Sketchcrawl With Le Collectif

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Quebec’s Collectif mostly organizes life drawing and portraiture workshops, but it does, occasionally organize sketchcrawls. One such event took place last weekend when we all showed up at the Place Royale Information Center to sketch in its small museum.

This museum is mostly full of artifacts dug up during archeological exploration of Quebec’s old port area but the basement contains a couple rooms containing kitchen and bedroom furniture, as well as a large collection of traditional clothing. I’m a sucker for old wood and so I ended up there, where I sketched an old kitchen cabinet and a butter churn.

Stillman & BIrn Alpha (10x7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

Stillman & BIrn Alpha (10×7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

I took a short break and then turned my attention to a pre-digital age way of having fun, when imagination was the currency. I’d suggest I’m old enough to remember these but this one has wheels, which were invented about the time I was finishing up high school so that would be a lie.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

We finished up the day comparing sketches over a nice lunch. It was a great day.

Sketching In A Baron Fig Apprentice Notebook

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Larry Marshall

One of the highlights of this otherwise miserable winter was taking Marc Taro Holme’s People in Motion class. During the class Marc suggests that you get a small, cheap notebook and sketch in it constantly. He recommends the Moleskine Cahier (same paper as the Moleskine notebooks but without the hard cover).

I think the idea of a small, cheap notebook that facilitates sketching everywhere and all the time is a great one. On recommendation from my mentor and buddy, Yvan Breton, I’ve been doing this for a couple years and it’s done more for my ability to draw than anything else I do.

What I hadn’t tried was the Moleskine Cahier so I bought some. They come in a 3-pack for about $12 around here. I was very disappointed because of bleed-through and lots of ghosting when I used my fountain pens. I complained about this here, and included a bunch of sketches to illustrate the problems.

But what I really did like about these little books was how small they were. My typical small book has a hard cover and 96 cheap-paper pages. These books are 5.5 x 3.5 x 0.5″ while the Cahiers are only 48 pages with a thick paper cover and are thus about 1/8″ thick. Very portable, very light in the hand. If only….

There are alternatives and I’ve been trying them. Tina Koyama motivated me to try Baron Fig‘s notebooks, and I think I might be falling in love with their little Apprentice notebooks.

While the typical small notebook is 3.5″ x 5.5″, the Baron Fig is 3.5″ x 5″. When I received them this threw me off a bit as I was more used to the other size but now that I’ve used it a bit I find that I actually prefer it. It fits my hand better and certainly fits in a pocket more easily. Size does matter.

The books are 48-pages of white (an improvement over Moleskine) paper and cardstock cover. They are stitch-bound rather than stapled like most of their competition. It’s a nice touch and the stitching is perfect.

While they can be had with lines, grid or blank paper, I bought a pack of their standard gray notebooks (3 per pack) and a pack of their “limited edition” Time Travel series. They cost only $10 per pack so, $3.33 per notebook. Not bad even if you do use a lot of them.

All this is great but the proof is in how they handle ink. For me that means fountain pen ink. Typically I use fine nib pens in my small notebooks because of the small format and a side benefit is that it places lower demands on the paper when it comes to bleed-through and ghosting.

But what happens if you do use a lot of ink on Baron Fig paper? The results are better than I thought. I decided to try Tina Koyama’s favorite pen, the Sailor Fude pen. This pen can lay down a lot of ink or a little ink depending on the nib angle. Here’s the result of this experiment.

Baron Fig Apprentice, Sailor Fude pen, De Atramentis Document Black

Of course the “proof in the puddin” is to look at the back of this sketch. Here it is (on the left):

As you can see, there is some ghosting but not much in the way of bleed-through. We’re not talking about doing drawings that you’re going to frame so, to me, this is acceptable. The sketch on the right was done with a Namiki Falcon SEF. This is my typical nib size for these and the ghosting on the back of this sketch is negligible.

But what if you wanted to use the Sailor pen and also wanted to draw on that ghosted page? Could you do it? Sure, the ghosting wouldn’t distract from your sketching. It might, however, not look as nice as you’d like when you scanned it to send it to your favorite social media group. But, with the magic of Photoshop (or some other graphics program), you can easily remove this ghosting so that it looks like this:

These results are the same as I’ve gotten from the paper in my cheap hardcover books so I’m thrilled and the paper in the Baron Fig as it looks better and feels better.

My cheap book sketches rarely see any color, simply because I’m generating lots of sketches as I wander through my day and so there’s no time for color. But, for this post I decided to add a bit of color to see how that worked. I kept the washes light and didn’t expect to move them around much. I was surprised at how well it worked.

Baron Fig Apprentice, Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black

This is definitely not watercolor paper but I was happy with the results. This does increase the ghosting a little bit but surprisingly little, as long as you wait for the paper to dry. This definitely opens the door for me to use my gray and brown waterbrushes to shade drawings on the fly. If you’re looking for a small, very portable, sketchbook solution, the Baron Fig Apprentice might be what you need.

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

De Atramentis Document Inks & Doodling

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Larry Marshall

De Atramentis, the Austrian ink company, has been releasing a growing line of fountain-pen friendly, waterproof inks for a while now. Buying them in North America, however, has been nearly impossible. Goulet Pens finally got them back in stock, I ordered, and within a couple hours people were reporting that they were out of them. Hopefully distribution will get worked out over time.

These inks are a wonderful addition to my arsenal and become the ones I use most often, I think. Not only are basic blue, black and brown available but they sell an equivalent of the CMYK (cyan/magenta/yellow/black) set that is used to generate color in offset printing. And they’re mixable. Jane Blundell has done a series of blog posts on mixing them.

The black ink makes my Pilot Falcon very happy. Like Platinum Carbon Black, it causes the pens to write a bit finer than they normally would.

Same thing for the Pilot Prera.

I’ve just started doodling with them. I’ve mixed up a gray but otherwise I’ve been working with the colors straight out of the bottle. They are very similar to Platinum Carbon Black in use, though for some reason they feel smoother to me, maybe a bit wetter. So far I have them in Pilot Prera and Falcon pens and a Noodler’s Creaper. As is typical of the Creaper, there is a bit of start up problem but otherwise all these pens seem to like it. Time will tell.

I did some hatching practice with a Pilot Prera filled with De Atramentis Document Brown. The color is a rich brown, leaning towards a burnt sienna. I really like it, though I can always adjust the color by mixing. That’s the great thing about these inks.