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Verso I
Teto
Notitle
Leve
Dobra 2
Circle detail
Coluna 2
Expira
Sobe detail 1
Magro 4
Narciso
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Posts tagged as:
ink
My fountain pen is gliding over the paper. Up, down, up, down.
I love to watch while the black is slowly consuming the white paper. I could do this all day.
But I won’t.
If I just paint the whole paper black there isn’t much to look at.
But I would want to…
Then comes the hard part.
Although the colors I get with this color hatching technique are beautiful. They are also completely unpredictable.
I don’t like things that are unpredictable.
The shorter the lines, the more colors I use, the more unpredictable and beautiful the result.
Or I can begin with a layer of some color and then place a few lines on top. That’s far more predictable but not as beautiful.
I’m mostly fearful of my next few drawings.
I want to try to make kind of a landscape using my new color technique. But I’m not sure how.
If I can’t predict the colors how can I get them to interact?
Love and fear
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For the last few years I’ve been playing a kind of game with my self. I look at an object; a tree, car or park bench. And while I’m looking at it I try to imagine it.
Doing that feels as a kind of memory practice.
That is, I’m not sure whether I’m improving my memory. But it feels like that.
The problem until recently was that it also invoked a very strong feeling. So strong that I never knew whether it was a good feeling or not.
But a few weeks ago I noticed that the feeling had changed. It’s still a very strong feeling and I still don’t recognize it. But I’m now sure that’s a good feeling.
So the last few weeks I’ve been looking a lot. At everything around me. At everything I would want to draw.
And I finally realized something that’s probably obvious for people who are not autistic. But I never saw it.
The background of an object is very important.
A tree is nothing without the park or forest it belongs to.
The reflection of an early morning sun in a black wet road is nothing without the trees and the cars that surround it.
So for the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about how to draw background. Specifically about a color pencil drawing technique I read about years ago where you hash colors together.
In this study I’m finding out how you can mix colors.
I’m finding that the nice part of this technique that you can’t actually predict what kind of colors you’ll get after mixing a few colors.
I’m must try this on a somewhat larger scale.
Color islands
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I wanted to play a little with the pebble shape. It seemed like a nice idea to suggest the shapes of pebbles touching each other by only coloring parts of the shapes.
But for some reason it didn’t work.
Maybe I used to many pebbles or maybe the hole idea is impossible.
For now I compromised and draw something a bit like what I had in mind.
But I will be coming back to this idea.
Playing with pebbles study 1
Playing with pebbles study 2
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I started this drawing 5 times before I was satisfied with the result.
The first time was when I got the idea. But I didn’t like the shapes.
The last time I realized that if I wanted to contrast between white and black I should use a pen that’s really black instead of grayish.
Pebbles
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I just saw a video by Seth Godin about shipping.
He mentions something I never realized.
I always thought that being an artist is about making beautiful and interesting drawings. But not according to Seth.
Seth Godin says that any business is about shipping.
And of course he is right.
In the Christmas holiday I started a very complicated drawing that probably will be very beautiful if I ever get it finished.
But like with most complicated drawings that I do. It takes a lot of time to complete and the middle part isn’t very interesting to do.
I haven’t done much drawing the last few months, so I’m still only about one third the way of completing the drawing.
Thinking about this shipping idea I realized that there is a better way to drawing. It would work much better if I draw a lot of these easy, quick drawings. And when I feel like it I’ll intermix them with working on the more complex drawings.
Lines 6
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As I wrote in my last post “the difficult part of drawing a nose is getting a curved line at a specific distance of an other curved line”. I thought I should device some practice to get better at it and here it is.
What can I say. On the one hand it’s a boring exercise of course, but on the other it does become easier with practice.
I find that my hands starts to shake a little bit when I try this kind of practice. Which is something I have had before. But I never dared to go on practicing so I actually don’t know if this is something that will pass with practice.
In a few days I must try this again and see what happens.
O’line
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I was planning to draw a preserving bottle, but after starring it down for a moment I decided that would be to complicated for right now.
So I thought I go for something easy like the television that is sitting about a meter from me on it’s cupboard. But that drawing turned out to be deceptively complicated.
Because I’m sitting only a meter away and part of the television towers above me the perspective plays strange tricks: I never noticed but the corner that is facing me seems almost twice as high as the corner that is facing away. Which looks very strange in the drawing.
The slots on the site of the television also behave strangely. The top one is on eye level so it seems straight although it isn’t. It’s curved just like the bottom one. The same is true for the ventilation slots.
I won’t even start about how strange the cupboard looks.
It’s strange feeling. Having a photographic memory I feel that I know how the different parts of the world connect to each other. But trying to draw them it’s almost as though having a photographic memory for shape is something of a disadvantage.
Wasn’t expecting that.
Television on cupboard
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It’s a strange feeling to sit and stare at a vacuum cleaner for a few minutes. But it is the best method to figure out how the lines run and what the relationship is between the different details of the vacuum cleaner.
Now I’m doing this I finally realizing why I’ve always had so much trouble drawing complicated pictures like this one. I have a tendency to imagine the world in three dimensions. I know, by heart, which lines are running towards me and which lines are running away from me.
But to draw them I have to learn to imagine them in two dimensions. Lines don’t run towards me or away from me but under a slight angle upwards or downwards to the left or right.
Half way through the drawing I realized that I had placed the vacuum cleaner to far away to get a good view on some of the details. Since it is not possible to move the vacuum cleaner without changing the angle and/or the perspective. I was forced to simplify the drawing somewhat. Which in the end turned out to be a good thing.
This type of vacuum cleaner has a lot of ornaments that don’t have anything to do with it’s purpose. It’s nice to look at but it doesn’t necessarily make the drawing better to understand.
Vacuum cleaner
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It’s getting a bit boring to draw only chairs. So this is the last drawing of this chair. But not the last ink drawing.
This time I didn’t use the single line rule. I lifted the pen as often as I needed and I must say that this drawing is far better then the last few. The perspective of the backrest and the armrests is almost correct.
But then the legs in the last drawing where a little better then this one.
Still I feel I learn something with every ink drawing I do. I think that tomorrow I will do my vacuum cleaner. I have a Dysons with nice curved lines.
Last chair
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