Tagged: white China Marker

 

I’ll admit some of my pages are quite the train wrecks. To wit: the first scan.
To those of you who’ve borne witness to my sketchbooks and been surprised to see the spectrum run from chicken scratching to clusterf@kkery, allow me to explain.
There are times when describing how I begin or develop a drawing to another artist, or student, the sketchbook is my podium, and I jot down my thought process right there, on the spot, in full view of another’s retinas. Not wanting to be ‘long winded’ as it were, (I realize, THAT runs against expectation), the doodles are pretty much whipped out and at times very much short of grace.
The 2nd and 3rd images are minimal, yet clear enough to get the point with the sketch in blue ink on yellow ledger paper showing the progression of a bent over figure, derived from a modeling friend on the left to the imagined scenario of a fight on the right.
 
 
After that we see a very cursory sketch of four people in green about a table with indication of an implied horizon line for POV. Pretty quick and loose in light green with follow up line work in black to give a tad more clarity, as in,”Okay, there you have it. Now y’all get started and let’s see where you take that in 30 minutes”.

Next up….uh oh, it appears Don not only displayed how to do a loose layout in a light Umber color followed up by dropping black marks on top to strengthen form and pull near features out of the background, but perhaps a touch of impatience also, eh?

Two more images show our pedagogue starting to use the same page for multiple lessons. Hang on tight, this could get confusing.
 
Now we come to a diagrammatic sketch of a bush. That’s more like it. Focused, with sufficient development to explain the incorporation of simplified geometry, developing form by building values, awareness of light source, and enriching surfaces with varied textures.

And after that…oh dear, he’s back at it, certainly demonstrating some of his trickier palm print for leather techniques, but those moire hatching patterns could mean our boy is adrift on one of his tangents again.

Thank goodness he’s returned to a simple  linear layout of a house, I guess, and some kind of…like…machine-ishy gizmo whatchamacallit. We’ll like the text says, I guess you had to be there.

Now the blue panorama of the cemetery should be as self evident as the kid can get. Start light and general, work towards the specifics and develop the values. This was actually done, on site, for the benefit of a class. But you’d have to poll the class to get second opinions about the benefits passed along.
So the six sketches that follow demonstrate one thing in particular. That I loathe wasting good paper. The question of the merits of any given drawing here being set aside for the moment, I often go back into my demo pages, especially the minimally developed and sketchier ones and start to reuse, or repurpose, or transform, or crowd ‘em up. Especially if I’m on a bus and I’m frantically flipping thru the book to find the space to drop in a passenger’s head. Like the bearded dude’s noggin.
It can get pretty disjunct.


Occasionally, I’ll drop a drawing on top of some sketches that were minimal or light enuff that any early meanderings got incorporated into the whole with little evidence of pentimento, or prior being. Kinda the way I feel about reincarnation. With all the new input and distractions and constant jazz and extrapolating forays, how are you ever gonna recognize your way back to your old self.
Hunh?????
Mmmm, last up is a page that seemed to have begun one journey, jumped track, and rode away on an obsessive tangent.
 
 
Drawn with various medium such as fountain pens using Platinum Carbon Ink, DeAtramentis Document Black and Brown Ink, Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, Polychromos Color Pencils, Gouache, and White Grease Pencils on ledgerbooks, and Clairefontaine notebooks, Goldline Watercolour sketchbooks, Stillman & Birn Nova Series sketchbooks.


Gosh, I miss life drawing. I draw from life on a regular if not daily basis. But to draw the human body, uncovered, to really slow down and take an intense accounting of this marvel of the world. To see the structure and the substructure while capturing the play of light over the form. In the past two years I’ve barely drawn the nude and have stopped attending live sessions. I gave the virtual, online live session a go but there is a subtle spatial difference of drawing from a screen, a two dimensional surface filmed from the singular perspective of a lense and standing before a figure. When drawing live, in the same space before a model, I feel the negotiation between my two eyes. The very tricky play of parallax which creates the jostling of binocular vision.
And the craft of translating the third dimension onto a plane. Dealing with the slow fatigue of the model holding 15 and 25 minute poses, where the greater the difficulty of their pose, the more the wrestling match with gravity creates settling of the body, and the not always slight twists which may ease the strain of the pose but tease the artist to accommodate new profiles and morphing negative spaces. I miss it and I love it. All that and the accounting of lights nuanced play over the form. Again, each minute shift means light edges and slips to new real estate.
I enjoy looking at this marvel that is us.
Every sleek contour, every wrinkle, crevice, bulge, scar, wart, hollow, hump, jut, droop, dimple. The heft and hang, the flab and fold, the sheen and shade, where there’s hair, where it’s spare, the stretched and gathered, the glint of light on pout or snout or knuckle or nail.
Ah and skin. That marvelous organ which wraps and conceals all that writhes and wriggles beneath. At times dry and cottony, other times it more resembles satin or warm alabaster where one can literally see light penetrating it’s surface.
And the extraordinary dance between the hand and eye, and the mind and the heart that is the craft of drawing. The Thesaurusian challenge to describe as simply as possible or with as wide an alphabet of marks as one may, the same features again and again and with tireless return, again with no loss of delight.
Know thyself.
I’ve been missing it.






 
Drawn with a variety of fountain pens – usually with water proof pigmented ink or water resistant inks some of which are dyes, white grease pencils -aka White China Markers, my trusty Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, on the rare occasion a color pencil, on various papers.

Cali Zephyr

Passengers on the Fall Trek. Above, a very nice gentleman gets his first look at the Rockies.

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Amtrak, Metra, CTA, Megabus, Trailways, Uber….as long as my hands aren’t glued to a steering wheel, I’ll make my way around the country and fill my sketchbooks. Fountain pens, juiced up with Platinum Carbon, Pitt Artist Pens, grease pencils, aka the white China markers, ballpoint, the rare color pencil, gel pens, whatever, in ledger books, watercolor pads, Stillman & Birn, Strathmore, Clairefontaine, Tomoe River Paper and then some. Drawing from life, from nudes, landscapes, urban environments, transit passengers, dead animals, cemeteries, laundromats, drawing out of my head and out of my mind….just answering the calling and feeding the obsession.

Cafe studies

Slowly coming out of the winter, tho I know in this part of the country it’s a big tease.

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What am I to do if I don’t loiter? Some artists comment,”You draw so fast!”. But if they watched me, they’d observe I’m anything but a blur. I may use techniques that achieve great effect, and I prefer to say I draw fluidly, but, it ain’t speed. Decisiveness rules the day. But, it still takes time. And, if your subject seems to be comfortable and settled into what they’re doing, enjoy what you’re doing. Slow down a bit, look more deliberately.

Perhaps it’s that I draw in ink and with pigmented pens, and use multiple nib sizes and brush nibs that cover rapidly. It might also have to do with not sketching in pencil first then switching to ink or paint. Once warmed up I might get to final contours and tones early in the process. Still, if you’re going to adorn a dress with flowers, or convincingly portray a head full of curly locks and beard stubble, time flows on, and easily enough, you’ve spent 20-30 minutes trying to capture a citizen enjoying a book while sipping away at a beverage.

I see the following tools used in the above drawings: various fountain pens, Pitt Artist Pens, white grease pencils (aka White China Markers) and White Big Brush Pitt Artist Pen. Papers would be: Strathmore toned paper, Yasutomo, Utrecht toned paper, Cachet Eartbound, different ledger books, Tomoe River Paper.

Don K's log cabin

After 57 years, I finally return to the Land of The Midnight Sun. Glorious light. Flowers going crazy in long luminous days. Met up with some of the local talent for a plein aire event and a drink-n-draw at Spenard Tattoo. The above log cabin is the home of local artist Don Kolstad who has been an educator and fixture on the scene for years.

Flight sketches  Mtns & clouds

Above, drawings done on the flight to Anchorage. An attempt to capture some cloud and mountain formations somewhere over British Columbia.

The following drawing of Columbine flowers and the following paragraph I did and dedicated to a young woman who passed away just days before I arrived in Anchorage. I also dedicated gave it and gave it to the owner and staff at Blaine’s Art where she had worked for about nine month’s prior to here death at 21 years of age.

Columbines

Ashley, I never had the privilege to have met you. But I have met wonderful people who did , and clearly, your spirit touched them. You are missed. I believe life is a supremely amazing gift, and the people who come into our lives, are a large part of that gift. I was told of your departure as I sat in the car outside the store you worked at, having been driven there from the airport. The first things I saw as I stepped from the car were the Columbine flowers at the store’s entrance. They were the first things I drew after stepping on Alaskan soil since I left as a child 57 years ago. They were purple, one of your favorite colors I’m told, and radiant in the incredible searing light. It was the first I had ever seen Columbines. It will not be possible for me to see them again without thinking about you and the emotional way those who knew you, spoke about you, your radiance, your accomplishments, your wit and brilliance. The growing season in Alaska is brief, and like those arresting Columbines, you had an all too brief but intense presence to those whom you encountered. I know they are grateful to have met you.

Ship Creek

Above, a view from the water’s edge of a Salmon catching contest near the mouth where Ship Creek empties into Cook Inlet by downtown Anchorage.

Humpy's Spenard's Tattoo

Seth and his shy friend at the Drink & Draw at Spenard’s Tattoo when Seth works. I could tell she was watching me thru the veil of her hair.

Plein aire group

The Anchorage Plein Aire group with Don Kolstad on the right from an overlook facing the estuary alongside Turnagain Bay.

Anchor. Mus. o Art Sea-Tac

Above, a dorama in the Anchorage Museum of Art and my lunch counter view of the kitchen crew at Anthony’s in Sea-Tac International. Airport.

Drawings done in a ledger book, a Strathmore toned sketchbook, a Stillman & Birn Alpha series sketchbook with Faber-Castell Basic and Pelikan M215 and Pelikano Jr. fountain pens with Carbon Black ink and Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brish Pens and White China markers.

 

 

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