with my tried-and-true sketchpads that I've used since my college days.

Here are some images of the trial-and-error process. When you see pretty sketches in a book or online, you don't usually see all of the preliminary testing that allows an artist to draw in a certain style. Every component is a variable, and must be tested together in various combinations. For me, my variables are: sketch paper, type of ink or pencil, pen nib width, and watercolor.

In this picture, you can see my favorite way to test materials. I draw a little clover flower, which allows me to see how much tiny detail I am capable of getting, and then various lines and squiggles. I then wash over the lines with water or watercolors to see what happens. On the right hand page, I included some pens that I knew were not waterproof (like the Flair), as a reference. Sometimes I like the look that these pens produce.

In this picture, you can see some of my favorite fountain pens. From left to right is a Pilot Kakuno, a Lamy Safari, and a Pilot Metropolitan. I have other favorites, too. These are just the ones that found their way into the photo because they are so colorful. The Metropolitan pen is loaded with Herbin Orange ink that matches the barrel color almost exactly, and smells absolutely heavenly... it's scented like orange blossoms. This is my new favorite for notetaking.

I think I've settled on the Kakuno for when I need a lot of detail. The Fine nib does produce a very fine line, as you can see in all of the mosquito drawings on the page (click to enlarge). The mosquitoes are a bit of a joke. The Kakuno's packaging is entirely in Japanese. I took a photo of the instruction page, plugged it into a language translator, and was told that it was a fountain pen of mosquitoes! Pretty funny. There must be a subtle nuance of interpretation of one of the kanji. One of these days, I need to learn Japanese.

The Lamy is my favorite for general sketching. I seem to get a lot of line variety with it. On this paper, the Sailor Nano black ink doesn't smear too much.

That's an inside peek at the beginning of my New Year materials testing. I'm also testing different brands of acrylics, and water-soluble oils. More on those later!