Drawing Success!

 Drawing, Fine Art  No Responses »
Dec 062011
 
Cat With Prosthetic

Cat With Prosthetic

8″x3″ brown ink on watercolor paper
Subject is a long-haired cat with a steampunk prosthetic for one leg.

I dug through my art supplies and came up with an unopened pad of watercolor paper. It came from a discount store, so I had shoved it aside assuming dubious quality. When I opened the pad, it appeared to be ideal. The paper is 140#, with a light tooth and an apparently strong surface. Not wishing to spend several hours on another fail, I sketched out a quick cat drawing, and was able to ink it without difficulty. The real test was the wash, which, as you can see, worked fine. While I still have plans to buy paper so I am using a reliable quality source, this should suit me just fine in the meantime. There are only 12 pages in the pad.

This image is from my camera, hence the uneven shading left-to-right across the image. I left most of the page blank when drawing this, so after I use the rest of the page I’ll pull it off the pad and create a proper scan for my portfolio.

Drawing Fail

 Drawing, Fine Art, Work in Progress  No Responses »
Dec 062011
 
My Robot

My Robot

After two failed attempts, I finally finished an ink drawing which turned out well. The inspiration is a photo I took of a friend at Maker Faire a couple years ago, posing with a robot-like pose-able sculpture.

This is a relatively small drawing, only 7″x8″, created with Senellier Walnut Satin ink on smooth paper. I used a dip pen to create the outlines, and a round brush with water to apply the wash.

Third time was the charm. In the past couple weeks I have tried, unsuccessfully, to create two other ink steampunk drawings. The first failed because of cheap watercolor paper. The second failed because I used expensive watercolor paper of a kind I’d never used before and it took the ink far darker than I was expecting on the first stroke.

The frustration with this one is lack of appropriate paper. I ran out of the paper I used for all the other ink drawings, and at the moment I can’t afford more. Thus, I’ve been trying to use other papers, but they are not behaving in a way I like. In this case, I went with a paper which I figured was not going to give me the result I wanted, but was worth trying. It’s an ultra-smooth paper I usually reserve for marker work, which is why the wash has no gradient to it. That paper also will not take the nib I prefer for drawings because it has such a fine tip it needs tooth in order to draw. That meant I used a thicker nib, and the result was a less delicate drawing.

Methinks I need to budget new watercolor paper ASAP.

 

This is the drawing I made just prior, which had too much tooth for my liking, and took the ink far darker than I expected.

Reference: Victorian Day Dream by xXtimeless-stockXx

Almost Ready - WIP

Almost Ready

Waiting at the Station – Try 1

 Drawing, Fine Art, Painting  No Responses »
Nov 262011
 
waiting-at-the-station-try1

9″x12″ ink pen and wash on watercolor paper
Reference: Victorian day dream 4

I’m not putting this drawing in my main portfolio because I drew it on the wrong paper. I grabbed a cheap watercolor pad because it’s been so long since I did one of these and I didn’t want to waste good paper if it turned out bad. Unfortunately, that means in places the wash obliterated the texture of the paper and turned a swampy grey color. There’s no fixing it. Never, ever, ever use Academy brand watercolor paper for anything wet – only for sketching.

I would be more upset about the paper flub, but I like the piece enough that I am going to redo it with some alterations and improvements to the overall composition. It also took me nearly half the drawing before I got the hang of ink wash again, so the next rendition should have much better shading on the face.

The drawing was created with a croquille nib, dipped in brown Senellier ink.  The wash is the same color ink, mixed with water and applied with a small round brush.

Project: Waiting at the Station

 

New Art – Maelstrom

 Drawing, Fine Art  No Responses »
Nov 032010
 

Maelstrom

Roughly 3 feet by 4 ft in size, backed with black fabric
Bottle ink on large-format printer paper
~1 hour of work
No references

Large-format assignment for art class. The only requirement was that it be large, and she provided glossy printer paper for us to use. I cut a roughly 4 ft length from the roll, and worked on the non-glossy side. I attempted to use masking fluid on the glossy side, and it wouldn’t come off, which worked out just as well because all my classmates who used the glossy side had problems with the ink sloughing off.

With this large a piece of paper I knew I wanted to do a more abstracted style of art, because my normal detail work would require that I spend weeks of dedicated time to complete the piece.

The background is made with Higgins waterproof ink, dripped on the paper. I then dripped some water around it, soaked a paper towel, and spread the ink around. It took five or six applications to cover the entire paper.

The foreground is made with more of the Higgins ink, and with Bombay white (for the white bird). I drew the birds with the ink dropper, and then used a air can duster to spread and splatter the ink. It took hours to dry, and didn’t want to adhere terribly well to the surface. In particular, the white ink oozed out from the clean splatters within about ten minutes, so I only made one bird in white, rather than the half-and-half I had first intended upon. I think this technique will work much better on bristol paper, and I’d also like to try it on watercolor.

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