Sketching At The Cafe Au Temps Perdu

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Claudette and I decided to meet at the Café au temps perdu to draw people. Literally translated, the name of this place means Lost Time Cafe, which probably is a subliminal message from those who say that doing anything that doesn’t make money is a waste of time. But on this day, maybe it was a warning.

We arrived just after 9:30 to find the place closed. What kind of coffee place doesn’t open until 10AM? We got lucky and the woman running the place let us in early. We got coffee and set up with a good view of the place, anticipating the throngs of people who inhabit coffee shops every morning.

But they never came. Not one. Nobody. Besides us, the only person in the place was the woman who let us in and she was running around, placing silverware, placemats and menus on the tables and restocking the bar.

Yes, I did say bar. As it turns out, Café au temps perdu is a bar/restaurant more than it is a coffee house. A few people did straggle in about 11:30, as we were getting ready to leave. They were ready for lunch.

So, what do you do when your subject doesn’t show up? You switch subjects, of course. After drinking our coffee and kibbitzing about coffee shops that aren’t, I drew this and we had fun anyway.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10x7), Sailor fude pen, De Atramentis Document Black

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7) sketchbook, Sailor fude pen, De Atramentis Document Black

Sometimes Sketching Isn’t About The Sketching

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Larry Marshall

My daughter is home from school for a week and I got a late start as I headed to the museum to do some sketching. By the time I got there it was nearly 11AM and I found that three of my friends had been there since opening time. Two of them I hadn’t seen in quite a while so we spent some time ‘catching up.’ Ultimately we decided to meet in the cafeteria for some of their divine cremed turnip soup. And so it was when I headed off to find something to draw.

Then I realized that soup time was only 25 minutes away. Hmmm… Rather than starting a long pencil drawing of one of the statues I decided to whip out the Namiki Falcon and use it to do a simple sketch of one of the glass cabinets and their contents. These things are two huge sheets of glass set parallel to one another with a table inside. The area above the table is encased in a big glass box. Easy peasy, says I. By the end my eyes had crossed trying to follow transparent sheets of glass inside of sheets of glass. It was fun though. The soup and company were better. Sometimes sketching isn’t about the sketching.

Stillman & BIrn Alpha (10x7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black, Pentel brush pen with Platinum Carbon ink

Stillman & BIrn Alpha (10×7), Namiki Falcon, De Atramentis Document Black, Pentel brush pen with Platinum Carbon ink

My Sketching Brakes Are Ineffective

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Recently I’ve been on a quick-sketching binge. Everything I look at got scribbled onto paper in a minute or two. That’s a lot of fun and, I feel, it helps me “see” shapes and their relationships more quickly. But it’s sort of like eating a steady diet of Twinkies. You might even like Twinkies but at some point you’re going to want an apple. I needed an apple.

I stopped to pick up a pound of coffee at a local coffee roastery. I decided to sit and draw so I also bought a coffee as an excuse to inhabit one of their chairs. I sat on a high chair near a window and two guys sat down near me, below my eye level, and I saw an opportunity to ‘know’ that my subject would be there for a while. I started sketching with the idea that I would have ample opportunity to truly capture their essence.

Have you ever gotten off the freeway and had a hard time driving as slowly at the side street speed limits require? That’s how I felt. I started blocking out the sketch with some well-placed dots and then found myself scribbling details. I tried to slow down but my quick-sketching brain just wouldn’t let go. This was a constant struggle throughout the process. The result was a sketch that wasn’t quite a quick-sketch but not what I was really trying to accomplish. I think I have to get my sketching brakes checked. Oh…and how do you draw shaved heads?

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10x7), Pilot Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black, Pentel brush pen

Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7), Pilot Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black, Pentel brush pen

De Atramentis Document Ink: Creating A Grey

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Larry Marshall

The new De Atramentis Document inks (not to be confused with other De Atramentis inks) are a dream come true for those of us who sketch with fountain pens and want waterproof inks. Before they came along, color choices could be described pretty much like Henry Ford described color selection for the Model T Ford – “any color as long as it’s black.”

The current elephant in the room question is whether we’re going to have a ready supply of these inks over time. De Atramentis is a one-man operation and Goulet Pens, to my knowledge, is the only source for them in North America. Their last shipment came in and went out before some people had a chance to even see them show up. Brian has said their current order is very large. I hope so.

I was one of the lucky ones. I’ve had De Atramentis Document Black and Brown for a while now and was able to fill in the other colors during the few hours they were available at Goulet Pens.

The potential to create any color I want now exists, except for one thing. De Atramentis sells a solvent for their inks and proper dilution should be done with that solvent. These inks are pigmented inks and every ink have a particular chemistry to give them the flow and paper interaction properties of a particular brand of ink. The proper solvent should be used to provide the proper lubricant, stabilizer, and maybe anti-fungal agent in their proper proportions. The big deal here is the lubricant as this generates proper flow through the pen. Too much lubrication and you can get feathering, nib creap, and slow-to-dry inks. Too little and you can get a dry-writing ink, though it may actually dry more quickly.

So before I continue, there’s my caveat. If you fear doing anything that might be referred to as an “experiment”, read no further. This is an experiment. I’ve mixed up a grey ink using the brown and blue ink in this line. It creates a very dark grey, not unlike Noodler’s Lexington Gray but a bit darker. I wanted to lighten it up, but the solvent isn’t available to me, so I used water. Worse still, throwing caution to the wind, I used plain old tap water to thin the ink. Here’s what I mixed:

De Atramentis Document inks, not to be confused with other De Atramentis inks:

Brown: 3 parts
Black: 2 parts
water: 3 parts

That works out to 60% water, which is a lot but I found that when thinning other inks I had to add a considerable amount of water to lighten their color. This proved true for the De Atramentis Document inks as well, maybe even to a greater degree.

As you can see, I got a decent dark grey. I may want to play a bit with the blue/brown mix or maybe try a green/red mix but this is just about what I want on a tonal scale. Just enough to take the harsh black edge off my sketches.

The real point of the experiment, though, was to see how diluting with water would work. I’m surprised to say that even with this extreme dilution, the ink holds up nicely. There is no feathering, the line remains consistent and there are no flow problems with the Pilot Prera (fine nib) that I used to dispense it. I wanted the sketch to reflect the tonal differences between the black and gray lines so I used De Atramentis Black to do all the shadow lines on the right side of the bottle. After scanning I quickly slopped watercolor all over it and can report that the waterproof nature of the ink is retained. All of this is being done on cheap sketchbook paper. Just to ensure that it wasn’t the result of the paper, I did a bunch of scribbles on Stillman & Birn Alpha series paper and those were were waterproof as well.

By the way, there’s been some discussion of a Fog Gray color being added to the De Atramentis line. Those few who have had access to it have found that it’s really more of a grey blue than a true grey. Given that it’s easy to mix our own greys, though, it hardly matters.

For me, the experiment was a great success. To be honest I’m still a bit surprised because in my experience, dilution of pigment-based products (wood stains I’ve used) with water are very limited and things tend to fall apart once you get past 10-15%. Here I’ve more than doubled the volume of ink with water..and it still works. Go figure. I still wish I could get access to De Atramentis solvent but until that time…I’m going to go draw a few shades of grey.

Sketching Rendevous At The Musee de la Civilisation

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I’m a member of the Collective des ateliers libres en arts visuels de Québec. And yes, the name’s too long but they do a great job of organizing life drawing workshops throughout the winter months. I’m not very interested in drawing people but this group causes me to wish I were. In the summer there is a great weekly event where we gather in a local park and draw people, mostly portraits. They’ve also started to organize outdoor, group events with other sketching targets.

These stage masks are part of a very large raised-relief sculpture that is part of the Olympus exhibit. The holes for the eyes and mouth look sort of odd in this context but it is what it is.

So it was last weekend when we all gathered at the Musee de la Civilisation to sketch the Olympus exhibit. It was a great day as it’s always fun to get together with people who like to do the things you do. We sketched all morning, broke for lunch and sketching talk, and then some of us returned to sketch some more.

I worked in pencil the whole day and I’d forgotten my pencil case so I was using a Pentel Kerry (0.5mm) in my Stillman & Birn Alpha (10×7) sketchbook. I love this pencil. It’s pretty spendy but being able to put a cap on the pencil end (the entire red portion on the rear is the cap) is really nice for street sketching. I do wish I’d bought the 0.7mm though.

Truthfully, while I love the Alpha series for my pen sketching, it’s got more tooth than I like for pencil. I prefer their Epsilon series for pencil, though I’m not much of a pencil driver regardless of paper. But I had a lot of fun and the museum was warm, unlike my normal stomping grounds of Quebec streets.

You can’t have Greek Gods without snakes.