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April 11 2012
Travel Sketchbook: London some more
It was easy to prepare a ground that would suit almost any drawing on a grey London day. Fold-out sketchbook page, Garnham Close.
Somewhere in Soho.
Plants growing on a rooftop garden in Stoke Newington. Pen and ink. Click on it to see the extra-high resolution version.
March 27 2012
Studies in Memory and Repetition
I’m trying to dig deeper into my visual memory and to sharpen my perception of values. I’m experimenting with ways to make a more active use of my memory in my drawings, for example by coloring them from memory, or not drawing on location as much as just look at location, and then go home and draw from memory, or to make one drawing on location and another one back home, either with or without looking at the one made on location.
The ideas for this come from a few different sources – Loriann Signori’s blog, Nicolaïdes‘ The Natural Way to Draw (which I still regard as the best book on drawing I ever laid my eyes on), and some remarks on Turner’s sketching technique (he is said to often have only made pencil sketches on location, and filled in the colors from memory or imagination when he was back in his room).
Also, I tend to go drawing early in the morning, and it can still be damn cold at that time, and doing the washes at home gives me warmth and more control. Funny enough, the increased control that comes from working on a table and having two free hands means I can let the washes move around more freely, use more water.
P.S. Last year I wrote this lengthy posting about finding that some of my favorite watercolors by artists like Turner, Wyeth, Hopper and Sargent were done, or at least could have been done, with very few different paints, achieving their splendor through the subtle gradations of those very few paints. I am still intrigued by this – you can see in the second Turner copy above that it only uses two colors, a yellow and a blue/violet. I guess I’ll be digging for a long time.
March 15 2012
More March Sketches and a Double Sketchbook
Page 10.
These are from the same sketchbook as the last posting, but it is a twofold sketchbook: It is half made from very bright, almost blueish Dorée 200 drawing paper, whose color I love, which is a good paper for dry media, and I have a 50 m roll lying around under my desk which will last me forever (and only cost around 70 €). This paper also sucks beyond the telling of it for watercolor or even slight ink washes, and the brush pen doesn’t go on quite as smooth as I would like. So the other half of the book is made of my favourite drawing paper ever, the Fabriano Disegno F4, which is a tiny bit warmer in its color, also very smooth, and although it isn’t advertised for wet media at all, takes them surprisingly well. In fact, for most things I prefer it to ‘real’ watercolor paper even if working heavily with watercolor. It is also way more expensive than the Dorée, and I’m buying it in loose sheets these days because I can’t afford the big packs. Oh well. Anyway, I’m using this book starting from both sides (the page numbers with ‘b’ are from the Disegno side, the regular numbers from the Dorée side), and will meet myself in the middle somewhere. I still like the format. I can actually imagine sticking to this square size for a couple of years.
These landscape sketches are inspired by the wonderful drawings of Fred, by the way, like this one. So many possibilities lie in his treatment of wash and bleeding, so much still to learn for me! But some of it might have to wait for next winter, when the landscape gets empty again and the trees bare.
P.S. If you click on page 05b you’ll see some strange textures in the brown on the right side. That’s what happens when a wash freezes on the page. I love it, I just wish I could play around with that effect more without freezing myself. I’ve drawn this place many times before, and encountered the same problem last winter, as you can see here. And of course I forgot to buy a heating pad in time, and now spring is just around the corner and I don’t feel like I’ll use it often enough to buy one now. I think I should make a note in my calendar, maybe for October or so: “get a heating pad and fingerless gloves.”
March 07 2012
First Post Travel Sketchbook
My travel sketchbooks were of various sizes and formats, not one exactly like any of the others. When I came back I started producing drawings for my exhibition on single sheets of paper so they could be framed, also it was cold and I wasn’t spending much time out and about, so for a while I didn’t have a sketchbook at all. Now I’ve made a new one, and I think I’ve found a format that will be ‘home’ for a while: more or less square, big enough to splash around with some color and layer drawings, but not too big to hold in my hand in the windy outsides…
February 11 2012
Teeny tiny exhibition preview
Sigh. There are more than enough drawings already lying around here for my exhibition, but of course I feel compelled to make a couple of extra ambitious pieces at the last minute. As always. And as always, apparently, this implies figuring out some completely new ways of doing stuff. Yeah, good idea on a deadline. Not. But it is fascinating. Also, I’m well aware that nobody besides me will miss the pieces that should have hung there but won’t because nobody else has already seen them in their mind. So I’m gonna be fine. I’m just starting to feel a bit crazy. But then, that’s to be expected.
Now, the things that are different than all or most of the drawings I have made before aren’t completely obvious from these photographs. Also, the one on the left is looking way different by now, and the one on the right is only partially shown. Still, you might pick something up.
February 02 2012
How to buy a Drawing
Well, from me that is.
From time to time people contact me to ask how they can buy a drawing, or people that buy one tell me that it took them a while to figure out how to do it. Now, I don’t want to plaster ‘Buy me!’ messages all over my blog, but clearly if it is not obvious how to do so even to people who already made up their mind that they want to own one of my drawings, something is missing. So here comes the comprehensive guide to buying my stuff:
Most of the drawings you see here are for sale. Yes, even the sketchbooks (but they are pricey). If you see something you like you can simply contact me to find out if it is still available, and I am going to answer you with all the details. To get an idea: individual drawings cost between 100€ and 300€ (depending on size, with ~Din A 4 at 150€ and ~Din A 3 at 300€), and sketchbooks start at 900€ (depending on the size and number of pages and the kinds of sketches inside). I take great care to protect my drawings on their way, and in many cases I might be able to send them already matted. Shipping depends on size and destination, but it is free for smaller sized works inside the EU. Payment methods are Paypal or direct bank transfer (Überweisung).
Another, less personal option is to browse my Etsy store. There you will find drawings that I have already prepared for sale, most of them matted, and complete with full information on size, media, and shipping costs. On Etsy you pay via Paypal or credit card. (Here is a guide to the payment process.) (Here a similar guide written in German by a patron after finding out for himself.)
I also take commissions, can send you a drawing already matted and framed, and am willing to accept payment in several rates. However, such things depend on the specific situation, and I cannot give ‘rules of thumb’ for them yet. If you consider taking me up on one of them, please contact me directly. The same goes for studio visits.
Oh, and if you happen to be in or come through Berlin, starting from the 15 February you can of course also come to my exhibition and have a look at my drawings in person.
Example of a Commission
Just this week I finished a commission for a friend of mine who wanted a slightly larger version of one of my travel sketches—here some of the stages that led to the finished drawings (photo only, because it is too big for my scanner…)
December 29 2011
…And Even More Plants
More views of the same old plants, more experiments with how to depict them.
I’m still looking into the relationship between color and line, but also between looseness and tight rendering. Drawing at home and having time made my drawings recently much more exact and detailed than they usually are, sometimes working in several sessions that need to dry for a while, as with some of the ink washes that depend on a complete outline in masking fluid. Sometimes I miss the speed of quicker, more fluid drawings, so I’ve been trying to do more of them as well, as you can see in some of the pencil drawings above. I’m looking a lot at the Helga pictures by Andrew Wyeth, especially the drawings and watercolors. One result is a slight curiosity about his drybrush technique (good for very detailed and exact renderings). I also realized that many of even his simplest pencil drawings are actually quite big, and have been experimenting with drawing bigger myself, also as a way to get back to speed and fluidity, to keep my lines moving. (nothing to show yet as they don’t fit the scanner and even during the day it is too dark to take good photographs).
December 12 2011
More Plants, with and without Jars
I continue falling into plants—I can draw the same plant over and over again without getting bored. While doing one drawing a variation occurs to me making me want to start the next version as soon as the first is finished. Drawing many versions of similar things makes it easier to conduct my drawings like an experimental series testing different media, ways of mark making, and their combination. I feel unclear about my relationship to the elements of line, value and color, which to give how much weight, how to relate them to each other. Sarah Simblet wrote in one of her books that usually adding lines to a drawing started as a value drawing, or the other way around, does not work well, advice I’ve found to be helpful in many cases (some of the force of lines tends to be lost when filled in with shading, just as the haptic force of light/dark contrast tends to be broken up if too many linear details are added that ignore the light/dark organisation). I just seem lately to be unable to stick to one or the other, being fascinated by the tension between them. There is always something in a plant that I could not do justice to, and thus I try again.
Hint: If you click on one of the pictures it takes you to a bigger view – if you click on the bigger view, it takes you to the original file, which is about 3-4 x as big as the bigger view, and in many of the pictures necessary to be able to see the pencil lines.
India ink wash and details in pencil.
Coming soon: Experiments in silverpoint and water-soluble oil paint.
November 04 2011
First Berlin Sketches this Fall
Looking at my travel drawings I get the impression that at least since July I’ve been exploring different ways to combine lines and colors, playing around with different drawing processes. This was without a doubt fueled by the workshop ‘Lining over Color’ I did with Richard Camara during the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Lisbon, although I feel that it goes back a bit further than that. You’ll see that the sketches in this posting differ wildly, too, in how they employ line versus color, although I drew them all within less than a week.
November 03 2011
Lisbon Sketches and Drawings
First Letter From Lisbon
First Day of the Symposium
Line over color workshop with Richard Câmara
Unfinished Business workshop with Nina Johansson and Jose Louro
Just drawing ...
... and drawing some more.
If you look closely you can see how I assembled the second letter from Lisbon from the sketches I had done the days before:
Second Letter from Lisbon
Some details:
Detail from the second letter
First sketch of the scene
Sketch of the scene with colors only
Sketch of the scene with lines only
P.S. Both letters are now available on etsy: The first letter here, and the second letter here.
July 02 2011
Two Works in Progress for the Open Air Gallery
One of these is finished by now, as are most of the drawings for tomorrow, but one of them belongs to the last three I’m still working on today. If you know Berlin, you might already recognize the places they are depicting… I really like how they’ve turned out so far. If you’d like to see them finished and ‘in real life’, come visit me at the Open Air Gallery tomorrow! On the Oberbaumbrücke, 10:00–22:00, my booth is no 90.
June 21 2011
Paper Testing Swatches
All the paper swatches side by side. Left column: Fabriano Artistico 300 gsm hot press extra white, Fabriano Artistico 450 gsm hot press, Arches 185 gsm hot press, Hahnemühle 'Hahnemüle' 230 gsm extra-rough. In the middle at the bottom is a sheet of Arches Rives BFK. In the right column: 185 gsm Bristol paper, Hahnemüle 'Hahnemühle' watercolour board 200 gsm matt.
Fabriano Artistico 450 gsm hot press
Arches 185 gsm hot press
What is the perfect paper for my travel sketchbooks? I don’t yet know. I don’t even have a probable favourite yet. A couple of weeks ago I splurged on the test sheets shown above, only to find that not even the expensive 450 gsm Fabriano paper gives me that ‘oooh nice’ feeling I was hoping for. There are two main problems:
The grisly character of the paint once dry, found on both the lightweight Arches and the heavy Fabriano paper. Why does this happen? These are good watercolor papers, but I would expect this behaviour to put many people off. No smooth color coveradge. Or is something with my colors wrong, or my tap water, or whatever, because this is not nice and I would like to understand how it comes about.
Arches Rives BFK
Arches Rives BFK
The papers that take watercolor well are not fun to use a pen on and those that take pen well are strange and not really fun with the watercolors. So far, none of the watercolor papers allows for the smooth continous lines that I want from my pen (and am used to getting). The papers that do are the Bristol paper on which watercolors look flat and boring, and the Rives BFK printmaking paper on which watercolors work in very interesting and strange ways, but ultimately too strange for my taste right now. Also, at least the smooth side is really bad for pencil/graphite, and the stark difference between the sides makes this a bit more ‘interesting’ for bound books than I want.
The Hahnemühle papers are out because I’ve decided I’m going for a hot press paper. The paint looks great on the rough papers, smooth blending and flawless washes are really easy to achieve, but in the end I simply like drawing on smooth paper too much to choose the rough side. For me, even if not in every drawing but in the general order of things, pencil or pen drawing comes way before the watercolors. Also, I find I actually like the typical ‘flaws’ of wet work on hot press paper, the hard lines and strange patterns that appear unplanned just because there was a tiny bit too much water somewhere (as used to great effect for example in the sketches of Marc Taro Holmes, Wendy McNaughton and Amy Holliday if I’m not mistaken about their choice of paper).
So there is going to be more testing more papers, especially smooth drawing papers, but time is a bit tighter for this than I’d like. Ah well. I particularly have my eyes on the Fabriano ‘Disegno 4′ paper. Anyone any experience they can share?
P.S.: Some of us Berlin Urban Sketchers will participate in the ‘Rosenfest‘ at Rosenthaler Platz this saturday (me too):
15.00 Uhr
Rosenthaler Platz: „Urban Sketching“ auf dem Platz – Zeichnen für alle! Meeting Point: The Circus Hostel
Urban Sketching on the Rosenthaler Platz – come and join in! Meeting Point: The Circus Hostel
June 16 2011
Monochrome studies
I’m working on my values (after somewhat painfully realizing how important they are) in between producing ‘finished’ drawings for the Open Air Gallery (only two more weekends to prepare! Mats are expensive!). I’m also looking at my books a lot, trying to soak every bit of advice from those pictures before I leave, as I won’t be able to take them with me for consultation on the way.
Study Materials. From left to right and top to bottom: Rembrandt, Carl Blechen, John Ruskin, Robert Crumb, James Jean, William Turner, Whistler, and Paul Madonna.
Here I laid out some books on the floor to look at how different artists have drawn architecture in more or less monochromatic drawings, comparing different qualities of line and ways of organizing values, hoping something will rub off;-)
And, of course, I’m panicking a tiny bit more every day as the date of takeoff comes closer. I feel compelled to end lots of sentences with exclamation marks, as everything is so new! And exciting! And I’ve never done anything like it and I have no idea what I’m doing really and OMG my life is never going to be the same again! But then, that is of course always true.
June 02 2011
Tool bag for sketching stuff
I just got this tool bag for keeping my sketching utensils close without having to carry around a bag when I go out for a walk, and all my essentials fit in it! In the picture are my watercolors, sketchbook, propeller pencils, waterbrushes, a cloth to wipe the brushes, and (hidden) an eraser. A second sketchbook/pad, more pencils, water jar etc. would fit in as well. I think this will be great for the Urban Sketchers Symposium and following travels. (It is made by a company called ‘Demo’, but really I think that most standard tool bags would serve this purpose well. Also, it was less than 10 €, so not much risk to test it out.)
June 01 2011
Location Sketches
Insbrucker Platz (Ringbahn)
Wühlischstraße, 20 May.
RAW Area, 22 May.
Grünberger Straße, 31 May.
I have drawn this place before, and wasn’t satisfied at all.
Grünberger Straße, 16 April.
This week’s lines-only attempt feels much better. I’m in an analytic mood, trying to shake my sketching habits up a bit, mostly because I’ve been not feeling quite right about my watercolors for a couple of weeks now. I need to get my values right or my colors will erratically suck without me being able to do anything about it, I’m afraid, but I’ve been procrastinating on that. The desire to just make pretty pictures can be a trap—colors are seductive, at least before I have them applied. Every time I try to skip some exercise that I feel would help get me further, I end up producing crap, and wishing I had done the hard/annoying/necessary exercise instead. It just takes longer. This is not to say that the drawings above are completely without merrit—my criterium for judging my own drawings is not if they are any good or not, but rather how much the distance between what I wanted to do and what I did pains me when I look at them. I do rather like the line drawings above, though, and will probably put some washes on them over the weekend, to dig my heels into the study of values some more.
Also, sometimes I would like to be Paul Madonna for a couple of drawing days.
May 10 2011
Thoughts on Assembling Travel Sketching Supplies
Assembling the art supplies for my journey is quite a challenge: On the on hand I want to pack lightly, but on the other hand I find it hard to predict what I will need or not. There’s just so much I don’t know! For example I don’t know if the means I use to depict Berlin and London are as well suited to depicting other places, especially places with different light, different landscape, and other materials used in buildings. I’ll be gone for so long that I’m not sure if I will grow bored, say, with pencil or watercolor, or … or I might get into an especially experimental mood and suddenly want oil pastels or start missing my acrylics or whatever. I don’t know what will be available locally on the way (except that I expect most things to be available in Istanbul), and I don’t know how much of anything I’ll take I need: How much color will I go through? Is the small tube of cadmium red enough? How many pencils, pencil leads, how much paper? The only orientation I have is my trip to London last year, but how representative is last year’s me of this year’s me? I feel like I’m still learning a lot, especially about watercolors, so my work habits, methods and techniques are not yet fixed.
Recently I got some money back from my landlord and went supply shopping - this is what I came back with (from left to right): little boxes for my tubes, tube watercolors, both paints I had run out of and new ones to test (the reds), a masking pen, colored inks, some Derwent drawing pencils, a charcoal pencil, another Rotring Art Pen (1.5), gum arabic, two waterbrushes (I have lost my Kuretake), a small empty palette, and a testing pad of twelfe different Hahnemühle watercolor papers.
But whatever I’ll take, I’ll have to haul around for more than three months. So here are my criteria for what stuff not to take:
- Don’t take anything that needs fixative and/or smudges a lot.
- Don’t take anything that doesn’t dry overnight.
- Don’t take anything with a messy set-up or clean-up.
So out go pastels of any kind, conté crayons, charcoal, very soft graphite, oils, and acrylics. Phew. That leaves only pens, pencils, colored pencils and watercolors/gouache (and maybe ink & dip pens). Sounds manageable, right?
But which of all papers, especially those I haven’t even tested yet, is perfect for all my needs while away? Rough paper for the ease of handling washed and the gritty texture, or smooth paper for my love of lines? Lightweight paper that is easier to carry and cheaper to pay for, or heavy paper that can take all I throw at it without buckling or complaining? A pleasing warm natural/off-white or a bright/extra white for those days of blinding sun and the sparkle of cool colors? Self-bound sketchbooks with the perfect paper I will hopefully find or ready-made ones (much less work!)? All the same size and format or differing formats for variety ( all the same looks better!)? Can I adjust the sketchbook format to the stuff I will encounter before I’ve even been there? I don’t know if I will just want to draw still lives all day or panoramic vistas! If only one format, which? I don’t have a favorite format or brand of sketchbook yet, so should I just choose on randomly?
Sketching kit from last year's trip to London. This served me well, but that trip was just about a week...
How many different colors of each kind of medium should I take? One big watercolor palette or several different ones? How many and what kind of brushes to take? Maybe invest in a sable travel brush? (This also depends on the formats and weights of paper I take.) Any additional tools? A little folding stool would be great, but the one I tested was too heavy. A field easel? It would be nice to be able to work big and not have to hold the paper/sketchbook in hand all the time, but these are heavy and big, compared to the other things I want to take, so probably not worth it. Maybe a kind of drawing board, maybe like this but made myself to the size I need?
But I am trying to pare things down; I don’t want to carry (and maybe loose) stuff I don’t need, I want to focus on looking and drawing and not spend a lot of time picking the tools for the day. Right now I think I will travel with two or more watercolor palettes, one big with all my colors (still only 15), and a little one with my essential colors, somewhere between 5 and 7, then a case with some pencils and colored pencils (mostly neutral colors for details and texture), some waterbrushes, some writing pens filled with different inks, and a couple of pens for really fine lines, and my black brush pen for its beautiful swing. I’m not sure about the dip pens yet – I love them, but they are a bit too messy for location drawing, and presumably that will be most of the drawing I’ll do. I’m still testing my way through a couple of papers, and am pretty much lost on the questions of size/format/one paper or two/three different ones.
Any advice? If you have one, what does your travel sketch kit contain, and how long a journey does it last you? Do you ever get bored?
If you want a lot of information on sketching supplies, head over to Roz Stendahl’s blog, for example to this posting on travel palettes in watercolor and gouache. If you’d like to see other people’s sketching kits, my flickr gallery collects some of my favorites from people not me. Oh and the invaluable time sink that is handprint.com, for all things pigment and how they relate to watercolors and watercolor palettes and how the palettes relate to the paintings.
April 20 2011
On the Value of Values
I’m thinking about value and contrast, because I find that this is an aspect of drawing and painting that I have much less conscious control over than I would like. Sometimes I hit and sometimes I miss and I don’t necessarily understand why.
Hoping to learn more I’ve greyscaled the scans of some of my recent sketches, and looking at them I felt like somebody just struck my head with a club. I know all those wise words about how value does the work while color reaps the credit, how a painting works if the values are right and there just is no way to make it right if they don’t etc., but I think I’m just about to start understanding what they mean. Ouch! But look for yourself:
From all those sketches the one on the left side of the first image was my favourite to begin with, and I find that the greyscale version stands out as well. It looks almost photographic in a good way. Here it is again in a bit more detail:
This not just made me even more eager to spend some time exploring value and monochrome drawings, but it also reminded me that the means of picture making have to be suited to the subject to be depicted, and that blindly using a standard method of sketching might not be the most satisfying approach. For example I feel that some of the above watercolors might have been happier as line drawings, sometimes color can be downright superfluous, and sometimes it is the lines which aren’t needed.
Some insight into values by people who did not just notice their importance yesterday can be found in the respective blogs of Loriann Signori and Stapleton Kearns.
April 11 2011
First Sketches of Spring in New Handbound Watercolor Book
Yesterday afternoon the sun was warm enough to sit on the pavement. Just a few days before had I made myself a new sketchbook, so I wouldn’t miss to record too many spring days in it.
The cover is recycled from an old physics textbook I found somewhere, and the paper is Hahnemühle Burgund watercolor paper, with a rough and a smooth side. It is a bit heavy, but I couldn’t help myself: I wanted it to feel like a big book. It is not for quick train sketches but for occasions when I have at least 20 minutes to draw, and only for things in Berlin. I feel like I would be free to leave Berlin for good once I filled this book (but for now I’m not planning to leave, just to travel).
The first page in this book:
April 02 2011
Clean black lines
For the past weeks I’ve mostly stuck to my EF Rotring Art Pen, which glides over the smooth bright paper of my current sketchbook to produce clean black lines. The lines are not quite as thin as I would like them to be, with barely any variation at all. This forces me to know what I will do before I put pen to paper, to use fewer but more deliberate lines than in pencil.
These lines don’t allow for modeeling the way I’m used to, they make me look more for the bulk of the form, for outlines, trying to achieve the feeling of bulk through the outlines more than modelling through chaotic strokes all over. I realized that once I have clear outlines, I can play all kinds of games with them…
I’m deliberately experimenting with the placement of the figures on a page, in a planned way, and I like the results reminiscent of comics.
But I haven’t forgotten the fun in making a mess, and although most of my recent sketches started out with those black lines only, I’m still far from finished with testing what can be done to them once I get home. More about that in another post, first I have to scan some more…
February 04 2011
The Pleasure of Making a Mess
I have been experimenting with ink washes (brushing over ink lines with water) for some weeks, but it was only on Wednesday that the potential that lies in making a mess on a page started to dawn on me. Looking back, I usually prefer the dirtier of my drawings to the clean ones, smudged pencil and charcoal to slick pen lines. Not that there is no attraction to the clean lines, or no fun in experimenting with them, but the dirty stuff is where I feel most at home. That was one of the reasons why I started adding the washes to my pen sketches: I felt a need to un-clean them. But on Wednesday it hit me: Not just can I use the washes to bring out the forms in my drawings, to hint at light and shadow and make them a bit dirtier; I can completely work them over, smudge and mirror them until there is barely anything left than the ghost of a drawing, over which I can make new ones, playing off the ghosts.
The original page spreads, and how they look now:
Suddenly I understood how freeing it is to work with prepared pages the way Roz Stendahl has been doing and writing about it for ages. Before I understood it as more of a decorative thing, to make pages more colorful or use patterns so they become prettier to look at, or as a kind of inspiration device if you’re afraid you might run out of ideas what to draw. Neither appealed to me. For me, it is rather like the pleasure of jumping into a mudhole and just messing around. And then discovering that the mud is, in fact, chocolate. My heart starts racing when I just think about all the things I can suddenly do, all the ways in which I can prepare and work over my pages in layers. Because it is not just about smudging the ink (which can be done in so many interesting ways!), or pre-painting a bit, or even gluing in stuff and drawing over it – the thing that really makes this fascinating is the relationship between the layers. Drawings talking to each other.
This also makes me think hard about composition, in a good way. Page spreads become landscapes, and some pages suddenly find themselves to be paneled, as if they are about to become comics. It feels as if I just reinvented my sketchbook, as if this is where I was trying to go back when I started layering drawings done with different pens on the same page.
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