David is a very good spirit who works in the grocery store in my neighborhood. He and the staff have done a good job resupplying the store during the pandemic despite some binge buying. And David and crew have kept a Upbeat and helpful attitude when many customers became frustrated or contentious. Finally, if you come into the store you must mask up which helps protect these workers and their families.
Tools used: Faber-Castell Essentio Black Leather fountain pen, DeAtramentis Document Black Ink, Pitt Artist Pens on Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. #fabercastellusa #clairefontaine
Got in a weekend at Rachel & Bob’s beach house in Michigan. Chicago has been really going thru it and it was necessary to take a break. Between the demonstrations which have seen the torching of police cars and property damage, shootings, the pandemic, loss of employment, the restrictions on public gatherings, the closing of so many restaurants, and the general anxiety increased by truly depressing news cycles, Giamila & I hunkered down in Sawyer for a few days. If you’re going to feel isolated and cut off, you might as well be in a gorgeous environment where you can take off the masks, swim on the clean side of the lake, and go pick blueberries.
Drawn on #clairefontaine Stillman & Birn Nova Series Beige and Goldline Watercolour sketchbook with #fabercastell Essentio broad nib fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens.
A couple weeks ago my dear pal Alexandria and I felt a need for a visit in these isolating times, so, we each masked up and met for a 3 hour visit at Calvary Cemetery.
Calvary is a modest size cemetery which sits between Chicago and Evanston along the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s very open being flat and not forested with minimal trees and plantings. It is quite pleasant, very bright and enjoys the benefit of the lake’s breeze.
Alex and I brought chairs and I proceeded to sketch her as she surfed the net while we talked of how we were coping with the extraordinary times.
I worked on a Stillman & Birn Nova Series Beige sketchbook. The warm tinted Pages provide a great tonal base allowing a selective use of a brighter value by adding white as I did here with a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush Pen. The page has just enough tooth that when I dragged or rubbed an inky finger across the surface I was able to emulate the surface and look of the tombstone behind Alex. Yes, those are my fingerprints which when inky create a perfect look of pine needles and grass.
Tools included a Graf von Faber-Castell Chevron fountain pen filled with DeAtramentis Document Black Ink, Pitt Artist Pens of various grays and nib sizes and the S&B sketchbook mentioned above. #Stillmanandbirn #fabercastellusa
Dreary weather at end of April. Stuck indoors because of the pandemic and cold wet day, so, making the most of it by sagging a sketch from the window by my drawing table. Giving y’all a glimpse of the building across the street from me. Not delighted by the final results and had already grown tiered of drawing it as it was being erected.
At this point I need to make a full disclosure as I am now receiving funding as an “influencer”. My sponsors are Faber-Castell which should not come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed me for any of the past 12 years and knows that I like their product and have worked as a demonstrator on their behalf. For a number of those years I traveled the country demonstrating tools and techniques in the brick and mortar world of art stores as well as at trade shows. I’ve also made my way to teach and lecture at colleges and schools around the country, an experience I greatly enjoyed. All during my travel to these venues I documented my treks here and there and there on the Internet on this site and on the internet as Don Colley’s Road Trip. Faber-Castell was the entity that made all that possible and now I am very appreciative for their sponsorship of my online blogs.
In addition to Faber-Castell, I’m most delighted to be working with Clairefontaine and Stillman & Birn (now owned by the parent company Clairefontaine). I wholly support both lines of paper and sketchbooks by these companies and have made considerable use of their products as you may have noticed in my posts over the years.
There are loads of wonderful products in the marketplace to work with and I’m a big advocate for experimentation and trying them out. When I find pens or sketchbooks I enjoy, I keep going to the well more so these days.
As always, this format is suited to me answering your questions and I do encourage followers to strike up a dialogue regarding the craft of drawing, the tools of the trade, or the themes I may be working around.
The above drawing was made with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, an F-C Basic Black Leather fountain pen using a waterproof ink, I’m currently using several as long as they hold up to over washes and don’t clog my pens. Mind you, regular cleaning is necessary for any fountain pen ink that claims it is waterproof. The sketchbook is a Goldline Watercolor Sketchbook by Clairefontaine.
Well, this may be helpful. I worked with videographer Hiromi Sogo to give y’all some sense of how I manage, or try, to sketch people who are not posing but rather engaged in some activity. This I do and have done, as those who follow me know, for more than four decades. This practice has helped me in many ways, but greatly in one in particular. When I had the chance to draw in court, I was already up-to-speed with capturing people in motion.
Here are close ups of the drawing used in the video: just a note, when transferring the video to this platform, some of the soundtrack drops out; a glit I look to correct and avoid in future videos. Learning curve stuff, my bad.
As mentioned in the video, I number the drawings in the order they were begun. To my eyes, there was a lot of “meat on the bone”, I.e. an interesting looking dude holding great poses about concentration, wearing a shiny, puffy jacket made more dramatic by the raking light that accentuated surface features with the cast shadows of near and mid distant structures. Drawing multiple perspectives or postures on the same page makes the transition from one position to the next easier as the subject moves and/or returns to a similar posture allowing you to add or complete the drawing. Afterwards, it also makes for better side by side comparisons since you’re not flipping back and forth to compare and contrast drawings.
You can see the preliminary or searching sketch for which I used a light Flesh tone. That establishes the general silhouette and will be a place holder if the subject suddenly moves just after I’ve begun drawing. I managed to knock in a good deal of his face and hair but he moved before I could get to his hand. When he returned to this pose about 45 minutes later, my “notes” were in place and I was able to pick immediately where I’d left off.
Evident in these drawings ing s is my use of several tools, one very important amount them are my fingers as you can see the marks left by my fingerprints.
Those fingerprints create hatch marks that are quite distinct from the hatching created with a stylus be it pen or pencil. Varied marks have great appeal to me in that they can enrich the drawing and their combined effect is to increase the descriptive nature of the marks. But another, very crucial reason I draw with an array of different tools is to take advantage of the inherent attributes of a given tool and by doing so save myself time. Most important in drawing a dynamic subject where you’ve no idea when your subject could move or altogether leave, is to draw efficiently. Why overwork a small nib when a big brush affords greater coverage. Fingerprints create multiple hatch marks simultaneously that are also very difficult to emulate with the stroke of a pen. An inky finger will come in handy if you should want a smudged tone. Add to this collective of mark making, a variety of hues and the drawing gains in richness and description. For the combined effect simply examine the close up below of figure #5.
Drawings were done done with a Faber-Castell Basic Black Leather fountain pen filled with DeAtramentis Document Black Ink and F-C Pitt Artist Pens on a Stillman and Birn Gamma Series sketchbook (S&B is now a subsidiary of Clairefontaine) which takes ink and pencil nicely and can handle watercolor, plus has a little pebbly surface that creates nice textures when smudging or scumbling.
