Gesture Line

Time for basics. The year started with “Gesture Line” as a topic in the Tuesday Sketch. The experience turned out to be a mini experiment. Adventures looking for a gesture line.

I thought I had gesture lines down. Mine were recognizable as such by my peers, a long time ago! The hare took a nap, eh? I give you a bit of my search for the elusive gesture line. Should be the first thing you see, right? :)

So I picked a reference image of a lady in a courtsey pose. I suppose I could have picked a pose with more obvious gesture lines, but here we go. If you’re wondering, its from Stephen Silver’s Pose Book app.

Some initial unfocused attempts at finding a gesture line.  I used a Tombow brush pen to throw myself off. Finding more shapes than lines, eh? Focusing.

Some of these lines could be mistaken for gesture lines. Loosen up, and the lines start to make sense. Going for “flow” or visual “action”. The pose was strange, so I came up with a few lines that I think can hold it up.

And here they are. For some reason the shoulders seemed like a good starting point. And of course, the crown of the head starts one main line. The crossed legs complicated things, making this an awkward balance for the figure. I think this is how it goes to the Tuesday Sketch… very very rough. I’ll finish something off of these lines soon.

My lesson: Practice your basics frequently. Better to be in shape when you need it.

Have a great art time, and thanks for dropping by!

Tom’s Water-based Ink

This is a “Pen Experiment” I suppose. Regardless, there is reason enough to post as such! I was very happy to receive a Tombow dual brush pen set (6-greyscale) to play with! These pens have both brush & micron-like tips, making them handy to flip and change while inking. Here are some inked sketches and images.

By The way, these are water-based ink pens. The ink, I find, may bleed if you lay it on thick, and even if up close (two different shades touching) it may bleed together. Of course, you can smudge the ink together as easily.

This is the original fish (posted prev?) was with a micron, or fountain pen. I used more shades. Inking black was satisfying (the eyes on the candy creature below, etc), but the shades were good texture.

A bigger version of that “view fish” or “ufish” organic sub thing. It was first printed with photo-blue right on sketchbook paper, which then got the ink brush/pen treatement.

And here are The Brothers. Also done with Tombows. You can still see the photo-blue. LOL The heads were from another sketch, also for the 30 Character Challenge.

Oh yeah, the bottom line? I like alcohol based inks and how the dry. This water based ink dries quick enough to use, and not mix if you are careful. I suppose its good for mixing with water colors. That’s an experiment worth pondering.

Hope you liked it, thanks for visiting, and have a great art time!

Return to Dip Island

Broke out the old set of drawing dip pens. My wife was going on about how she got to sand her fountain pen tips and made them write smoother. I tried them and noticed the difference. She has 6 or 7 fountain pens now,, and she is really enthusiastic about with new found hobby.

I asked her to sand my drawing ink tips, but I was impatient and did it myself. After sanding and cleaning, I printed a “photo blue” version of one of my “standard” subjects to try out the little rascals. As you may see, lack of practice shows. That’s 6 to 8 months w/o dipping ink. Not that I ever practiced that much. The thick lines are a tell-tale sign that I covered mistakes. Getting used to the steady and straight strokes was kind of hard at first, but by the end, I was closer to the motions and angles. With a brush, you sort of stroke away from yourself. But with a dip pen, a stricter angle and motion is required. Simply put, there is only one direction that you can use to draw with these tips, and the angle is strict if you want a steady ink line. I combined strokes to the side with strokes toward myself to get what I wanted (after getting used to it, of course). I started wider tips, and finished with narrow ones. I also used regular copier paper, which came close to ripping in the solid black areas. Thankfully, the ink dried quickly, and I was lucky.

Anyway, it was fun to sit there, and patiently dance with the line that slow dance the ink makes you do. As well, that India drawing ink sure dries up fast. Something that helped avert smudge city. I hope you like this. I’ll try to get more experimental with my dip ink drawings in the future, but for now, it was a good experience, and a reminder that there are all kinds of tools out there to draw with, and you can make them do what you want. Oh yeah… robot says hi! Thanks for dropping by, and always have a great art time.

Sketchbook Experiment

Hi there! Long time, eh? Time has been a factor. Day job time creeping into my art time. But if you know of me, you’ve probably heard that song before.

A good friend, Krishna Sadasivam of PC Weenies fame, referred to a post by, and about Gary Panter, “Gary Panter’s Drawing Tips“, where Gary delineated an approach to using sketchbooks that I really liked. Panter listed some steps to get one going with sketchbooks, filling them up, and that also focused on drawing practice. My natural modus operandi, as of lately, has been: start a piece, work on it, dedicate your art time fully to it. With my time constraints, this has not been convenient, and my practice time has suffered. I’ve been learning even less because of this. Panter has a great approach to sketchbooks that in my case, tackle my time problem, and lends itself to aleviate my current situation: very short art sessions. I’m focusing on the first step: sectioning off a sketchbook page into many squares, and drawing anything on them, one by one… namely, from his post: “…name every object you can think of and draw each thing in a box, not repeating…” I didn’t name them, per se, but took each square to draw the first thing I could think of. There will be more, not that I’ll post them all in here, but you may see them if you follow me online.

The next step involves picking one of those objects, and drawing them with your eyes closed! Image that! That will be in the next experiment post. I found Gary Panter’s article very interesting, worthy of a series of experiments here at the lab. So stick around. I’ll try post more frequently. Have a great art time, my friends!