As the temperature gradually drops and scary flicks litter my movie recommendations on Roku, the spirit of Halloween begins to creeps in. With the dread of candy corn and other sweet treats to rotten my teeth beckoning me, I turn my attention to a set of Derwent drawing pencils that I purchased over a decade ago and focus on drawing one of the few creatures that remind me of the season…bats.
I can’t say that I’m a big fan of bats. One time, back when I was a teen, we had one living in our attic and it swooped down and almost got caught in my hair. It scared the begeezus out of me and I haven’t cared for them since…unless you’re talking about those cute, fruit eating flying foxes from the bat family.
Flying Fox
So, like I mentioned earlier, I had some Derwent drawing pencils I had never used just sitting in the drawer of my drawing desk. I’m more fond of mechanical pencils but I was up for using something a little different since I was anticipating a need for a much darker lay of graphite than what the 4b lead of my 0.5 Draftmatic pencil could lay down. I pulled out a Derwent 6b and 9b pencil and a 2b 0.3mm mechanical pencil and a 4h 0.7mm mechanical pencil and got to working on a basic sketch.
Mini pencil drawing of a flying fox.
I hadn’t intended on being long with this. Initially I wanted to leave it half finished because I just personally have an affinity for partially finished drawings. But I couldn’t do it and the next thing I know I had spent two hours on this mini drawing of a flying fox. This was just for fun and practice so it was time well spent but it’s amazing how time can slip away from me while I’m drawing.
Now this isn’t the first time I’ve drawn something from the bat family. During the Halloween season of 2018 I did a artist card, pen and ink stipple drawing, of a flying fox that has since gone on to a new home. But since doing this recent pencil drawing, I now feel happily inspired to do another pen and ink piece of another one of these adorable Chiropteras. This has turned out to be a much healthier distraction from gorging myself on Halloween candy and binging scary movies. 😏
I’ve been away for a long while and much has happened since my last post but I don’t want to get into all of that, if ever, at the moment. I only want to return to the quiet simplicity of this blog and simply sketching with pencil.
The fall weather has got the bunnies frolicking around my yard and I felt compelled to capture a likeness of the little creatures with some sketches. It felt good to just pick up a mechanical pencil, my sketchbook and without any plans or objectives, just get lost in a sketch or two. These progressed to more than just a simple sketch but that can happen when you zone out and find some peace with pencil and paper.
The holidays aren’t over yet. We have one more festive day to celebrate before we start a new and hopefully a much better year but in the meantime I hope everyone had a pleasant as possible Christmas. This year, to my surprise, Santa brought me a new technical pen for Christmas. When I got it I was excited yet a bit hesitant. You see, I have a history with technical pens and it’s not good. My first experience with these finicky things came by way of a set of Koh-I-Noor pens. Initially they were great for creating amazing stipple drawings. I loved how I could get more uniformed dots and I liked how the ink had a bit of a glossy finish when it dried. Besides being my first set of technical pens, Koh-I-Noor holds a special place in my heart for being the pens I used to create one of my most memorable drawings, “Kneeling Man” (shown below), which was based off of the cover of Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth.
“Kneeling Man” – this is from a time in my life when I had the patience of a saint and no distractions.
Outside of that the set was a nightmare when it came to maintenance and cleaning. If you didn’t use them frequently and keep them clean, the ink would harden, making them difficult to use and clean. This was something I wasn’t particularly good at keeping up with. Within two years my pens were pretty much unusable due to unuse and my lack of maintenance skills. After that experience a decade passed before I ventured out into the world of technical pens again and tried the Rotring Rapidiograph. This pen was different from the Koh-I-Noor in that instead of having a reservoir for ink that needed to be filled manually with a billion parts to clean, it had a small cartridge of ink that you simply inserted into the barrel, shake it a few times and voila, you’re ready to start drawing. This was great. Less mess and parts to clean when refilling ink. And for a while I loved my Rapidiograph but the wonderfulness didn’t last long. Instead of having issues with maintenance and cleaning, I had issues with ink flow and the needle in the nib. I ended up having to buy another Rapidiograph only to have the same problem and mind you, these aren’t cheap pens. Depending on where you get them from and what size you get, you’re looking at spending $25-$35 per pen. So if you’re not fortunate enough to be one of those artists who is raking in the dough from their work, having to fork out $30 every time a pen malfunctions for some odd or unknown reason becomes frustrating and costly.
After spending $75 total on two Rotring Radiographs then turned out to be faulty, I said to hell with it and started searching for drawing tools more feasible to my bank account. That’s when I discovered Pigma Microns and have been using them ever since. For $13 I can get six pens in a set (that’s about $2 per pen). They have felt tips and are filled with archival pigmented ink. I have no worries about leaking ink, malfunctioning nibs or inconsistent ink flow. Over time though the felt nib wears down and the pen eventually runs out requiring the need for a new one but at $2 per pop it doesn’t feel no where near the expense as the more fancy technical pens out there. But because of that you do get this sense of feeling less professional especially when you see more of the big named ink slingers using pens like Rotring while noticing that the so called amateurs and “kiddies” are using Microns. Funny how perception can effect how you feel about your own work which is why you need to be careful as to how much attention you give to what other artists are doing. So here I am once again trying out a Rotring. This time it’s a Isograph rather than a Rapidiograph. The difference is that the Isograph uses a reservoir instead of a cartridge which means I have a little bit of clean up to do when I have the refill it. And unlike the Microns, which I don’t have to worry about ink hardening or inconsistent flow from lack of use, I’m going have to be mindful of how I store this Isograph and make sure I use it frequently in order to avoid ink flow issues. In order words, this damn pen in high maintenance. 😒 But hey, on the good side, I didn’t pay for it and so far, when drawing the ink is more richly black, maybe a little too black. Anyhoo, I will still be using my Microns along side my new Rotring. Maybe, as they say, “Third times a charm”, since this is my third time on this merry go round. Maybe this time I’ll become a believer or at the least, this Rotring will become a valuable asset to my arsenal of art supplies…or not. If this thing crashes and burns on me I’m not going to mourn the loss but simply toss it in the trash and no longer give any thought to these fancy technical pens.
Saturday night I got a bit ambitious and tackled kettle stitching. First off I have to mention that this feat probably would have never happened if I hadn’t of been blindsided by my sweet tooth and been hyped up on cake and oatmeal cookies. (We all have our weaknesses.) I had spent the day watching bookbinding videos on various stitching techniques and found myself interested in kettle stitching. To me it seemed the easiest to grasp of all the stitching techniques that I watched yet still rather challenging so I really didn’t have any real intentions on trying it. But late in the evening I was full of energy. Too much to sit down and stipple, which requires me to be in a less excitable mood. So I opted to make a blank journal using kettle stitching.
In this project I used two precut 5×7 mat boards, some cardstock, two images from an old wolf calendar I had (by the way, if you didn’t know, I love wolves), an elastic band and bookmark I cut from an old Mokeskine journal, waxed thread, a needle, a corner rounder (I think that’s what it’s called and 72 sheets of paper cut and folded to the appropriate size. I first made the case cover which is why I needed 72 sheets of paper. The sheets I grouped into six signatures (this is a group of folded sheets) of 12 sheets. Most examples I watched used signatures of four sheets, if I had of done that, I would still be stitching right now. After making the signatures I made the proper holes with an awl to prepare for threading. Now I won’t go into all the details on kettle stitching, it would be better to watch the video below that shows the technique I used if you’re curious to know the basics of how it’s done.
Once I got my text block ready I glued two end papers to the front and back of the block. And to keep from getting long winded, in a nutshell, I glued those end papers to the inside cover of the case I had already made and voila, I had a hot mess of a wolf journal on my hands.
You can’t see from the pictures but the first mistake I made was attempting to stitch such a large number of sheets for the first time. I blame the sugar for my lapse of good judgment. Second, I didn’t keep the thread tight as I was stitching which made the binding a bit loose and this led to a rather uneven cutting of the pages when I trimmed the excess. Initially I was disappointed with how it turned out but I had to remind myself that it was my first attempt and mistakes are a given. Sometimes I put too much pressure on myself but some things just take time to learn so I’ll be tackling kettle stitching again. Anyways I’m not going to let some paper and thread defeat me. Overall it was fun and I look forward to mastering this technique. ☺
I didn’t think I would be able to do it but I got my idea of a mouse with mushrooms to fit onto an artist card. I started off working at a larger size but it didn’t seem to look right to me. I’m beginning to wonder, by me being so accustomed to working on such a small scale, I now have difficulty working at a larger size? It’s like my brain can’t fathom such a thing. Then again maybe working on a small scale is really just my natural disposition and I should just hone my strengths rather than worry about my perceived weaknesses. Unfortunately I often get the impression from the art world that there’s much more interest and focus on large works of art that can fit the span of a living room wall. Due to that, at times I feel this pressure within, to match what I see and strive to stretch myself and to do something on a much more grand scale. But in all honesty, I find something cozy and quaint about small works of art that suits me more than I like to admit. As an American, born and bred in a culture that likes to do everything BIG, it seems almost unAmerican to churn out these little works of art, especially when I have some people who ask, “Why don’t you do anything larger?” Anyhoo, so far this little scene fits nicely in the space provided and I’m excited to see how it’s going to turn, which is a good sign because if I’m not excited about my work it becomes so much harder to do.
Carve & Draw 