More on Drawing with Pen & Ink

In the previous post, I gave out some drawing tips.  I'll continue along this vein, though this will probably be less of a drawing lesson than an examination of the drawing process, as was the previous post, I think.


I do hope that the description of the drawing process will be of interest to those who own some of my work or have seen it, (i.e. at goodrichink.com) and to those who are working on their own drawing skills.   And also to those who simply share an interest in art.  And lastly, to those who can't find anything interesting to watch on TV.


I wrote in the previous post about drawing from life with pen and ink and how this approach offers a Zen-like experience because of the intense focus required to get it right the first time (no going back to erase mistakes).  This was the approach I used when documenting scenes and people in Togo, West Africa, where I lived for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer.   All the ink drawings you see in the "African Sketches" section of my website gallery were done this way.


Most of the artwork with pen & ink that I have done in the past several years while living in Vermont has had an underlying Vermont theme.  In the beginning, I approached the drawings in the same fashion discussed above, sitting in front of the scene and drawing everything directly in ink.  Some of these early examples include some churches.  The first picture here shows the hazards of drawing direct, without mapping out in pencil first. 


This is the First Universalist Unitarian Meeting House at the north end of Church St. in Burlington, VT.   I started the drawing at the top, working my way down and ran out of paper before I could depict the entire building...



Here are a couple other samples of this direct ink drawing approach:

The Chace Mill, Burlington, VT

The Old Brick Church, Williston, VT

As I progressed in building my portfolio of Vermont images, I wanted to increase the complexity and detail in my drawing.  And to make the best use of my time (which became all the more important as my family gradually grew from two to four humans), I began to outline my drawings first in pencil.   The idea was reduce the inherent risk of messing something up (proportion, composition, etc.) long into a detailed drawing, thus making it a throw away.


In addition, and because the free time one has in the years BC (before children) dwindles to almost nothing AD (after delivery), I took to photographing my subjects and working from the photos.  
Drawing from photographs is similar to drawing direct from life.    


In both cases. the rendering of negative space is very useful. (see previous post "About Drawing with Pen & Ink") 

Intensely focused observation is key.  


Also, seeing shapes in two rather than three dimensions is essential (again, see previous post).  Even though, with a photograph, the scene has been reduced for you to two dimensions, your brain has the tendency to interprete the objects in it as existing in 3 dimensions.  And therefore, you tend to interpret sides of barns (for example) as receding into the distance, rather than an assortment of irregular two dimensional shapes set side by side.   Training your mind to see and draw two dimensional shapes is the goal.

Here are some other techniques I find useful (oooooh.. free how-to-draw tips!).  They work both with traditional quill-type ink pens as well as rapidograph-type pens, but several came about as a result of experimenting with the fixed-width point of the rapidograph pen.


Here is an example of a drawing done using a reference photograph (apologies for the low quality image).  

Church Street   - Burlington, VT

It includes a fuller version of the truncated church shown near the top of this post.   It also shows people that wouldn't have stood still enough for me to draw them.  It shows great detail which would have required several extensive visits to the location.  But after a few photos taken, I worked on this drawing entirely at home, penciling in things first, then inking.


And here are a couple of techniques I use in drawing with ink:
Shading:
In achieving differing values with pen and ink (creating a range from light to dark areas), you increase the density of the ink marks as you get darker.  
I tend to work with close parallel lines, the closer the darker.  To get even darker, I draw more close parallel lines at an angle over the first ones.  This is called crosshatching.


Another common technique (which I don't use much) is  "stipling".   This is the use of dots of ink in varying density.   Crowd them together for a dark area, spread them apart in lighter areas.  
People often ask me if this is my technique, most likely because they remember the term and notice that I frequently make use of dot marks in my drawings.  However, I don't tend to "stiple" much at all - I prefer working with lines.  For the most part, I use dot marks to soften and darken cross-hatched areas, or to add texture, but not to define form or shading through density.   I also use dot marks in drawing lines and in crosshatching - breaking the lines up in order to make them lighter.   With a traditional quill pen, you can vary a line's thickness by pressing down and releasing more ink.  But with a rapidograph pen (my tool of choice), the thickness of line is determined by and limited to the size of the tip.  I work with the same pen for an entire drawing (convenience and laziness), so, instead of thin-lined crosshatching to create a light shading effect, I crosshatch with dotted or broken lines.  

As I said above, I avoid using stipling (personal preference), but here is an exception which shows how effective it can be as a technique.  It worked because the forest background was to be soft, or blurred even, so as not to take the eye's  attention away from the figures of the children and the pile of hay tossed in the air.


Well, then...I tend to ramble, and I am feeling that I must bring this to an end so that you can read it, and I can come up with something else to say on a future post.