About drawing with pen & ink

Here is a drawing that I made when I was living in Togo, West Africa.  There are several others you can see in my online gallery in the African Sketches section (goodrichink.com).  It was a fairly quick sketch and done (I believe) with a rapidograph pen.  This was in the town of Atakpame at restaurant on a hill.  I must have stopped in for a coffee or a beer.  And had my sketch book with me.

I like it because it captures the quiet of an afternoon.  The place was empty except for these two women chatting.

Drawing with ink, rather than pencil, presents its challenges.   But it is also  a great exercise in discipline and focus.  You can not go back to erase and correct.  There is a zen-ness about this.  You become so focused on the object in front of you, that nothing else exists - for a period of time, you are one with the scene that you are drawing.

There are some tricks and techniques, which I will talk about, but highly focused observation is at the core of it.   Your eyes and mind may be shifting between the view and the paper in front of you, but you are constantly carrying the mentally imprinted image with you as you look down to your paper.  So you never quite leave it during the whole process.

Another thing to note is that you are translating something from three dimensions to two.   But in my approach, this comes about as a consequence of the focused observation and not through any mechanism such as using perspective lines - another old technique was to suspend a glass plane between the artist and the scene and "trace" the three dimensional reality seen through the glass onto the two dimensional plane of the glass. 

I suppose I've trained myself to do just that without the glass.  Let me see if I can explain what I mean...  Look at the stonework railing, how it goes from left to right and then turns toward the viewer - a change in the perspective. When drawing this, however, I had no thoughts about perspective.  I simply drew the object as I saw it in two dimensions.  Rather then try to draw something coming toward me, I drew the parts that made up the view - a darkly shaded rectangle that is the end of the railing, then a rhombus sort of shape to its right, with top and bottom sides angling up toward the right. I'm working with pure two dimensional shapes rather than an object that recedes into the page.  The result is the appearance of an object that recedes into the page.

A key concept or technique that is helpful in accurate drawing is negative space.  The trees, the women, the porch make up the positive space - they are the subject of the drawing.  The negative space is everything that is not the subject.  It tends to form abstract shapes and these shapes tend to be easier to draw.  The reason for this is that the brain is not distracted by all the associations that come with to the concrete shapes of people, buildings, etc. 

So instead of drawing the head of the woman on the right (and thinking about head size proportional to body, or thinking about her posture), I am drawing the white shape around her head, between the tree trunks and below the foliage (left).  Her leaning posture, the placement of her arm, her head, and the positions of the tree trunks become defined by this shape.

Likewise, I'll draw the shape that embraces the other woman's head, and is contained by the two tree trunks to her left and right, as well as the horizontal line of the railing at the base of the shape (above on left).   The size and position of the tree trunks and branches as well as the height of the woman's head relative to the other woman  are now established and easy to start filling out with detail.  Using negative space is extremely helpful.

I'll be writing more about drawing technique in future posts, but my dog is wanting something right now and won't shut up.