As most of you who have been reading
this blog know by now, I don't always do what I set out to do in the
order I plan to do it. This is most assuredly true of every artist.
I felt compelled to tell you that since
I am following up with the recent posts about all the intuitive painting
I am hoping to do, and the slippery yupo paintings, and the running
together of the colors, and it all gets really exciting and fun and
then, life happens, (or death happens, as was the case of that
beautiful little marigold), and then for a while I just can't think
that way anymore and I am faced with whether to do laundry or to sit
and be depressed, so what do I do?
I start playing Vivaldi.
And I start drawing things in pen &
ink.
A long time ago, (and I think I
mentioned it somewhere in this blog), my dad taught me to draw, and
would take me to boat docks, and we'd draw the complicated ships with
all of those lines and masts and I was not to use an eraser. In fact
he taught me never to use an eraser. This is a pretty drastic thing
to tell a kid. Believe me, I have tried to teach this to my young
students, and most of them start to cry.
I honestly don't remember when he took
the pencil away and gave me a pen....but that, of course, is another
step in bravery and confidence, that every child, (and even more so,
every adult), really should take once in a while.
(artwork by Charles Geotis)
The important thing to remember is, as
with any medium, you ALWAYS start as light as you can, and then work
darker. By the time your drawing is done, those first fluid
suggestive lines are not noticeable anymore, and in fact, may even
help to add some life to the finished piece. I'm not suggesting that
this is going to happen automatically, but with practice, and with
NEVER using an eraser, it does work over time. And the wonderful
thing is that once you get the hang of it with pencil, pen and ink
does not feel so scary, and you already have a leg up on what is
going on.
What is pen & ink anyway? I think
it is kind of funny that we still use that terminology, since it
implies that we are using a dip pen and a well of ink. While I liked
to work that way as a teenager, (they DID have regular pens then, I'm
not THAT old, but I was a bit of a purist) there existed at that time
a few other options. My dad used to use just a regular old felt-tip or ballpoint pen a lot
of times.
When I got to college, one of the items
on our supply list was a cartridge-filled ink pen for drawing with.
It was actually pretty nice- the pen was sort of like a sharp
calligraphy pen, and it allowed you to press harder or slant the tip
to get different thicknesses of line. It's funny- my first year of
architecture school was at Georgia Tech. You would think that this
school would be heavily slanted in the technical aspects of
architecture. To my delight, I actually found the opposite to be
true, at least for their freshman year curriculum.
One of my dearest memories is of two
professors who would come to our design studio on Thursdays. Their
class was completely art. They were a couple of real characters. Two
old guys with long white beards (well, old from my perspective at
that time...) smoking their pipes, leaning back with their fretted
eyebrows, pensively contemplating each little detail of our work...It
would make us so happy when a smile came over their faces in pride
and happiness with our work.
Among other things, these two men
really taught me some great pen and ink technique. One of our
projects was actually doing a portrait of a TREE. We all sat outside
for something like four hours with our pen and pad of paper, and had
to render a tree, with all of its paculiarities and uniqueness. The
technique was to use small, diagonal strokes, (again, light to dark)
and to delineate the tree with its bunches of leaves, highlights,
shadows, edges, trunk, openings where the branches peek through, etc.
It may sound funny but I think I learned more in those four hours
than I have learned in many entire classes. I am still teaching my
students the techniques, and more than that, I've learned to see
every single tree as distinctive, and I innately know how they grow.
It was important to know through the years rendering buildings as a
design architect, but it is also just a beautiful thing to be able to
see. I have rediscovered the beauty of this recently, and I highly
recommend it.
These days the technology is so
remarkably better that 'pen and ink' really just means 'pen'.
Everyone has their favorites, but these days I am really loving the
Staedler pigment liners. They come in different thicknesses, and I
have found the 0.3 to work really well for heavier line work and the
0.1 for really fine lines.
My education in college expanded to
show different ways to render buildings, and once in a while I like
to remember it. This is an example of a drawing I completed a few
years ago, which shows some of the techniques I learned. Although I
worked from a photo with this one, the techniques work just as well
on-site. As a matter of fact, on-site work is very valuable in terms
of timed site drawings in order to train students, or yourself, how
to capture a 'place' or a 'space' within a given amount of time. This
drawing is shown to you here so you can see some of the different
strokes used to delineate different architectural elements.
You can
see in the enlargement that rendering brick, for instance, is not very
precise. In fact, if you try to delineate every detail you will lose all
of the life of the drawing. I like to sketch out very faint, BROKEN lines
along the horizontal, and then suggest random bricks with diagonal shading, just
giving the impression of the material. This general idea also works for stone,
stucco (with stippling), etc.
Now having said all that, I am not
going to pretend that I don't use an eraser as a professional artist.
More often than not I do, especially if I am doing detailed work. I
will sometimes block out overall frist lightly with a pencil, then go
over and detail with pen and ink, and erase the pencil. Sometimes I
will even go further and color- as was the case with the recent
childrens' book illustrations.
But sketching with pure pen and ink on
a sweet drawing surface, black and white, has such incredible
benefits. And doing it over and over again makes you grow in so many
ways.
It is very soothing creating a drawing
in black and white, with tender, deliberate strokes, not in a rush,
and tedium is never an issue. Time is just passing as it should, and
beauty is being created, one little stroke at a time, with no eraser
at all....this comes from the part of me that loves to embroider, and
write, and knit. And maybe even play Vivaldi.
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