Today’s image is a drawing I started this morning. I’m using a .35 Rotring Rapdiograph pen on Claire Fontaine PaintON paper. After scanning the drawing in, I’ve added colour and backgrounds digitally, just for fun.
After several days where the focus has been on digital art and editing, it’s a pleasure to use pen and paper, just as a change. I’ve said it before – I do love working digitally, but drawing on paper is something I also very much love. Combining the two is my ideal way of working, mostly. Mandalas are most probably the exception – I do like the way digital tools speed up the drawing process.
I have, two final edits being approved, completed all the templates for Entangled Starry Skies. I did them while I was awake in the wee small hours of the morning and stayed up until my Abel & Cole delivery had been made. Then, I was ready to return to bed, after breakfast!
Since I woke, I immersed myself in drawing, and I’ll be returning to it in a while as tomorrow is Template Thursday and I have a template to create!
I’ve finished it! Well, I think I have. One crazy assemblage of all kinds of bits and bobs. I will look at it again in a few days and see if I want to add anything to balance the design. Fresh eyes are always a help in this. I’ll also decide if I want to add shadow and light to bring out more of a sense of dimension.
I really, really enjoyed doing this drawing. It’s my favourite style of drawing, yet different to things done in the past.
To complete the drawing I used a 0.25 Rotring Rapidograph pen, which is the same thickness as the Pilot G-Tech-C4 pen I drew the first part of this design with. The difference is that the Rotring pen’s ink flowed more freely onto the paper.
I didn’t realise it until last night, but the sketchbook I’m using is one by Sea White. The acid-free cartridge paper is sized so that it is more robust with wet media. That causes problems for pens, however, as the size tends to clog the nib/point/ball up. The Rotring pen seemed to have fewer problems.
Also, I found the larger barrel of the Rotring pen easier and more pleasurable to hold and draw with. I need to dig out some pen grips to use with the Pilot pens.
Over the past week or so I’ve been gradually adding to this sketchbook page. It is entirely what a sketchbook should be, in my opinion. Pages full of ideas, sketches, unfinished drawings, practice of techniques, written notes… a visual zibladone for the creative soul!
It is a reflection of what is catching my attention in my world. That world encompasses the inner worlds of imagination and emotion, as well as the outer world of books, nature, architecture, photographs, and so on.
This page includes inspiration from Mayan glyphs/sculpture, rocks, nature, mushrooms, magic wands/staves/sceptres, pen textures and some inspiration from Hundertwasser.
Everything on the page is a bit wonky (not perpendicular), and I’m OK about that – it’s a sketchbook! But then wonky art, particularly colouring pages, seems to be part of my signature style. Perfectly straight lines just don’t look right to me, nor do sharp corners. Perhaps that’s why I like Hundertwasser so much.
The English gardener William Kent said, “Nature abhors a straight line”. Hundertwasser said, ” The straight line is godless and immoral.”
A sketchbook is always a work in progress (WIP), even when every page is full, it’s full of incomplete drawings and ideas, sketches and notes, jottings and doodlings. Nothing has to be perfect. Not a single thing.
A sketchbook is a place to try things out, experiment, just see what happens. With that comes an acceptance that not everything will work out, and where surprising things happen and discoveries are made that may otherwise never happen.
Sometimes the gems of ideas and colour combinations and ways of using media remain hidden until much later. A sketchbook is a place to practice and learn, to note down what is of interest at this time, what needs to be expressed, without any pressure to produce a finished, polished artwork.
That doesn’t mean, however, that a sketchbook can’t be something interesting to look at, even with it’s own kind of beauty. They are a reflection of the artist that creates them and so is a window into their arty heart and feelings. They are very personal things.
A sketchbook encourages me to use media that are gathering dust because I do so much art digitally. In a physical sketchbook, if I want any colour, then I have to use some of these media.
On this one page I’ve used Pilot Hi-Tec C4, Pilot Maica, Rotring Rapidograph and Uniball Unipin pens. To add colour, watercolours, Tombow Dual Brush pens, Derwent ColorSoft pencils, Derwent Procolour pencils, Derwent Inktense pencils have been used.
I’ve done it! I’ve worked out how to easily add a watermark to my scanned artwork to try to protect it as I share it online.
Autodesk Sketchbook Pro made it a doddle to do and so I’ll make sure I do this in the future.
To draw this one I found, after much searching, my Rotring Rapidograph pens. It’s been a while since we were acquainted with each other, but yesterday was the day! I’d forgotten what a joy they can be to draw with. Also, unlike the UniBall UniPin or Sakura Micron pens I generally favour to draw with, I don’t wreck the nibs in a short space of time. I must press a lot harder than I think I do with them…
So, onwards to more art. A lesson learned about protecting my ownership of my art and some control of it when I release an image of it into the wilds of the world weird web.
It has been a while since I last made a post to my blog.
I have been struggling with vagueness and lack of focus with the medication I’m taking, and this one I’m on now doesn’t suit either. As well as the vagueness, I’m constantly on edge and fidgety, and the medication is supposed to treat that not cause it. Have to give it a couple more weeks before it’ll be changed though. I’m still away from work as a result.
In spite of all of this I’ve still been busy with art, though the focus for the projects I’m involved in has been lacking at times, but just ‘doodling’ with no constraints or requirements does help me settle a little and also is something I can do that doesn’t need that focus.
In the summer I signed contracts to do the artwork for two books linked to art therapy. In the last week I was approached by another company to do one book for them in the first instance, and if it goes well then there could be a whole series of them. My hope is that I’ll have enough contracts and work lined up that I can go kind of part time at work. That won’t be for a while and I need to get myself better first, but the part time may be a way of helping me remain ‘better’ in the future. Time will tell.
Approx. 15cm x 20cm (6″ x 8″). Rotring Rapidograph pens on cartridge paper with watercolours, metallic inks and paints applied. It’s rather sparkly/glittery … which the camera doesn’t really pick up.
I own the copyright to this image and it may not be used or altered in any way without my written permission.
Angela Porter 