Museum Sketching With A Pencil

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Larry Marshall

It’s a balmy 41F here this morning, with the promise of rain. Mr. Weatherman is promising something called “sun” about mid-week so maybe, just maybe, I’ll get to sketch outdoors this week. Hope so.

Since I am limited to indoor sketching, though, I thought I might use the time to do something I’m really not good at – use a pencil. When I started sketching it just seemed natural to use my fountain pens so I skipped the traditional ‘use pencil first’ approach to drawing. I think there were virtues to this approach as I had to concentrate on seeing relationships before I put anything on paper. The drawback, I think, is that sketching with pens emphasizes contour more than masses. It’s also rather silly, and sometimes embarrassing, for a sketcher not to know how to use a pencil.

So, when I went to the museum yesterday I was determined to use a graphite pointy device to make a drawing. I decided to draw Athena, with her leather helmet pushed back on her head. She’s a reminder that strong women were very much a part of the Greek religion. The daughter of Zeus, Athena was the goddess of reason, intelligent activity, arts and literature.

I did this drawing on Stillman & Birn Alpha series paper. While I love the paper for my pen and ink drawings, I have no idea whether it’s good or bad for pencil. It seemed to work. I used Staedtler pencils. I always have fun drawing on location but admit that a pencil felt clumsy in my hand. I think I learned a lot but I’m not sure what at this point (grin).

How Do You Use A Pencil?

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Larry Marshall

Long before I decided to learn to draw I was a fountain pen guy. I’ve always loved the feel of a nib running across paper. So when I started trying to learn to draw, I used a fountain pen. It’s still my tool of choice some two years later.

Some would argue this is a good thing as it forced me to look a lot and draw a little as erasers weren’t part of the process. I think this is true and that it has helped me acquire a rudimentary ‘artist’s eye’, though that eye is still ill-developed.

But at the same time, I missed out on the more typical starting point for someone learning to draw – graphite or charcoal. The pencil remains a very popular drawing tool and I’m completely ignorant of its uses. I do carry a mechanical pencil but it’s full of 3H or 4H lead and I use it just to draw a few guidelines to block in a drawing and I quickly switch to pen for the rest. So I’ve decided that I need to learn a bit about 2B, HB, and 4H pencils and how to rub them around to create value. I also need to learn what you do with a kneaded eraser. It’s a very clumsy process. But I’m trying, mostly with little scribbles and doodles.

Monday I went with Yvan to the nearly hidden ‘museum’ at the university. It holds the contents of the long defunct natural history museum, the university insect collection, and roughly 300 plaster casts. These were given to the university sometime in the 19th Century, when art departments thought it wise for their students to learn to draw. When they decided that you didn’t need to draw to be an artist if you were going to paint with a roller, spatula or by throwing paint at the canvas, all the casts were, well, cast off. Only the insight and diligence of Madame Wagner, the curator of the ‘museum’, saved them from becoming so much broken plaster.

And so little old me has access to some 300 plaster casts of hands, feet, ears, noses, busts of famous people, and many, many full-size statues. It makes even this street sketcher say KEWL! I chose a poet named Benivieni as my first subject. It wasn’t due to any affinity for him as I have no idea who he is but I liked his hat (grin).

Here’s my first attempt at doing a bust with a pencil. It’s not perfect but it does, sorta-kinda, look like him so I was both surprised and happy. I do have to work more on that ‘artist’s eye’ as seeing the half-tones is a challenge, but I think I’ll go back next week. Those art students don’t know what they’re missing.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9x12) with pencil.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (9×12) with pencil.

Faber-Castell Perfect Pencil

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Larry Marshall

I have to confess up front that I’m not a pencil guy. I might even want to be but I enjoy pushing pens across paper so much that it’s hard for me to use anything else. And so I carry a single 0.5mm mechanical pencil with 2H or 3H lead that I use to quickly block in a subject before I start drawing it. As I said…I’m not a pencil guy.

So it’s odd for me to be talking about a pencil but Faber-Castell’s Perfect Pencil snapped my head around when I heard about it and double-snapped it when I found one in an Ottawa art supply store last weekend. It’s just plain cool, even if it is a pencil.

I also have to confess that I love wooden pencils. They just feel good in my hand. I also like that you can use the side of them, use them dull, or sharpen them up for fine details.

I don’t use them, though, for a couple reasons, mostly stemming from the fact that I do my drawing on the run as a street sketcher. This, for me, makes (or made) wooden pencils impractical. Here’s why:

1) You have to sharpen them and the tiny portable pencil sharpeners produce a short, stubby tip. Yes, I can use my pen knife, which is very Bohemian, but also rather impractical when sitting in a music recital or riding a bus.

2) The tips break unless protected. Yes, I can keep them in a case but then they’re not available. A lot of my sketching is ‘grab the book and draw’ sorts of sketching.

3) The length becomes a problem as the pencil is used. And yes, I could buy an extender. Something else to carry.

What makes the Perfect Pencil so perfect is that it solves all THREE of these problems. The Perfect Pencil comes with a sharpener, and not just any sharpener. It’s a sharpener that produces a nice, long and sharp tip. The Perfect Pencil has a cover for the pencil tip, a cover that has a clip just like my fountain pens so it’s easy to carry. And when the pencil becomes short, you can stick its rear end into the cap, which acts as an extender. Best of all, you get all this for the price of one of those high-priced coffees where you get to feel empowered while making all those mind-bending choices.

I can’t say much about the pencil that comes with the Perfect Pencil. It seems like a Faber-Castell HB pencil but it’s round rather than hexagonal. That said, you can replace it with any standard-size pencil. I’ve tried other Faber-Castell pencils (including watercolor pencils), Staedtler pencils, and Blackwing 602s. The 602s defeat the extender function because of their square eraser but otherwise they work fine. I might become a pencil guy yet. In any case, I’ll be carrying my Perfect Pencil when you see me on the street.

Sketching in Pencil

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Larry Marshall

I met Claudette this morning for a sketching session at the Musée d’Amerique Francophonie. I want to say this is a tiny museum but it’s actually a fairly big building/facility. They just don’t have much in it 🙂 But there were a couple pieces that Claudette wanted to sketch so that’s where we went this morning.

I wandered around, looking for something to sketch. We’ve done group sketching events there on several occasions so I was very familiar with the displays. So, after wandering a bit, I finally settled on a statue (former mayor I think) as my subject. Since we’ve been discussing pencil drawing in one of the Facebook groups, and since I know nothing of pencil drawing except that I tend to smear everything I draw, I decided to do this sketch with an HB mechanical pencil. Definitely a KISS principle drawing. It’s also a sketch that demonstrates why I use my fountain pens (grin). It was done on a light gray Canson Mi-Teintes (6×9).

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.