I’ve been trying to get away from my computer during lunch to do a little sketching.  I’ve been attempting a SketchTaro-esk style.  Mark’s one of the people I spend the day sketchcrawling with.  He uses 100# paper, pen, ink brush-pen, and he puts more detail in the center and lets everything just fade out the further away he gets from the subject.  So I was, you know, "trying" to do something like that :)

This last one is a sketch while chilling at home:

Observations:

1. By skipping the pencil and going straight to pen, you have to spend a lot more time planning before you touch the pen to the page to make a line. Because of this planning, you end up drawing front to back, instead of back to front.  For example, with oil on canvas or just pencil sketching, you start with the background.  Things like the horizon are the first thing you make, then you put things on top of that, like the background, then the foreground, finally, any details.

Using the pen is much more like the Chinese Brush Painting we were doing a while back.  You start with the closest object first, and you go backwards starting with foreground, then background, and then distant background and horizon.  So in the last image above, I drew the front corner of the cabinet first, then the camera on the tripod and all the things on top of the cabinet second.  After that was the book case, then everything on the wall, then the wall itself followed by the things behind the wall (kitchen and hallway).

2. I thought pen would be great because it’s not as messy and smudgy as pencil.  I was very wrong.  Ink is just as prone to smudging as pencil AND it’s more permanent.

3. I was starting to get the hang of using the darks and solid blacks to push things into shadow and give things depth.  You can see this in the sapling I did above.  I’m not totally there but applying a lot of black is starting to make more sense to me.  It’s good for pushing the eye to see depth.  Of course I’m still looking closely at Mark’s work to get a better understanding of how he applies so much solid black so brilliantly.

practice practice practice.
~Danny

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