Category Archives: Sketching

Sketching During A Perfect Storm

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I bet you think I was calling Irma a perfect storm.  Naw…it was a large storm.  People use the term “perfect storm” to refer to several things coming together to create more than the sum of the parts.

What I’m referring to is a storm like that.  My right knee was frozen up so that going out sketching was out of the question yesterday.  At the same time, Irma, the great liberal hoax, was raising havoc on the people of Florida.  Add to that my wife’s fascination with watching people stand in the rain while saying the same things over and over and over… and you have my personal perfect storm.

While I always like watching journalists make fools of themselves in these storms, I can only handle so much and eventually I got bored.  I decided to quick-sketch the crazies, standing in the wind and rain while talking about how hurricanes work.

So I started doodling.  I was using my new Kaweco Lilliput pen.  I loved the young woman in the red coat.  She was standing in heavy rain and 100 mph winds.  She held one hand up against her face to keep the rain from stripping the skin off her face and her shoulders were scrunched up tight around her neck.  Of all the people (mostly guys) who were doing this gig during the day, she was the more sane of the bunch.

I kept doodling.  The guy in the orange jacket had his arm wrapped around a railing to keep himself from being blown away.  I started being bored by weather people, or maybe I was always bored with weather people, so I drew a couple pine trees.

I continued to doodle but lost interest in the hurricane coverage as a subject.  I started drawing steeples and such from memory/imagination.  Here’s a few of them. I really am enjoying this pen for small pen and ink drawings.

I then turned my attention to a small (about 6″ tall) statue of a sitting Samurai warrior.  I had fun drawing pieces of him.  He was more fun than weather people.  Probably smarter too.

Sketching With A Brush

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A few weeks ago I spent some time with Marc Taro Holmes and we talked a lot about sketching directly with brush, skipping pointy devices completely and jumping directly to a fuzzy stick.  I even tried it that day and only moderately failed at it (grin).

Those small experiments told me several things.  The first was that I had little control over a paint brush.  After some analysis I think the problem is that I’m trying to draw with it like a pen, at too low an angle, and I lose control over line width.  I also learned that I had no feel for paint thickness and when drawing you can’t rely upon thin washes to get the job done.

So I went away intrigued but also a little frustrated.  I also felt challenged to gain better control over my watercolors, something I’ve been wanting to do anyway.  I’ve spent some time mixing, drawing lines, experimenting with brush angles, etc. and it’s been a fun adventure.  That’s a good thing because I’ve got to do a lot more of it before I’ll be able to draw directly with paint.

I was out for a walk, though, and decided to give the method a try with one of my favorite steeples in downtown Quebec City.  Accomplished artists won’t think much of this as it lacks crispness and precision.  But I was pleased with this simple sketch as it suggests I’m making progress.  I have to confess, however, that I doubt this will become my way of working for the simple reason that I love drawing with my pens and don’t want to give it up.  It is a wonderful way of getting me closer to watercolors and forcing me to stop viewing them like crayons.

USK Montreal Sketchcrawl

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Sometimes timing is perfect and we were moving our daughter to Montreal on the same weekend as the USK Montreal sketchcrawl at the Maison des Éclusiers.  So, between the back and forth between Ottawa and Montreal, the up/down elevators with countless boxes, and exciting activities like unboxing, cleaning and hanging drapes, I got to go to the event.

The venue was great.  During the introduction Jane Hannah provided a long list of places and things to sketch in the area and then we all dispersed, like a bunch of young kids, excited to find the “best” spot.  Turned out, the head count revealed 60 participants.

The Maison des Éclusiers, or as others call it the Marché des Éclusiers is a place along the harbor where boats enter the Lachine Canal (an éclusier is a guy who manages the locks on the canal).  Where they go I do not know as I was busy meeting people, sketching, and generally just wandering around, gathering information for future trips to the area.  The place is set up as a tourist/local eatery/relax area, complete with restaurants, coffee house, and lots of benches and grassy areas.

I chose to draw a large house (castle?) from one end of it, mostly because there was a nice picnic bench in the shade that afforded a good view.  In hindsight, I don’t feel I ever completed this sketch as I just sort of quit near the bottom of it.  I guess I got bored or wanted to talk to some more people.

From there I just started wandering around.  I wanted to meet some of the sketchers and see what they were up to.  Lots of talent in this group and, because I hope to be returning regularly, I wanted to start establishing some relationships, though I struggle with trying to remember everyone’s name.  Eventually I sat down with Diane Gauthier and her friend Lyse (sp?).  I’d met Diane when I was in Montreal to meet Koosje Koene of Sketchbook Skool, who was visiting.  It was almost time for lunch and they let me share their picnic bench.

I decided I wanted to draw the crane on the other side of the river.  It was a goofy subject, if only because it was so far away and it didn’t provide a nice scene.  Undaunted, I decided to draw a street lamp in the foreground to improve things a bit.  I was only partially successful but here are the results.

We chatted for a while, I ate sloppy tacos, but by then it was time for me to leave.  There were still things to do back at the apartment so I had to leave before the group meeting at the end of the sketchcrawl.  Nevertheless, it was a fantastic day and, to quote Arnold, “I’ll be back!”

Kaweco Lilliput – A Sketching Pen?

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My new favorite store is Notabene, in Montreal.  I’ve talked about it before but today I want to show you a pen I bought there back when Liz Steel came to Montreal.  It’s the Kaweco Lilliput in aluminum.  You can buy it in brass and, I think, copper but the aluminum one is so light that I just had to go down that road as it suits my arthritic hands better.

To look at it though, you have to wonder whether such a tiny pen could be useful for sketching.  I’m here to suggest that it has both advantages and disadvantages as a sketching pen, but I’ll sort of give away the punch line by saying that I’ll probably be using this one a lot this winter.

Size

When it’s closed up, it’s really tiny, measuring only 95mm long and about 7mm in diameter.  Drop it in your pocket and you won’t even know it’s there, which can be good or bad depending on your view.

When open, however, it’s every bit as long as a Lamy Safari so you feel like you’re holding a real pen, which you are.

While the Safari weights 18g, the Lilliput weighs only half that (9g).  A feature I like as a street sketcher is the ability to post the cap and the Lilliput allows that like a champ since there are threads that let you screw the cap to the end of the pen.  Works great every time.

Ink storage

This is an area where pros and cons are dependent upon a person’s needs.  The Lilliput takes standard pen cartridges.  This translates directly to having a large number of inks available from a number of manufacturers.  Kaweco themselves make a bunch of them, including a really nice black and an equally nice gray that I’ve tried so far.  The downside of standard cartridges is that they hold less ink than, say Platinum or Pilot cartridges. Another downside of standard cartridges is that none of the truly waterproof inks come in that size cartridge, though aside from Platinum, that’s true for all of the cartridge formats on the market.

Kaweco makes a converter for this pen but by all accounts it’s a miserable design that doesn’t work well and actually holds less ink than do the cartridges.  I don’t find any of this a drawback as I can fill standard cartridges with any ink using a pen syringe, which is how I fill all of my pens anyway.

So how does it perform?

I bought the fine nib.  Kaweco also sells it with heavier nibs and even an extra-fine nib that is so fine that I didn’t see it as practical.  Here’s a quick comparison of Kaweco fine and a Lamy Safari extra-fine.  I tried hard to get this graphic to display in the size/contrast of the actual linework but I suspect it will display on most computer screens larger than it exists on paper.  Performance while inverted is excellent, by the way, and it doesn’t seem to dry up like many pens when used in this way.  You can see that Kaweco Fine nibs are fine, like most Asian fine nibs.

I started using this pen with a Kaweco Stormy Grey cartridge.  I decided that it wasn’t dark enough to make me happy so I switched to Kaweco Pearl Black.  Both of these inks performed well in the pen, though I noticed that the pen writes a bit drier than my Platinum and Pilot pens.

Then I filled a cartridge with Platinum Carbon Black.  This worked ok for a while but fairly quickly, the dry-writing fine nib and pigmented ink combination created some starting problems, though once started it seemed to work ok.  I really hate that, though, so I don’t find PCB a suitable ink for this pen.

I’ve tried my diluted version of DeAtramentis Document Black ink and that works great.  Just for this review, I ran some Noodlers Black through the pen.  This works fine too for those of you who find that ink suitable for sketching.

What I really like about the pen is the ability to start a sketch with very light, sometimes intermittent lines if I use a very light touch, and then, as the sketch develops, I can add emphasis and contrast by applying a bit of pressure.  Coupled with its light feel, it’s ideal for quick-sketching people.

So, is it a good sketching pen?  If you love big, heavy pens, absolutely not.  If you absolutely need to use Platinum Carbon Black rather than alternatives, I don’t think so.  If it’s going to be your only pen, probably not.  But this pen is now part of my arsenal because of its light weight and small size and because it opens into a full-size pen that feels good in my hand.  Here is a doodle page from my testing.

Last Trip To Ottawa For A While

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We made our final trip to Ottawa for a while.  Our daughter just graduated from University of Ottawa and we moved her to Montreal where she’s entering law school at McGill.  I gotta tell ya, I’m too old to be moving from school to school.  Been there, done that, even have souvenir t-shirts.

But since we were there, it seemed only appropriate that I should do some sketching.  The first chance came when we agreed to meet our daughter in Rideau River Park.  I don’t know if that’s what it’s really called but it runs along the Rideau River and Chantal and I had parked our butts on a bench while we waited, so its Rideau River park to me.

I got out a Stillman & Birn 6×6 Beta spiral book and just started quick-sketching everything and anything.  No rhyme or reason to it, which is fun sometimes.  Find a white space on the paper and fill it – easy peasy.  Here’s a couple of the pages I did.

I drew stuff; I drew people, and I even drew some of the birds on the river.  But then my daughter showed up and there were other things to do.  We hadn’t seen her in a while.

A couple days later, Chantal and I went down to the Parliament area and sat on a picnic bench in the shade.  I’m showing this next sketch to make a point to those who feel “I’m not good enough” to sketch around other people.  I was scribbling this teeny, tiny sketch (3×4) in the tiny sketchbook I mentioned in a previous blog post.  I’ve been having fun doing these really tiny sketches but they’re really crude and mostly just warm up sketches. Even that gives them too much credential.

Anyways, a really nice lady from Italy asked if she could sit because she was waiting to take the Parliament tour.  Chantal started talking with her, she saw my sketch and got genuinely excited about it.  She took a photo of it to show to her friends.  My point is, people are amazed that anyone can draw anything.  You don’t have to be good to sketch in public.  You just have to sketch in public for people to think you’re good (grin).

I started drawing this next sketch because we were sitting right near the corner of a building called East Block on the Parliament grounds and we  were on a hill, affording an interesting view where I wasn’t having to look up a lot to see the top of the building.

While I was working, a Chinese family from Manitoba came to sit.  They were waiting for a tour too.  Their son, a young teenager was excited to see someone drawing and showed us a couple of the sketches he’d done.  He wanted to be an animator and was making a good start at it.  They watched as I did this sketch and I confess that half a dozen people asking questions was a bit distracting, but Chantal fielded many of them so we sort of formed a temporary clan as I sketched and they waited for their tour.

Chantal and I were both getting hungry so we headed off to forage.  Once sustained we decided to go sit in the center of the busiest intersection in Ottawa.  Well, sorta.  There is a triangular piece of land near Parliament with a lot of traffic passing on all sides.  This place is filled with statues, including a memorial to Canadian military actions complete with honor guard.

I drew the Laura Secord statue, the famous candy lady.  Some defend her statue status with stories of her running for kilometers to warn the British of an impending attack by Americans during the war of 1812 but I know its the chain of chocolate stores that brought her fame.  It just had to be, though most deny she had anything to do with the candy business.

When I finished that sketch I was getting pretty tired but I quickly draw this part of Chateau Laurier, a posh hotel that’s nearby.  All sorts of errors in this one but it was a fitting end to the sketching day.  When I was done we headed off to meet our daughter for dinner.