Drink And Sketch, Drink And Sketch

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Larry Marshall

On my way back from a discussion with a bank manager I stopped into a place for a cup of tea and the possibility of sketching an interior scene. It wasn’t the Taj Mahal but what the heck, it was great practice. Here’s the result, done in a Stillman & Birn (4×6) Alpha sketchbook. I used a TWSBI Mini as my pointy device.

While the counters, coffee and tea didn’t move, the people did as one after the other, a person came to the counter, paid for something, and left. I’ve been asked several times about how I set up a sketch like this and I thought it might be time to oblige.

It’s fashionable in internet-land to proudly state that one doesn’t use pencil. Ink is the only way to go. Well, I’m an ink guy and most of my sketching is done in ink. But I’ve also learned that laying down a few bones beforehand allows me to concentrate on the drawing of each section of a sketch and prevents my ideas from running off the page.

So, I start with a pencil, a 3H pencil to be exact. I draw lines to represent the major vertical and horizontal components. I’ve indicated the pencil work for this sketch in red. Once done, I can look at the paper space and compare it to the scene, ensuring that things are going in the right direction. Note how few lines are actually required. This is not drawing; it’s organization.

In this case I also wanted to place a person and I could use counter height and the verticals to locate her. I’ve indicated three small pencil lines in yellow that define the top of her head, her shoulders as well as the bottom of ‘her’ coat. The reality is that the coat was drawn mostly from the first customer but also the second, who contributed the legs/shoes. A third provided the head, but as I had these little lines in place, it was easy to cobble together a person for my scene. Given how light the pencil lines are, I rarely see a need to erase them when I finish so no eraser was harmed in the creation of this sketch.

Could I do this with dots from a pen? Sure. When I did Brenda Swenson’s 75-Day Challenge (limits you to ink only) that’s exactly what I did. But it’s far easier to see the scene structure with some lines than with a few dots and a .5mm pencil isn’t that heavy so I carry one for this purpose. Besides, if layout underpinnings was good enough for the master artists of the 18th and 19th Century, why shouldn’t it be good enough for me (grin)?

The next day I was meeting a friend for tea at one of my favorite haunts and this guy, all scrunched down in his chair caught my eye. I sketched him and then just kept going, ending up with this scene.

Sketching The Past

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Winter sketching, as I’m mentioned before, is confined my sketching to indoor venues. That’s ok because there are museums, coffee shops, and librarys to provide sketching opportunities. But what’s a guy supposed to do when he’s sitting at home and wants to draw?

Photos? I’m not very good at drawing from photos as I don’t feel I can ‘see’ the same as when I’m actually on location. It’s also not as much fun for me. But that’s the choice that Mother Nature gives me so what the heck…photos it is.

What photos, though? I’ve taken a lot of photos of Quebec City with the thought of using them as sketching material but it’s occurred to me that there may be better alternatives. Why not sketch stuff I can’t see any more? Dirigibles, Victorian hats, inkwells, carrier pigeons or steamships? Or trains….that’s it…trains.

Our society decided we’d subsidize the trucking industry in the 50s and 60s by building a highway system which allowed that industry to outcompete the railroads, that had to maintain their own ‘roads.’ So, now we’ve got LOTS of trucks to draw, lots of trucks burning fuel, and the warehouses of our world have become 18-wheel diesel-powered boxes clogging up our highways. Oh and we have far fewer trains. So yeah, I could draw trains.

And what better place to start than with the lowly caboose. As a kid, train watching was a big deal. We’d wave at the engineer as the engine went by, hoping he’d blow the whistle for us. Then we’d wait…and wait and finally, after a bunch of boxcars, tankcars, and hopper cars, here it would come…the CABOOSE…the crummy, the brain box, the dog house…whatever you called it – it was RED! They were mostly eliminated from trains in the 1980s, replaced by “EOTs” (End Of Train device) which are boring boxes of electronics and a red light that get hung on the end of the train. Kids don’t watch trains any more and I don’t blame them. My daughter didn’t even know what a caboose was when I showed her my sketch.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9x6) sketchbook, Pilot Prera, Lex Gray ink.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9×6) sketchbook, Pilot Prera, Lex Gray ink.

I sketched this one from a black and white photo in a book I own. It was fun. My daughter learned what a caboose was. Maybe I’ll draw some other things she has never seen.

Sketching a Mutoscope

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I met Fernande at the Musée de la Civilisation on Saturday morning for a sketching session. We’re having so much fun with these weekly meetings. I like sketching by myself. I love sketching with someone else. Besides, the tea and sketching talk that follows our sketching is priceless. The museum exhibit, “Paris on Stage, 1899-1914”, holds a lot of potential for sketchers, if you keep an open mind about your subject matter. On this day I decided to sketch a “mutoscope.”

Long before a short film of a train arriving in a station scared the be-geezus out of people who were seeing their first “moving picture” and before George Méliès shot the moon with a large bullet full of people, there was the mutoscope.

Early ‘moving pictures’ were created not by a long piece of multi-framed film but rather by a whole bunch of pictures, shown in rapid sequence to the viewer. As kids we’ve all played with ‘flip books’ that did the same thing. A sophisticated version of this approach was the mutoscope, a device that held, by my guess, about a gazillion and one sequenced pictures in a large, round canister. You deposit a coin, look through a viewer, turn the crank, and watch the movie. Of course, to entice people to do just that, these machines were well-decorated, providing a really time-consuming subject for a sketcher like myself. I tried to simplify it but it still took forever to draw all the scrollwork. Lots of fun, though. I did this in a Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9) sketchbook, with a TWSBI Mini pen filled with Platinum Carbon Black ink.

What do you mean you don’t know who George Méliès is? He almost invented the genre of action films (grin). Go to Netflix or your favorite video store and rent Hugo, in which George plays a significant role. And keep your pause button handy as there’s lots of great stuff to sketch in that movie 🙂

Street Sketching in Paris – Sort Of

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Larry Marshall

This is a hard time of year for me. Not only do I not like winter, as a street sketcher my daily routine is snatched from my by the cold. My Arizona fingers just won’t hold onto a pen when it’s cold. I know, I’m a sissy, but I’ll point out that the birds leave because they can.

But all is not lost. Last year I lived in the museums, sketching Samurai helmets, Nigerian masks, statues, and paintings. This year I have decided that I will spend more time in coffee shops, drawing people, tables, and countertops AND heading to the museums. One of the big exhibits at our Musee de la Civilisation, this year, is Paris on Stage, that reflects Paris as it was at the beginning of the 19th Century, with emphasis on the world expositions that took place there in 1889 and 1900.

And this is where I was, with a couple of friends, for a pleasant Saturday morning of sketching. We’ve done it for two weeks, now and I think it will become a regular thing for us as we’re having lots of fun, sketching, followed up by a pleasant cup of tea and the ever-present discussions of art materials.

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9), Pilot Prera, watercolor pencils

There’s a huge mural called Les Halles by Léon Lhermitte. It hangs at the entrance of the multi-room exhibit. It’s an amazing work that captures the outdoor marketplace in Paris at that time. One could sketch portions of it forever and not become bored.

My skills, thought, are too limited to do it justice but here is my attempt at three of the women in the painting. Lots of fun to do and, for me, very difficult. I’ll be sketching more of this mural as I hibernate in the museum this winter as it was lots of fun.

I find watercolor pencils and a waterbrush to be a great way of coloring sketches while in the museum. I use Albrect-Durer pencils as I love the way the lines completely dissolve, unlike other pencils I’ve tried. I do use watercolors in the museum sometimes, though. This museum is very accommodating to sketcher-persons (grin).

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9), Platinum Carbon pen, watercolors

This week I had decided I would fill two pages with ‘cabaret’ sketches. There is a significant portion of the exhibit devoted to the ‘hot’ cabaret scene in 19th Century Paris, with posters, paintings, signs and photographs of the places (eg – Moulin Rouge, Chat Noir) as well as early videos of dancers, patrons, and even the prostitutes who were part of that scene. I began with this sketch of a painting featuring Le Lapin Agile, a cabaret owned by a prostitute who rose in the ranks of the community. I loved the winter scene particularly the many trees, devoid of leaves as they hunkered down, much like I’m doing right now, against the cold. This sketch is about 6×6.

Cabaret page, sketched at Musee de la Civilisation

Stillman & Birn Zeta (6×9), TWSBI mini, watercolors

My eye caught a large brass sign hanging high above me. It was the original sign that hung to announce Le Chat Noir, possibly second only to the Moulin Rouge for notoriety in Paris. I quickly sketched it and then followed it up with a loose rendition of a portion of a Moulin Rouge poster that was, itself a pencil sketch of the place. Then it was time for tea so we packed up and headed to Cafe 47, the museum coffee shop. It was a great day.

Mastering Brush Pens: Not Yet!

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Larry Marshall

My typical sketching tool is a fine nib fountain pen filled with waterproof ink. I like it because I’m not an artist, I just draw stuff and I like the detail a fine nib permits. I often add color to my sketches by using them like a kid uses crayons, keeping the color inside the lines. In the two years I’ve been trying to learn to draw, I’ve ignored all of the nuance of ‘art’ and concentrated solely on line and contour.

But winter is encroaching on Quebec and that means I’ve got to give up my daily wandering and location sketching. It’s just too darn cold. So I’ve decided to spend the winter sketching in museums AND trying to learn more about alternative approaches to sketching.

To that end I bought a Pilot cartridge brush pen. These come with soft and hard tips and I bought the soft one. I also have a Pentel brush pen and I love doodling with it but it’s so soft that I find it impossible for my shaky old hand to control. The Pilot soft tip is a bit stiffer than the Pentel but I still have a hard time controlling it. I’m interested, though, in producing sketches with varied line width and in using washable inks to provide shading and texture.

When I received the brush pen, and using the Pilot cartridge that came with it, I drew this little sketch from my imagination and while sitting at my desk. I was pleased with the result and I could control the pen adequately, though my penchant for thin lines raised its ugly head and gave me some frustration. I used a waterbrush to pull pigment from the lines, some drawn specifically for that purpose.

Then it got ‘warm’ here. I think we got up to 5C one day so I went out sketching. I found it much harder to control the brush pen while balancing the sketchbook on my knee, mostly because in addition to directing line creation, the pen is very sensitive to pressure and maintaining that to achieve thin lines was hard for me. Again, I used the waterbrush and things went ‘ok’ – good enough to suggest that with practice I might be able to master the tool.

Then I decided to add some blue to the building and the ink further exploded in some areas. Some might see this as ‘artistic.’ My response was “eeeek!”

I had to feed my penchant for a bit more detail so while I was out I swapped tools. I have a Kaweco Al-Sport filled with Noodler’s Bernanke Black, a washable ink that dries quickly. I use it regularly as a writing ink so I thought I’d try it as a sketching tool. I did this sketch of a downtown building. Lines are thicker than my norm and they responded well to waterbrush. I liked the results of this approach – something of a compromise to my typical approach and a more loose sketch. Lots of potential here, but not a brush pen sketch.

That night I was watching TV and decided to work on control of the brush pen. I started drawing geranium leaves and, fairly quickly I had a geranium plant. I felt I was gaining some control over line width, though I had to think about this a lot, which interfered with my ‘seeing’ process. I guess I’m not good at multi-tasking (grin). When I added a bit of color I got what I felt was a pleasant bit of washing of the lines by being careful with the brush.

All of these sketches were done in a small (4×6) Strathmore Series 400 drawing pad. I have not yet used any of these approaches on better quality papers. I suspect the results will differ but mostly I need to do a couple dozen sketches with the brush pen to see if I can gain better control over it. What are your experiences with true brush pens (not pointy felt markers like Tombows)?