Tag Archives: Quebec City

Sometimes Small Is Fun

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With decent weather coming late this year, I’m in the mood to walk, and walk, and walk.  My pedometer has been smoking hot from all the activity.  At the same time, my arthritic hand has been giving me fits and so it’s been hard for me to be motivated to sketch.

But small formats fit into the walks and don’t pain the hand too much so I’ve used my trusty 3.5×5.5 Stillman & Birn Epsilon book to work some sketching into my walks.  Here’s a couple of those results.  I might have gotten carried away with the color but I’m trying to figure out the why and how other sketchers do this sort of thing.  I think I like the results.  Do you?

Giving A Lamy Another Try

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Long ago I decided that the popular Lamy Safari was not the pen for me.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is that European XF nibs aren’t XF and to get a truly fine fountain pen nib requires purchase of an Asian pen.  The other reason, however, is my real problem with the Safari.  Its triangular grip may be fine for people writing with a fountain pen but I find it a real problem when I try to draw with it, mostly because I regularly move my hold point up and down the pen barrel and the triangular grip produces a lot of uncomfortable hold locations.

For some strange reason, though, I decided to try it again so I filled one with Platinum Carbon Black and went out walking.  We’re finally getting decent weather and I so thrilled with being out walking that sketching is taking a back seat.  The fact that my arthritis is causing my drawing hand to hurt may also have something to do with my reluctance to stop and sketch.

So when I was out I did a couple small sketches with the Lamy and my reassessment hasn’t changed my mind about it.  It’s not for me.  Here are the two small sketches I did.  The thick line and my clumsiness combined to create, at best, “ok” results.  It is nice to be able to be outdoors, though.

 

An Interesting View While Out Of The Wind

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It got pretty windy when during our sketching session and because our temperatures are still cooler than normal, it got uncomfortable.  We all started looking for a place to draw while out of the wind and I chose the leeward end of Maison Dorion, a large house that is the headquarters for the St. Charles River Society.  I drew this scene.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (8.5×5.5), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

Quick-Sketching A Landscape

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I’m convinced that I’m the slowest sketcher on the planet.  I’m not proud of being number one, but a man has to know who he is.  Sketching isn’t a race but nevertheless, this is often a problem for me because I’d like to capture a scene without growing a beard at the same time.

I figure that the only way to crack this problem is to force the issue so this morning, I went to a park near “my river,” sat down and started drawing trees as quickly as I could.  I did the pen work for this scene in about 25 minutes and reached for my color tools.

Oops…I’d forgotten my watercolor stuff.  What I did have was a handful of watercolor pencils and the smallest waterbrush known to man.  The pencils were ok for the color source but that waterbrush… yuck.  It was woefully inadequate for the task.  Nevertheless, I worked quickly and in less than 40 minutes I had this sketch.

Stillman & Birn Beta (8×10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

This doesn’t compare well to Liz Steel doing a painting  in the blink of an eye and it’s not even close to how long it takes me to do a one-minute sketch a’la Marc Taro Holmes, but for a scene with this many trees, I feel it was pretty quick.

I’m hoping to do a bunch of one-minute sketches and another bunch of continuous line drawings this summer.  They won’t be as detailed as my normal drawings and certainly not as accurate.  But I’m hoping these exercises will speed up my hand.  Wish me luck.

“What’s Wrong With It,” Cheryl asked.

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I tend to be fairly pragmatic about my successes and failures when I sketch.  I don’t make a big deal out of succeeding and it doesn’t bother me if I fail.  In fact, failure is an opportunity to learn.  It’s this last thing that gets me in trouble as I also don’t mind saying I’ve failed because I don’t see that as a bad thing.

Stillman & Birn Beta (7×7 spiral), Pilot Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black

And so it was when I posted this sketch on my blog and on Instagram. I voiced the opinion that it wasn’t my best and this caused Cheryl Wright to ask, “What’s wrong with it?”

Rather than give her a brief answer it seemed her question presented an opportunity to talk about the analysis I do when sketches don’t meet even my low standards.

Composition & Esthetics

I tend to do building portraits so composition generally takes a backseat to showing off whatever it is that causes me to draw the building in the first place.  But if I did this one again, I’d move my point of view so that the streetlight wasn’t directly in line with the ductwork on the side of the building and I’d ensure that the globe of the light wasn’t hidden within the crown of the tree.  These things completely negated the raison d’etre for including the light in the sketch in the first place.

Also, the window treatments are sloppy in this sketch.  I wanted to keep them simple but I hatched them carelessly.  Generally I’m still very clumsy with color but clumsy is where I’m at right now with color so I hardly ever assess it.  Maybe some day.

Tonal Obfuscation

This building is little more than a box.  What makes it interesting is that the entrance and display windows cut across a diagonal of the building, but the building itself is square, creating a ceiling over the entrance and windows.
I completely obfuscated that reality by painting the signs and entrance a dark black, completely flattening this feature of the building.  I’ve tried to play with it in Photoshop to indicate a better way, lightening the signs but I’d messed up the sketch so badly that it was hard to make it look good.  I hope the graphic demonstrates what I am talking about, however.

Keeping Things In Perspective

This is where things really went south, though.  It seems I let my horizon line wander.  I’m not a stickler for perspective and don’t generally think in terms of vanishing points and such.  But it should be the case that the farther one gets from the horizon line, the more steep should be the angle downward or upward towards a horizon line – AND the horizon line needs to be kept constant.  If you are consistent in this way, it won’t matter much whether  each is accurate.  Here, I wasn’t consistent and you can see that the angles go all over the place, crossing in places and being parallel in others.  Shouldn’t be like that and the sketch suffered.

So this is why I said what I said about this sketch.  I agree with what Cheryl said in the rest of her message, “I love its quiet simplicity.”  I only wish I’d done a better job of depicting it.  Thanks to Cheryl for asking a great question.