miniature art – Carve & Draw

Moon Licht (wip)

So I pulled out some old CDs and been listening to Cirque Du Soliel’s, “Varekai” soundtrack which is the inspiration for this little piece I’m calling “Moon Licht”, titled after a song from the soundtrack. I think it means moon light but I’m not quite sure.
I’ve been working on it for a week now. Usually I would be finished but I’ve switched out my 0.20mm nibbed pens for 0.15mm pens. It seems like a rather insignificant change but it makes such a big difference. I decided to switch because when working in smaller spaces the size of the inked dots will look bigger causing a more grainy effect, which honestly, has been annoying me. The times that I work in color it’s not as bothersome but when working in just black and white, it’s so much more noticable to me and therefore irksome. I really want a more even and smooth finish so I needed a smaller nib and luckily Sakura Pigma made a pen with a nib smaller then their 0.20mm that’s at an affordable price for a pack of six.
Now if you take a close look at my work in progress above, you can see the difference. The lower half of the art card was inked using a 0.20mm nib while the upper half of the night sky was inked using a 0.15mm nib. It’s a bit grainy on the lower half and smoother at the top. Although that smoother look is the desired effect I’m striving for, the major draw back to working with a smaller nib is that it takes more time and effort to get that look…and that’s just for one layer of ink. If I want a deeper black I’ll need to go back over it with a second, possibly a third layer of ink. Thank goodness I prefer to work on a small scale otherwise a drawing say the size of 14 x 17 could take two lifetimes worth of patience. 😊

Tiny Art

Back when I was in college my art professors were fond of fussing at me for making my drawings too small. Like most art classes we were always instructed to get a 20×24 pad of newsprint sketching paper, upon which we drew everything. Blind contours, still life, life drawings, nudes, whatever they put before us, we had to draw it…on them damned 20×24 pads of newsprint, using every inch of space there was. The size was overwhelming to me and I hated it. I also hated lugging that thing around, making it so bloody obvious that I was an art student. Til this day whenever I see newsprint I have a knee jerk reaction of disgust. Needless to say, all the fussing didn’t change anything. I still draw small but who would have knew that after all those years “tiny art” would become a thing. With the internet, particularly with social media sites like Instagram, I’m stumbling across more and more artists who have an affinity for the small. Maybe this trend will become a huge deal and more galleries will be open to doing more shows featuring these small works of mastery. I count myself among the many who create miniature art and wanted to share a few that I have come across so far.