I’m going to stop here on this drawing. I did a little more scratching on the back wall, and decided to fill in the dark areas using charcoal. Her hair was rendered with a Wolff pencil, and the background with a large piece of soft charcoal. I had planned to use a white pastel on the blanket she’s sitting on, but I’m fond of how the undertone looks, and didn’t want to cover that up. I’ll let her sit a while longer as I clean up some spots, but consider it mostly done.
I’ve started a new drawing using the clay coated paper scratchboard I made in the video I posted last time. This is from an photo of mine that I took of my friend, Sharisse, sitting on the floor of her apartment. The grey tone is a wash of diluted sumi ink. I lightly outlined the figure on the paper with a grey pastel pencil to get her placed the way I wanted, and used the box cutter blade to roughly lighten the brightest areas. I then scratched over that with a push pin. It’s still a little rough on the modeling of her figure, but I’ll refine that later as I move on to the blanket and background areas. I’ll make a last pass on the darks at the end; although, I rather like it without that right now. We’ll see what it looks like when I get to that point.
I have a new painting to show. It’s taken from a photo of mine where I saw this woman sitting on a bench downtown near where I live. Casein on board, 11 x 16″.
I’m considering this finished; although, there’s room for some clean up and details if I decide to add that. Right now I like the loose sketchiness of it, so I’ll leave it alone for a while. It accomplished what I set out to do, which was to test out this new clay coated surface I made. That has held up really well. No flaking, cracking, or lifting of the surface when wet. It behaved just fine, and takes paint well.
Here I am, playing the role of Pirate of the Pen. Old Greybeard, himself, captured forever in inky splendor.
Several months ago, I discovered the sudden vison problem in my right eye was due to a detached retina. The doctor inserted an oil compound in my eye to reattach it and help heal the eye. This morning it was time to remove the oil, and I was left with this fetching patch over my eye that I sought to record with a little self deprecating humor. I will return tomorrow to have it removed, and the eye inspected. Fortunately, I was born with two eyes installed, and the left one still works well enough. Next week I return again for cataract surgery, and hopefully that will do me for a while.
I finished a new ink drawing yesterday that I want to show. It’s based on a photo I took of a guy who works at a car shop where I got my vehicle inspected. The surface is 11 x 14″ Strathmore Heavy Weight paper primed with chalk paint. I used a couple different pens, mostly a BIC Intensity brand.
Here’s the final state of the new drawing of Georgia. I wound up using several different pen types on this. I found that a BIC Intensity brand pen worked nicely for the shading areas. For the darker areas and background squiggles I used an off-brand gel pen. I have to be careful when using different pens, since sometimes the ink colors don’t quite match. but the blacks here all fit together okay.
I started a new drawing. This is a based on a photo of a woman who works up the street from me at a convenience store. Her name is Georgia. I started by scaling up the photo onto a sheet of copy paper in a rough outline, and rubbed some grey pastel on the back to transfer it to the work board. This is a sheet of heavy weight paper from Strathmore that I sprayed with 3 coats of chalk paint. I like this surface so far (series500.) It’s like a paper that’s thicker than watercolor 300#, but not quite as thick as illustration board. The chalk paint coating lets me lighten or easily clean up the ink lines. In the photo on the right you can see my reference photo setup as I start the shading. I’m not too happy with the marker pens I got recently (see previous post,) but I figured I might as well use up their ink since I had them.
I wanted to show a couple steps in the process I followed to create a new drawing of my friend, Henry. The surface is a Permastone tile I made a little differently than usual. Instead of pouring it into a mold, I decided to paint several thin coats on a 9 x 12″ piece of 1/8″ plywood to build up the surface much like the process of making traditional gesso panels. This worked okay, except the end result gave me some brush marks that I had to sand, and the surface wasn’t as smooth as when I pour into mold on glass. A little more effort involved, but it came out okay.
Next I wanted to tone the surface with a wash of ink. I poured on some black acrylic ink and then wiped it down with a paper towel. This gave me an irregular texture mostly due to the sanded surface, but that’s what I was after. To transfer the pencil line drawing of my photo to this surface, I used my “cell animation” technique of taping the paper to the top of the board and flipping the paper up and down to see where to scratch the lines in the ink. It was then ready to start drawing the head.
The drawing was made using some new pens I wanted to try out. They’re a box of 8 pens I found on Amazon that use acrylic paint. It worked well, but there’s not any variation in the lines they make. Also, for this scratching technique, I have to wait a few more minutes for the paint to dry compared to using ink . I also got a set of white pens that I’ll try out on another drawing to draw the white lines instead of scratching them.
I thought I would show a series of pictures of how I drew a recent work of a photo of mine that I took of my friend, Olivia.
I started with a sheet of 300# watercolor paper, about 11.5 x 16″, that was sprayed with frosted glass resin. To coat this with a wash of Sumi ink I used a sponge, and then wiped it down with a paper towel to give it a light grey tone with some texture. I had sketched an outline of my photo to scale on some copy paper that I used to transfer this drawing to the watercolor sheet. I did this by clipping the drawing to the sheet, and flipped the drawing back and forth to see where to make the lines on the sheet using an ink pen. I could have transferred the drawing (as I sometimes do) by rubbing some charcoal on the back, but doing it this way is quicker, saving the time of tracing over the drawing, and cleaning up the charcoal that I just have to erase later. I set the photo for reference on my little digital display frame, and then applied a darker wash for the mid-tone and darkest areas. I then started shading in the lines with a Micron pen. The frosted glass doesn’t work quite as well as some of the other surfaces I draw on, but well enough to lighten up some lines and clean things up easily.
This is my latest drawing. It’s of my friend, Mika, on a 9 x 12″ sheet of chipboard that I sprayed with three coats of chalk paint. I toned this white surface with a thin wash of ink, shaded another middle tone value of ink, and then scraped away the highlights. I finished up the drawing by adding the darkest values.
I typically start a drawing of this sort working dark to light, but decided to go more from the opposite end of the spectrum this time. In fact, I had stopped after doing the lighter values thinking that it looked good enough to call it finished, but after thinking about it for a couple days, I decided to add the darker values to make it look as I had originally planned.
I have a book on ancient Greek sculpture that had these two photos of a bust of the poet/author Homer that I liked, and decided to do a new drawing of them. I used the Frosted Glass spray again on a sheet of mat board, @11.5 x 16″, and then applied a thin wash of ink to tone it. The drawing was done using a Prismacolor fine line pen. I darkened the background a bit more with the wash of ink, and scraped away a few highlight areas with a razor blade.
Artwork by D. B. Clemons 