The humble pencil, part II

You can read The Humble Pencil, Part I here.

Visual variety
However, it’s my opinion that drawings done with a variety of graded pencils are more visually interesting. The grays from the layered grades are just slightly different from each other as are their line qualities. Softer pencils tend to make an ever-widening, grainy line as they wear down quickly. Hard pencils hold a sharp point longer so they produce a finer, lighter line. When you layer these (hard over soft), you get a surface quality that is different from that made with a single grade of pencil. The harder pencils also work to fill in the surface “tooth” of the paper, which allows your darks and middle values to be strengthen by filling in the little white “holidays” that show through from the paper texture.

If you’re interested in working with graded pencils, you generally will want to start with the softer pencils in your shadow areas, say a 4B or 3B. As you build your darks and work out toward the middle and lighter values, try working with progressively harder pencils to fill in the tooth and create a finer texture. You don’t necessarily have to work your way through each and every “grade” but you do want to stick pretty much with that soft-to-hard progression.

Whatever you do, pick the right grade for the job. If you need a darker value, switch to a softer pencil. Trying to create darks by pressing down on a hard pencil will ruin your drawing by creating grooves in your paper. These will be impossible to remove or fill in. If you try to cover them with a softer lead, they’ll show up like a gravestone rubbing.

To smudge or not to smudge?
Many artists learned to work with pencil by smudging or smearing with tissues or those little gray rolled paper ‘stomps’. While a useful technique, this can also become somewhat of a crutch. If you work this way, you can achieve very, very delicate lights but this can be a problem if you think your work might be reproduced. It’s difficult for those delicate lights to be printed accurately along with the darkest darks.

Smudging can also get messy. It’s a lot harder to keep your whites clean – and whites never look as good if you have to clean them up after the fact.

Personally, I prefer the look of unsmudged pencil work, with all the delicate textures and values created by that tiny pencil point.

Even if you’re not deliberately smudging your drawing, you will find it can happen anyway. It’s always a good idea to keep a clean sheet of paper under your drawing hand to help keep stray smudges and skin oils off your drawing.

Making Changes
One of the beauties (and drawbacks) of pencil is that it’s easy to erase. For this little job, you basically have two choices. “Pink Pearl” erasers have been around for years and they are the eraser of choice for big scrub-outs. They have enough grit to erase (generally) cleanly, but not so much that they’ll damage your paper surface.

The other eraser that pencil artists rely on for small details is the kneaded rubber eraser. These are dark gray, and if you warm them up in your hand for a few minutes they can be pulled and kneaded into a fine point for picking out small highlights or cleaning up an edge. They’re awkward to use for large areas and if you try, you will notice they leave behind a bit of grit that alters the tonal quality of the redrawn area. As always, it’s important to use the right tool for the job.

Also, keep in mind that the softer B pencils erase much more cleanly than the harder H’s. In fact, marks from the higher numbered H’s are almost impossible to eliminate.

Fix It!
Finished pencil drawings should generally have a light coat of spray fixative applied to them to guard against smudging until you can have the drawing framed. Use a product made especially for fixing art, not hairspray (which will eventually yellow your drawing).

Working Surfaces
The subject of artists’ papers would need a post of its own, but in simplest terms you want to work with pencil on a paper surface that has some “tooth”. Tooth refers to the roughness of the surface – you need at least a little tooth for the pencil to cling to. A super-smooth slick (coated) paper would be very frustrating to work on with pencil. Look for a good drawing “vellum” with a medium surface or a “cold press” illustration board. Either of those will get you started.

Experiment
As with all artists’ mediums, you will have to experiment with your materials. There is no other way to learn your stuff than by trying different options and keeping what works for you. Try different papers. Sample different pencil brands. No two artists will have the same preferences. You’ll eventually come to love some and reject others. Some combinations will feel absolutely right to you and will be incorporated into your repertoire and will eventually become part of your style. Good luck and don’t forget to have fun!

Strange beauty

21st Century picture framing

When I was in high school, I worked at a small mom-and-pop frame shop. My job was to cut mats and assemble the final frame package (moulding, glass, mats, art and backing plus hanging hardware). It was great experience for a young artist. The way we did it then, and the way it’s still done when you take a piece of art somewhere to be framed is you look at zillions of matboard corner samples, play with different combinations until you find something you like and then finally pick a moulding to complement it all. That’s probably the ideal way to do it still and it does take a fair bit of time – this is not something that can be done in 10 minutes. A good frame shop is heavy on customer service because of this.

However, the major obstacle after having acquired a piece of art is actually remembering to take it somewhere to have the framing done! I often wonder how much art gets purchased but then ends up in a closet, under the bed or behind a door, waiting forever for this last step to be completed.

Well, enter the internet and print-on-demand (POD) with framing-on-demand. You have the image you’re buying right there on the screen, and then they give you a large selection of mat colors to choose from – tans, reds, white and creams, greens, etc. You can choose up to 3 mats – changing out each one and generally having a grand old time playing with the color combinations. Then you go to the frame selections – again, quite a lot of choice. Just click on the ones you like and like magic, the virtual art – with its virtual mats in place – “tries on” the virtual mouldings. When you’re satisfied, you pick a glazing (acrylic, glass, etc.), finish your order and the piece is printed and framed “on demand”. A week or so later the art is delivered to your door. It’s like a frame shop video game!

I’ve decided to offer prints of some of my work through an online POD service. (These are not available just yet – I’ll let you know when!) And the company I’ve decided to work with also offers a framing option. The art images are uploaded with a color profile embedded in the file for color accuracy. They look very good on my monitor and the moulding and frame samples seem to be displayed with the same care. They even give you a little interactive scale diagram thingy so you can judge the relative size of the framed piece on the wall.

Still, I do believe in supporting locally owned business. FOD services like this could hurt local frame shops, so if you have a real, locally owned, mom-and-pop place where the owners have the expertise to assist you, I’d encourage you to use them as a first choice. But if you’re a procrastinator, you live in an area where framers don’t exist, or you only have access to the framing department of some big box arts-and-crafts chain, then online framing just might be the better option.

On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow…

(Lyric from I Am a Rock by Paul Simon)

Tire art

These photos were forwarded from Gail Brill’s Green Circle group up in Saranac Lake, NY. These tire sculptures are amazing but there was no information in the email about the artist(s). I’d love to give credit where credit is due – but I have no idea who created these. If you know, let me know!

I hope the “raw materials” weren’t steel belted – I imagine they’d be extra tough to work with.

Anyway, here are a few of the amazing tire sculptures. Enjoy!

The humble pencil, part I

 “Oh, rarely had the words poured from my penny pencil with such feverish fluidity.”

– Ralphie, in A Christmas Story

Early literary efforts aside, many artists will tell you that the humble pencil was their first real art medium. Not counting the crayons we all colored with as children, I clearly remember that my first serious efforts were pencil drawings.

Consider the advantages of pencils. They’re lightweight, require no messy solvents or water to work, clean-up is a snap and – as art supplies go, anyway – are relatively cheap. They only require a drawing surface (which is widely available) plus a couple of accessories (erasers and a sharpener) and you’re in business. What’s not to love?

Still, if you’re new to art and have visited any good art stores to look at the drawing materials, you’ll have some decisions to make if you want to work in pencil.

Making the grade

Unlike the ubiquitous yellow Ticonderoga No. 2’s we’ve known forever, artists’ drawing pencils are sold in a large number of ‘grades’ ranging from very soft to very hard. The grades are designated by those little markings stamped on the end of the pencil: 4H or 3B for example.  (For obvious reasons, you should never sharpen the stamped end!) All together, the grades can be arranged like this:

 8B 7B 6B 5B 4B 3B 2B B HB F H 2H 3H 4H 5H 6H 7H 8H 9H

‘B’ stands for ‘Black’; that is, you can get a nice black mark with little effort from these soft pencils. ‘H’ stands for ‘Hard’, which is pretty much self explanatory. The higher the number, the harder or softer the pencil is.  So an 8H is harder than a 5H and a 7B is softer than a 3B. Or to put it another way, a 7B is softer than a 3B which is softer than a 5H which is softer than an 8H.

Graded pencils also come in two flavors – the familiar wood cased leads or the uncased mechanical drafting pencil leads. If you want to use the latter, you will have to buy plastic/metal mechanical lead holders that allow the leads to be stored inside the pencil. As you might imagine, a lead in a holder cannot be sharpened in a standard hand- or electric pencil sharpener. Instead you’ll have to purchase a little gizmo known as a “lead pointer”. The advantage of these leads is they can be sharpened to a much finer point if you’re really into precision. But be careful and don’t stab yourself! (Um…yeah, I’ve done it. Drew blood in fact.)

The wood-cased pencils are often sold in sets with one each of several grades in a tin or box. Both the wood and drafting leads are also sold individually, so you can stock up on as many of your favorite grades as you like.

Do you need them all?

Nope. I generally recommend getting one of the sets, or buying individual pencils in just the even or odd grades (4B, 2B, HB, etc.) In fact, you can do just fine with one grade (generally a soft one).  Some artists prefer this; they modify their “values” (shades of gray or lightness/darkness) by varying the pressure on the pencil. Harder pressure makes a darker mark, lighter pressure makes…well, you get the idea.

If you want to work with a single pencil, you might look for ‘Ebony’ pencils. These are very soft, roughly the equivalent of an 8B, so buy a bunch of them! They wear down quickly and will need repeated sharpening as you work. Because of their easy dark drawing qualities they’re ideal for quick, loose sketching approaches where you want to cover a lot of ground quickly. However, they can also be used for more formal rendering techniques.

Continued in Part II…

Hellboy movie poster art

I have long been an admirer of illustrator Drew Stuzan’s work and today I finally got to see his absolutely fabulous DVD, Conceiving and Creating the Hellboy Movie Poster Art. (I must admit that since I’m much more into art than movies, someone actually had to explain to me who/what Hellboy is.) This DVD is, hands down, one of the top 2 or 3 “how to” art videos I’ve seen.

The first part of the video demonstrates the conceptual process that that goes into developing the final poster image you see at the theater. The best part for me however, was seeing how he goes about building the finish art from the gessoed illustration board up.

The beginning stages are all about establishing the image in black and white, starting with a pencil drawing (which nearly always shows through in the finish, a signature aspect of his style) and building on that with black and white acrylic. This is his version of the time-honored old masters’ technique of grisaille underpainting, and it could certainly stand on its own.  However, unlike the traditional method of adding color with oil glazes, Struzan then builds transparent acrylic color over the grisaille with an airbrush. He follows this with colored pencil detailing to finish up.

Even if you don’t know his name, you’re almost certainly familiar with Struzan’s work from his Star Wars and Indiana Jones posters. Enjoy the trailer:

 

Got Geese!

After several days of studying the painting, I began to get some ideas of what to do to move it along. I shortened the log and changed the shoreline in the foreground as well as on the left and in the background. I think this gives the water a more natural, random shape than before and in a vague way, it sort of echos the shapes in the sky which adds interest.

I finally decided where the geese should go…on the right in the middle distance. It’s just a small family group – from the turning leaves on the left shore, you can tell it’s very late summer so the family’s goslings are nearly adult size. These geese behaved like wild geese when I was shooting the reference photos. As soon as they spotted me, they began moving off into the water, toward the far shore. This is very different from the local Mal-Wart geese that hang out around the local mall. When the fields were bulldozed to make way for the mall, the existing wetlands and ponds were retained to handle the storm water runoff from the acres and acres of pavement and roofs. The wetlands attract quite a variety of waterfowl and it’s a great area to get fairly close-up photos. But the resident geese have learned that where there are people, there is food – people stop and throw them chunks of bread and bagels from the local Panera Bread place.

I love Canada geese. I think they’re very striking, elegant creatures but I know a lot of people hate them because they poop all over golf courses and other areas where they congregate. (Officials think it was a couple of Canada geese that brought down that jet into the Hudson a couple weeks ago.) I guess I don’t understand “hating” geese or deer or any other wild creature. It’s human activity and development that has created so much ideal habitat for these species; our never-ending suburban sprawl has forced them to live among us. The geese and deer are just doing what comes naturally in the only spaces they have left: our gardens and mall marshes and putting greens. We’re the ones that have created the problem but I guess folks afflicted with nature deficit disorder will never understand that.

Still thinkin'…

I’ve come to one conclusion about my painting…the log is too long. It’ll be a few days before I have any chance to make changes, but I’ve pretty much decided that the log will lose a couple feet out there near the water.

Now THIS is a Sunset!

Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860
Frederic Edwin Church 1826 -1900
Oil on canvas, 40″ x 64″

“Twilight in the Wilderness marks the culmination of Church’s passion for the American wild. A technical and imaginative tour de force, it brought to a climax the series of New England sunset paintings, including Twilight, ‘Short Arbiter ‘Twixt Day and Night’ (1850) and Mount Ktaadn (1853), that had preoccupied Church throughout his career, and provides perhaps his definitive attempt to encapsulate American national identity in a single canvas.”

-Andrew Wilton & Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) 129-131.

(The colors in the above image are a little dull; a much better reproduction appears in the book.)

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