Struggling With Pencil And Other Laments

Posted on November 7, 2018 by Larry Marshall

Pat Roberson wrote to me asking if she was somehow missing my posts. I was glad she was missing my posts, but had to confess that they were being missed because I wasn’t writing them. If I could write about CT scans, doctor visits, constant blood and urine testing, and a bit of depression, I’d have lots to write about. As it is, however, writing about urban sketching would leave me empty-handed right now.

So, I’m going to talk about the little bit of sketching I’ve been trying to do, even though it’s sketching I’m unfamiliar with and even more problematic it’s being done with a tool I don’t understand at all … a pencil.

As the weather turned cold and my leg didn’t get any better I realized that this winter I was not going to be able to be an urban sketcher. I decided to view this as an opportunity (I brainwash myself regularly). I told myself that this would be a great time to set my pens aside and pick up a pencil in an attempt to master the tool. Everyone else starts with pencil but I was a pen-driver when I came to sketching and so all of my art baby steps were done with pen.

Further I decided that I would learn my pencil skills by drawing portraits, either from photos or from plaster casts. This was (is?) probably foolhardy because my least favorite sketching subject is people, but I need practice in this area too, so while the wind, rain and snow keeps me indoors, I might as well “get out of my comfort zone” and learn something new.

I started by drawing a bust of Mozart, a cast I picked up at a flea market in a small town east of Quebec City. Only an artist drives along a road to a sketching location and has to turn around to visit the flea market because they saw a white head sticking up from one of the tables.

Anyway, it seems I got off to a bad start. I made a rank beginner mistake. “I was just learning so I don’t need good materials” was my thought and so I grabbed a pad of cheap watercolor paper that I’d rejected for use long ago and started drawing. It was too grainy for a pencil drawing but it didn’t matter; I was “just learning” after all. I struggled to get an even tone, partly because of my lack of skill but also because of that paper. And then I realized that I’d drawn Mozart’s eye too large so I tried to erase it. The paper immediately pilled and I had a REALLY rough spot where the eye used to be. I tried to fix it but was a fool’s errand.

This frustrated me to the point of giving up, realizing that I was fighting the paper more than the pencil. So, here is my partially drawn Mozart, shown here with a black eye caused when he told Haydn that major-minor theme variations were silly. I’ll have to draw him again.

Sketching Along The Riviere St. Charles

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Larry Marshall

We are starting to get some outdoor sketching days and so you’ll start hearing me talk about my river as it’s one of my favorite places to be. Its real name is Riviere St. Charles and it’s only minutes from my house, though the river is at least 50 kilometers long, running from Lac Beauport down to the St. Lawrence River.

Yvan and I were there on Saturday, at a spot that’s no more than a 15 minute walk from my house. I was practicing sketching standing up. This probably sounds crazy to many of you but I really struggle with it, though I may be getting closer to wrestling this bugaboo to its knees. The thing is, I enjoy sketching while standing up. It’s a more natural point of view than sitting low on a stool.

It’s also the case, because I hold the sketchbook relatively high and shoved into my chest, I do a lot less head-bobbing than when I sit on a stool with the book resting on my legs. I think this improves my accuracy because the sketchbook is easier to compare to the subject because the sight line is nearly the same for both. I also find this approach easier on my back, though my legs get tired. Win some, lose some.

Some other benefits to sketching standing up is that I don’t have to carry around that stool, cutting the weight I’m carrying in half. I also feel more free to choose sketching positions.

You’ll think this next reason silly but people say it’s good to take a break every 15-20 minutes, just to remain fresh while sketching. This is easier to do if all you have to do is start walking. If I’ve got to get up from a stool, walk around and then sit back down, both my brain and my knees are reluctant to take a break. I told you that you’d think it was silly.

I was also practicing the idea of drawing landscapes. I don’t do it enough and I need a lot of practice with forest textures and such. Anyways, this is what I did and I was generally happy with the results. It’s sort of looking down on the river and up at the building, which made for an interesting scene. I may add color but generally, once a sketch is a couple days old, I rarely go back to it.

Stillman & Birn Beta (8×10), 0.5 mechanical pencil, Pilot Falcon

The Virtues Of Sketching With A Pencil

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Larry Marshall

People who follow my blog know that I’m a pen guy. I used fountain pens long before I started trying to draw so it just seemed natural that I should use one as my drawing tool. In fact, I was told that this was THE way to learn to draw by those who hung out in sketching groups. Working with pen, it was said, would make me see better, make better decisions, improve my hand-eye coordination, and a whole slew of other great benefits.

Five years later I’m still using a fountain pen as my principal drawing tool. More importantly, I can better assess all those well-meaning people who were advocating the use of ink to learn to draw. And you know what? I don’t think they were talking about ink at all. They were talking about erasers. They were talking about being sure about where you wanted to put a line before you put it. They were talking about not spending a lot of time erasing and replacing lines. When they said ink would improve my ability to see, they were really saying “If you know you can’t erase, you’ll pay more attention before you make a line.”

I suppose, they were right, BUT that is not the whole story. There is room for pencil in the drawing process, even if you ultimately use fountain pens as your primary drawing tool. For instance, I use a pencil when I start most drawings. I use it to generate layout lines, to evaluation locations, major angles, and object sizes BEFORE I start thinking about drawing actual objects. This is a step that pro artists may do in their heads but they are nevertheless doing it. Less skilled folks, like me, need the pencil lines to evaluate those relationships and correct those they got wrong BEFORE they actually start drawing the outlines of the objects they’re trying to capture. Most beginners skip this step completely. I might talk about this at a later date but today I want to talk about a more fundamental reason to use a pencil to actually draw.

Using ink causes people to concentrate mostly on outline. Whether it is buildings or people, basic lessons of contour drawing are very evident and, for the most part, that’s where the process of drawing ends for most people. They may follow up with watercolor or maybe even hatching but these are done as after-the-fact processes once the contours are all drawn.

But if you draw with a pencil you start thinking more about form and less about outline. Folds in clothes become areas of tone rather than a single line. Curves become gradients of tone, or they should as the surfaces change their angles with respect to the light. If you’ve ever tried to turn a circle into a sphere with a fountain pen you know how difficult this is, but with a pencil it’s a quite natural thing to do.

Because of this, drawing with a pencil will teach you more about seeing and creating tonal variation than will using a fountain pen. You’ll concentrate more on 3-dimensional form rather than outline. In short, you’ll start seeing in a different way and in doing so, even your fountain pen drawing will improve.

Because of this, I try to draw something in pencil every once in a while. I always find it a struggle because I’m a left-handed sketcher who drags his hand across the drawing as I draw. The smudging that results is not pretty. The fact that I don’t do it as much as I should also limits what I can achieve, but each time I get a little bit better and I see just a bit better. I also gain a keen appreciation for the pencil as a sketching tool.

Here’s a drawing I did of a statue in our museum. I did it with a 0.5mm mechanical pencil which is a convenient tool, but probably not optimal for doing pencil drawings. Please excuse my smudging; I’m just a lowly pen driver afterall. Do you ever draw in pencil?

Getting Out Of Your Comfort Zone?

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Larry Marshall

Oh how I hate that phrase. It’s used in various ways to suggest something, but I never know exactly what, at least when it’s directed towards me or my sketches.

But maybe it’s a soft way of talking about something very basic to learning art. I’ve noticed that amateur artists in particular don’t progress because they conflate learning with simple doing. We believe we will improve by going out with our sketching group once a week, doing sketches just as we’ve done every other week.

Sure, you’ll improve, slowly, by this approach. The problem is that when you go out with your sketching group, you want to produce something that you can proudly display when everyone says “what did you draw?” Because of this, you sketch in the way you know. There is no experimentation. You choose subjects that are similar to ones you’ve drawn in the past. So, you get better and better at what you know, avoiding anything that you don’t know.

I’ve always thought about my drawing as a two-part thing. One part is the execution/performance part. I use what I know to produce the best sketch I know how to make. I do learn a bit from this process but mostly it’s about producing sketches that day.

It’s the second part, the learning part, that improves all of my sketching and I feel that progress has come more quickly than would be the case if I’d simply concentrated one that first part. This learning part burns through paper a lot faster than the first part of my sketching life. In this time I’ll create pages full of elllipses and hatching of all kinds. It’s really fun to just draw a random amoeba-like shape and then contour it with hatching. I’ll also draw lines between dots drawn in advance. I’ll try to draw over a single line repeatedly trying to do so without widening the line.

I’ll draw parts of other people’s sketches, trying to get a feel for how they’ve made the lines they’ve drawn. I’ll quickly sketch stuff, mostly from commercials on TV. I’ll draw lines and divide them into thirds, fourths and fifths, followed up by measuring how good I was at it and correcting the errors. I’ve filled a bunch of cheap sketchbooks with this stuff and it’s rare that any of it sees the light of day, but it’s the most important “art” I produce. Now that I’m thinking about it, I should post some of those pages so you can see how disjointed, loose, and how little thought is given to producing “art” of any kind. It’s all about training my visual cortex to gather the right information and disseminate it onto the page. Hmm.. maybe I’ll do that.

Anyway, while I’m very much in love with making lines with fountain pens, I also draw with ballpoint pens, brush pens, and watercolor pencils. Sometimes I’ll draw in pencil. Most of this is done while I watch movies or TV shows but sometimes I’ll just sit down and draw with the notion of improving on things I don’t feel I know. This gives me a lot of things to choose from and on this day I decided that drawing with pencil was the order of the day. Sadly, I didn’t think well enough and just started drawing on a piece of Fabriano Artistico CP paper, which is not an ideal paper for pencil. There are numerous errors here but I learned a lot in the process and am now motivated to do it again but on a more suitable paper.

Drawn with a 0.5 mechanical pencil

I Don’t Do Portraits

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Oops…I guess I do.

One thing the art world has taught me is that I don’t have the “people are interesting to look at” gene. While everyone else attends life drawing classes and draws portrait after portrait, I prefer to draw fire hydrants, buildings and telephone poles. I don’t know why but if I were to rank sketching subjects, people would be at the bottom of my list.

BUT, sketching a person walking by a fire hydrant, that’s an interesting idea and so I spend a fair amount of time doing quick, loose sketches of people.

Yet another BUT is that I’ve come to realize that being able to draw a likeness can get you into places. My buddy, Yvan, is always drawing people and because of it people in groups immediately understand him and what he does. It’s harder to comprehend a fire hydrant sketcher.

Also, to me, there are several “core” skills that make up drawing. These are 1) the ability to measure/estimate angles and proportions, 2) achieve accuracy of line and form, and 3) mastery over whatever materials you’re using. I’ve spent the last 3 1/2 years, starting out trying to draw cubes, with a rather myopic “gotta learn those things” approach. I’m getting so that my ability to assess angles and proportions is becoming a feature, not a liability in my sketching, and I’m ok with pushing my fountain pen around (watercolor is another matter).

Canson Mi-Teintes (5x7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black - This is tough with pen but I barely know which end of a pencil to put to paper.

Canson Mi-Teintes (5×7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black – This is tough with pen but I barely know which end of a pencil to put to paper.

It seems, however, that fire hydrant drawing can only take you so far when trying to learn form and accuracy and so I’ve spent a lot of time in museums, drawing all sorts of stuff that I would never “choose” to draw, all in the name of improving my accuracy, ability to see half-tones, and the rest. I figure I only have another 40-50 years of doing it and I’ll have it figured out. By the age of 115, I might be able to call myself “artist.”

All of that is to say that I’m even drawing portraits… kinda. I head to a local park every Thursday night, where a small group sits on the porch of a small chapel and we sketch one another, during 20-minute poses. I’ve never mentioned it before because… well, I’m pretty bad at it. I thought, however, I would share a couple of the sketches I’ve done recently, just to change things up here just a bit. It’s ok to laugh.

Canson Mi-Teintes (5x7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black - I'm really lost when it comes to hatching really light shades that are the form of the face.

Canson Mi-Teintes (5×7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black – I’m really lost when it comes to hatching really light shades that are the form of the face.