Hibernation’s Hidden Costs

Posted on February 15, 2015 by Larry Marshall

It’s currently -13F outside. This, they say, is a ‘warming trend’ and in reality it is warmer than it was just a few days ago. But from the perspective of a street sketcher, it matters little whether it’s -13 or -30 outside, I stay inside.

Mid-winter depression is a real phenomenon in places like Quebec, where I live, but for me, it’s more like cabin fever. I spend too much time looking out the windows, wishing for a place to sketch. In previous years our Museum of Civilisation has been that place and the displays there have kept me busy throughout our long winters.

But this year, half of the museum is closed due to a fire that occurred just as winter was starting and what’s left are displays of early animation where you can watch endless series of cartoons and the Olympus exhibit which is filled with lots and lots and lots of plaster statues of Zeus, Aphrodite and their kin.
Sketching them was fun at the outset but I truly am a street sketcher that likes drawing buildings. Yet another plaster head is just not cutting it anymore and so my sketching is floundering somewhat these days. I doodle a lot but it’s just not the same. So, I decided to draw a window. It was just one lowly window, drawn in a 3×5 sketchbook, but it sure felt good (grin).

Moleskine watercolor notebook, Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black ink

My Sketching Brakes Are Ineffective

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Recently I’ve been on a quick-sketching binge. Everything I look at got scribbled onto paper in a minute or two. That’s a lot of fun and, I feel, it helps me “see” shapes and their relationships more quickly. But it’s sort of like eating a steady diet of Twinkies. You might even like Twinkies but at some point you’re going to want an apple. I needed an apple.

I stopped to pick up a pound of coffee at a local coffee roastery. I decided to sit and draw so I also bought a coffee as an excuse to inhabit one of their chairs. I sat on a high chair near a window and two guys sat down near me, below my eye level, and I saw an opportunity to ‘know’ that my subject would be there for a while. I started sketching with the idea that I would have ample opportunity to truly capture their essence.

Have you ever gotten off the freeway and had a hard time driving as slowly at the side street speed limits require? That’s how I felt. I started blocking out the sketch with some well-placed dots and then found myself scribbling details. I tried to slow down but my quick-sketching brain just wouldn’t let go. This was a constant struggle throughout the process. The result was a sketch that wasn’t quite a quick-sketch but not what I was really trying to accomplish. I think I have to get my sketching brakes checked. Oh…and how do you draw shaved heads?

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10x7), Pilot Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black, Pentel brush pen

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7), Pilot Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black, Pentel brush pen

Whirlwind Quick-Sketching Tour

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Remember me? I’m the guy who used to post on this blog. Seems like it’s been a long time since I have, but I have an excuse – kinda. I’ve been sketching up a storm and I’ve had nothing to report.

I know that makes no sense but I don’t make sense on a regular basis so what’s new? Here’s the deal. I’ve been taking art classes. First I took Liz Steel’s Foundations class. This is a wonderful class taught, as twelve well-organized lessons. I thoroughly enjoyed it and in spite of having been exposed to the ideas because of my voracious reading propensity, I learned a lot and did a LOT of sketching for this course. If I had any idea whether Liz is going to teach this course again I’d tell you where to sign up. I don’t so you’ll have to ask her.

Then I signed up for Marc Taro Holmes’s People in Motion class, which is offered by Craftsy for a pittance. Marc is not only a superb artist but an amazing instructor. I’ve burned through a lot of paper following Marc’s attempt to teach me to draw people in a “painterly” fashion. Still much work to be done on that front I’m afraid.

So why don’t I have a lot of sketches to post from those courses? Because when I took my first online course I came to the conclusion that, for me, posting results of my efforts in a class really stifled my openness to the new ideas and approaches. I would become concerned about complete, postable sketches rather than doing the real work of struggling to do whatever was being taught in the course, relying more on what I knew than what I was trying to learn. And so a “policy” was born and you’ll never, well almost never, see anything I do in association with a course. I believe I’ve made an exception twice.

What do I gain from this goofy way of viewing courses? Freedom. Freedom to spend time copying the instructor’s work, trying to get into their heads. Trying to feel their way of visual thinking. Getting as far away from my own way of doing things as possible. Not worrying about “complete” anything if it serves the purposes of learning. I’ve spent pages just making marks with a Pentel brush pen in an attempt (failed thus far) to achieve the marks that Marc makes consistently. I’ve done dozens of thumbnail sketches of my office and its contents in an attempt to understand how Liz dissects an area she’s looking at and I’ve copied her pages of thumbnails to see if I could get a sense of her visual thinking as she looked at the scene she showed us in the video.

But if you’ve read this far, let me abuse you some more (grin). One of the things Marc emphasizes is drawing regularly and he suggests the Moleskine Cahier as a “scribbler” notebook so you can do quick sketches everywhere you go. I’ve followed this practice for almost two years and in my view, this is the way to learn to draw quickly and no amount of drawing from photos teaches what a ‘scribbler’ will.

I’ve never thought much of Moleskines but decided to give the Cahier a try in a whirlwind quick-sketching binge. I filled one of these notebooks in three days. I admit that I had to skip the backs of some pages as it was impossible to draw on them because of severe ghosting and bleed-through but more on that later. I approached this with the idea of trying different techniques and pointy devices so I’ll show you’ll see that reflected in the sketches.

Here are a couple sketches done in my typical style. I suppose they do reflect Marc’s course a bit as I tried using a Pentel brush pen to add emphasis to some of the lines but mostly they reflect my limited style of doing 1-2 minute sketches of people on location.

I’ve included this one to show you the problem I ran into with ghosting and bleed-through. This one is only moderately bad. Many back pages were so bad that the it was impossible to even think about drawing over it.

I decided to do a very dark sketch. This guy was actually holding a cell phone but somehow he ended up with a book in his hand. Not sure what my brain was doing to cause that to happen.

This guy caught my eye. His thin face and odd hair reminded me of someone in a movie but I can’t tell you who. In addition to making his eyes too big, I decided to add watercolor and learned that the Moleskine paper generates little spots in any wash you lay down. What’s up with that?

Here’s another one that shows some of the ghosting in this notebook. Very distracting while drawing but this was ‘practice’ so it shouldn’t matter, right? It mattered…to me.

The next day I went to a coffee shop and started a repeat performance. I had learned that I really needed to work on the brush pen as I have no control over it whatever.

This first sketch (actually the third as the first two were destroyed by bleed-through), suggests that I was a bit timid as I didn’t do much with the brush pen. Frankly, I think it’s one of the best so maybe that is an indication that I need to use brush pen less. I kept the watercolor very light as I was trying to conserve the backs of the pages. Didn’t help much.

For this guy, I got carried away with the brush pen in an attempt to learn how to control it. There was also a certain amount of “if the little mark looks horrible, making it bigger will somehow make it better” going on here.

As I finished up my café allongé the guy below set up his laptop and sat down to look out the window and scroll through his Twitter feed. I was getting tired and so decided this would be my last sketch of the day and I ended up spending a couple extra minutes faking in some of the ‘across the street’ features of the scene.

The next day, 30 or so sketches into this marathon, I went to a food court. I decided to use a ballpoint (Parker Jotter) for these sketches. This does solve the ghosting and bleed-through as long as you avoid watercolors. But what fun is that? Anyways, I drew a bunch of people ordering food until I ran out of pages.

So, what did I learn? Well, you can draw nearly 40 quick-sketches in three sessions if you want to and limit each to a couple minutes each. I learned that I REALLY don’t like Moleskine Cahiers. The notebooks I’ve been using cost me $1-2 from the dollar store, have twice the pages and half the ghosting/bleedthrough problems.

But I do really like the ‘cahier’ notebook format. Field Notes and Baron Fig’s Apprentice series all come in blank paper format or even dot-grid which I find acceptable. The very thin nature of these notebooks works against them in terms of paper thickness, though. They typically have 12-sheet signatures which is too many if want 140lb watercolor paper. But there’s a middle ground and improved paper quality, even if it’s only a 60lb paper, would go a long way towards mitigating the problems. I’m looking for such a solution so if you know of any 30-40 page, thin notebook that tolerates fountain pens without the back of its pages being obliterated, let me know.

De Atramentis Document Ink: Creating A Grey

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Larry Marshall

The new De Atramentis Document inks (not to be confused with other De Atramentis inks) are a dream come true for those of us who sketch with fountain pens and want waterproof inks. Before they came along, color choices could be described pretty much like Henry Ford described color selection for the Model T Ford – “any color as long as it’s black.”

The current elephant in the room question is whether we’re going to have a ready supply of these inks over time. De Atramentis is a one-man operation and Goulet Pens, to my knowledge, is the only source for them in North America. Their last shipment came in and went out before some people had a chance to even see them show up. Brian has said their current order is very large. I hope so.

I was one of the lucky ones. I’ve had De Atramentis Document Black and Brown for a while now and was able to fill in the other colors during the few hours they were available at Goulet Pens.

The potential to create any color I want now exists, except for one thing. De Atramentis sells a solvent for their inks and proper dilution should be done with that solvent. These inks are pigmented inks and every ink have a particular chemistry to give them the flow and paper interaction properties of a particular brand of ink. The proper solvent should be used to provide the proper lubricant, stabilizer, and maybe anti-fungal agent in their proper proportions. The big deal here is the lubricant as this generates proper flow through the pen. Too much lubrication and you can get feathering, nib creap, and slow-to-dry inks. Too little and you can get a dry-writing ink, though it may actually dry more quickly.

So before I continue, there’s my caveat. If you fear doing anything that might be referred to as an “experiment”, read no further. This is an experiment. I’ve mixed up a grey ink using the brown and blue ink in this line. It creates a very dark grey, not unlike Noodler’s Lexington Gray but a bit darker. I wanted to lighten it up, but the solvent isn’t available to me, so I used water. Worse still, throwing caution to the wind, I used plain old tap water to thin the ink. Here’s what I mixed:

De Atramentis Document inks, not to be confused with other De Atramentis inks:

Brown: 3 parts
Black: 2 parts
water: 3 parts

That works out to 60% water, which is a lot but I found that when thinning other inks I had to add a considerable amount of water to lighten their color. This proved true for the De Atramentis Document inks as well, maybe even to a greater degree.

As you can see, I got a decent dark grey. I may want to play a bit with the blue/brown mix or maybe try a green/red mix but this is just about what I want on a tonal scale. Just enough to take the harsh black edge off my sketches.

The real point of the experiment, though, was to see how diluting with water would work. I’m surprised to say that even with this extreme dilution, the ink holds up nicely. There is no feathering, the line remains consistent and there are no flow problems with the Pilot Prera (fine nib) that I used to dispense it. I wanted the sketch to reflect the tonal differences between the black and gray lines so I used De Atramentis Black to do all the shadow lines on the right side of the bottle. After scanning I quickly slopped watercolor all over it and can report that the waterproof nature of the ink is retained. All of this is being done on cheap sketchbook paper. Just to ensure that it wasn’t the result of the paper, I did a bunch of scribbles on Stillman & Birn Alpha series paper and those were were waterproof as well.

By the way, there’s been some discussion of a Fog Gray color being added to the De Atramentis line. Those few who have had access to it have found that it’s really more of a grey blue than a true grey. Given that it’s easy to mix our own greys, though, it hardly matters.

For me, the experiment was a great success. To be honest I’m still a bit surprised because in my experience, dilution of pigment-based products (wood stains I’ve used) with water are very limited and things tend to fall apart once you get past 10-15%. Here I’ve more than doubled the volume of ink with water..and it still works. Go figure. I still wish I could get access to De Atramentis solvent but until that time…I’m going to go draw a few shades of grey.

People In Motion by Marc Taro Holmes

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I’m a big fan of Marc Taro Holmes. His precise and yet loose (how does he do that?) building drawings are a wonder to behold, at least for this street sketcher. Marc works larger than I do, looser than I do, and a whole lot better than I do but I can’t get enough of his work.

His recent book, Urban Sketcher: Techniques for Seeing and Drawing on Location rests next to my butt location when I watch TV and while I’ve read it twice, I find myself flipping through it, studying the drawings, as my wife and I watch…yawn…American Idol.

But what I’m not, however, is a sketcher who searches out people to draw, attends life drawing classes, and the rest. Sorry folks, but I find people boring. Buildings are just cooler. That said, when Marc, in conjunction with Craftsy, offered a course titled People in Motion I immediately signed up. I was going to get to see Marc draw…yippee!

I’m really glad I did. Marc is not only a great artist/sketcher, he’s a well-organized, articulate teacher with a willingness to provide lots of information in high-density form, showing you every step of his approach to drawing people. People or xylophones, what Marc teaches in this class will help you draw them quicker and better.

He provides several ways of doing it but his primary method is a four-part approach. I suspect that more often than not, Marc himself smushes the four parts together when he’s on the street sketching, but for learning what he’s thinking as he captures people dividing up the thought processes and results of them on paper, is an ideal way to get the points across. And you know what? Marc has even got me, yeah…go figure, ME interested in drawing people.

I encourage anyone who would like to capture ANYTHING quickly onto paper, to at least view the intro video of this course. Better, just take the course. It’ll be money well spent.