Here are some people sketches I’ve done over the last few years experimenting with various media and techniques.
Category: Drawing (page 1 of 1)
Same subject, same paper, different media. I’m comparing sketching with charcoal and water soluble graphite. Sketching with charcoal is fun, but it is not really the best choice for working in a sketchbook on location because it is messy and you run the risk of smudging the drawing when you close the book. Water soluble graphite is a better choice. It is not messy and it isn’t as delicate as charcoal. However graphite is shinier and you can’t get as dark a black as you can with charcoal.
I did the charcoal drawing first from a reference photo I took from the car. I started with a stick of homemade vine charcoal. I drew the midtones areas and smeared them around with my finger and a small, folded piece of craft foam and kept adding more charcoal to work up to dark gray. You can only go so far with vine charcoal. I switched to a dark charcoal pencil to add the darkest details.
I then drew the same scene with a water soluble pencil. Again I worked my way up from the lightest areas to the darkest sometimes smudging and blending with my finger. I then use a small rigger brush dipped in water to blend further and get the darkest darks.
Strathmore 400 Series Mixed Media paper, homemade vine charcoal, General’s Charcoal 557-6B ex. soft pencil, ArtGraf Viarco 6B water-soluble pencil, and D’Artisan Shoppe Minute Series XII 2/0 Rigger brush. Both images are 5×7 inches (13×18 cm).
Jim
I drew this with ink on Dura-Lar Wet Media film. It is like working on a monotype plate. You can put ink on and then wipe it off. I brushed ink on and also worked with pen and then I scratched or wiped ink off with a tooth pick or a cotton swab. It’s very fast and direct.
This orchard is just north of Hazelgreen Road on 62nd Avenue. Image is 11×3.5 inches (28×9 cm).
Jim
I did another pen and ink drawing in my sketchbook today. I’ve been experimenting with ways to get various shades of ink. This one uses a bluish and a brownish mix. I made another small paper palette. This time I did it with Yupo paper, which is a plastic paper because when I used card stock I discovered that the paper balled up when scrubbed and left little pills of paper in the ink. I figured plastic wouldn’t do that. I made two swatches on the Yupo with Pentel Sign Pens mixing two colors. I mixed black and light blue for one swatch and black and brown and ochre for the other. As before I used a water brush to pick up the ink off the paper palette and apply it to the drawing. It worked very well. I can add more ink and reuse the Yupo palette again and again because the plastic does not deteriorate.
I started by drawing the basic shapes with a very light gray ink pen. I then added additional grays working my way up in value from lightest to darkest. I used the bluish mix for the sky and the brownish mix for the light grays in the bushes and trees.
Travelogue sketchbook, Tombow ABT N95 Dual tipped brush pen, Kuretake ZIG Brushables 010 dual tipped brush pen, Pentel Light Gray brush pen, 2 Derwent #2 round water brushes – one with water and the other with a mix of Noodler’s Lexington Gray and water 1:2, da Vinci series 1573 #6 travel brush, vintage Sheaffer’s Balance Black and Pearl Lifetime pen with 14K gold nib ca. 1929-30 filled with Noodler’s Benenke Black ink, and Pentel EnerGel 0.5 black ballpoint pen. Image is 5×8 inches (13×20.5 cm).
Jim
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This week I tried new approaches to monotypes and sketching. The nasturtiums are still blooming. So, I photographed them with my phone and used the photos as reference for a crayon sketch and a monotype. I then tackled a larger monotype of Ankeny wetland using what I’ve learned so far. Then mid-week I got a new set of Qor watercolors and tried them out on a series of small sketches, and finally today I did another monotype of the Painted Hills in Eastern Oregon using a new technique.
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Last week I did one colored pencil drawing and several monotypes. The two are polar opposites. Pencil is very precise and controlled. Monotypes are very loose.
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I’ve been reading Alphonso Dunn’s book “Pen & Ink Drawing” which I checked out from the library. I used his basic technique of starting by outlining the basic shapes, then drawing in secondary shapes and the outlines of shadows, and finally filling in the shadow forms. He uses crosshatching to fill in the shadows. I used ink washes instead.
Once you put ink down on the page there is no going back. So, you better have a plan. A good method is to use an underdrawing. Most people do one in pencil, but it is always hard to erase the pencil without smudging the ink. I like to work without a pencil underdrawing. The way I did that with this drawing was to trace a photo onto overhead transparency film, backlight the film placed under my drawing paper, and use the rough tracing as an underdrawing. Here is what my tracing setup looked like.
A couple of weeks back I bought a bottle of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay Sepia India ink to try. It can only be used in a dip pen. So, I also bought a bamboo pen. I have on hand other brown inks including Diamine Dark Brown, which I used to start this drawing using my new bamboo pen. I had used the Bombay Sepia on an earlier sketch, but it didn’t flow well and I wanted to compare it to something else.
This is an ink drawing done with three inks in three pens. I drew this freehand from a personal photo starting with the brown ink. I then added grey and a touch of black. The foreground was done by blending the drawn ink with water and a brush. I applied the brown first and then layered the shadow building up from a light grey to the darker tones.
This is the first charcoal drawing I’ve done since college many years ago. I still had some soft vine charcoal from an art class I took at Berkeley. This was drawn on Canson watercolor paper. The image is 7×10 inches. I worked on it in two sittings, one yesterday and the other the day before. I looked at a very fuzzy photo I took several years ago while traveling on the train between Oregon and California. Here is a picture of my setup.