Various bits and pieces

 At least for the moment, I have decided to tone down all efforts at producing or selling marketable work. It's much more fun doing whatever I feel like, and so, I have been doing some of that, mostly in the form of pencil or ballpoint pen sketches of various things - whatever struck me as visually interesting. 

I have also rediscovered the joys of working from direct observation rather than reference photos. Not to mention, in the absence of any pressure to produce stuff I can sell, working with the cheapest of materials. These are all smallish sketches on common old printer paper.

Of South Africa's once impressive rail system, preciously little is left nowadays. Sad, perhaps, but it also resulted in lots of derelict buildings, a subject which I have always found very enticing for both photography and art. Someone posted a photo of one such slowly disintegrating station building on Twitter, and I made a sketch of it, in ballpoint pen:

In the west we have a strange love-hate relationship with technology. We want our laptops and microwaves and such, but we don't want to see any sign of the industries that produce or power them. And thus, we paint pretty pictures of flower gardens, but heaven forbid we use grimy industry as subject matter. 

Well, not so with me, particularly now that I no longer care whether my work sells or indeed whether anyone else likes it. Personally I find industry quite beautiful - it's the very engine of civilization. Hence, a sketch of electric pylons silhouetted against a sunset sky:

Vincent van Gogh painted this little Dutch Reformed Church in his home town early in his career. The building still exists, so I decided to emulate the great if crazy painter by making a version in pencil. Alas, my attempt cannot compete with his:

And some random stuff sketched from life:

I sketched these tomatoes in the garden, in a sketchbook. To prevent the graphite from smudging I sprayed it with a layer of fixative, but this had the effect of rendering the paper partially transparent, so a watercolor sketch on the other side shows through. So we learn: from now on, I'll use only one side if I'm going to spray fixative!

For this wooden toy truck, I experimented with combining ballpoint pen and graphite pencil. I rather like the result:

I still get up to no good all over the web...

Assorted sketches

Sketches, mostly birds, in ballpoint pen and colored pencil:

Some random sketches

I have been taking a break from painting in order to study up on some aspects of art that have always eluded me. How long I'll be busy with that, I don't know, but I'll post the occasional sketch here just to keep the blog alive.

Two still life sketches done from life:

And two in ballpoint pen plus colored pencil, cobbled together from various reference photos:

I have actually been itching to take up the brushes again, so perhaps I'll soon succumb to temptation and paint something...

Fallen things

After an evening storm, another batch of fallen leaves and blooms. Ballpoint pen and watercolor pencil on paper:

Autumn Treasures

Autumn in the southern hemisphere. I have long loved weathered late-season leaves, and this time of year there is such a glut one doesn't know where to start. On my morning walk, I collected a bagful, and sketched some in ballpoint and watercolor pencil...

Garden sketches

I went out into the garden, and sketched whatever caught my eye. Ballpoint pen with watercolor pencil.

In the meantime...

I have been rather busy, getting my latest children's book ready for publication. It's the first one with lots of color pictures, so there are all manner of technical considerations of which I knew little when I started out, so I am going through a rather steep learning curve, so I have little time for much else. But I did try to fit in some experimental bits and pieces and random sketches.

I now and then indulge in these rather relaxing and meditative pseudo-mosaics, done in ballpoint and colored pencil:

A botanical sketch:

A quick colored pencil sketch after Van Gogh:

And some experimental watercolors, after YouTube tutorials:

I hope to put final touches on the new book by the end of next week, but who knows - things always take much longer than planned!

Heads and cows and things

I have been rather busy drawing illustrations for the latest children's book I'm working on. In between, made time for the Instagram "100 heads" challenge. Here are #12 - 15:

And a selection of the illustrations. The mostly empty pages will be filled up a bit with text. That, at least, is the present plan. The thing has not quite come together yet; I may or may not make extensive changes:

More sketches and illustrations

A few more sketches for the Instagram "100 heads" challenge thing:

And some more illustrations for my latest children's book. Lots more still need to be done:

Gnome Alert (2)

Another batch of illustrations for my soon-to-be-available children's book The Garden Gnome's Journey. Watch this space for updates!

My other book, a youth adventure novella titled The Ten Horns, is available here:

The Ten Horns

Flying Things

Studies of marabous:

And a helicopter:

Pen and watercolor on printer paper.

And a few more

Some more random sketches in ballpoint pen and watercolor, on printer paper:

A few random sketches

Some sketches in watercolor on printer paper (which works perfectly fine for watercolor sketching, if you don't mind a bit of warping and they don't have to last into geological time):

Loosely copied after an original by Pieter van der Westhuizen (1931 - 2008); I went straight into the watercolor without making any sort of preliminary sketch, so it's not exactly accurate. But it forced me to loosen up a bit, which was partly the point.

And a similarly loose copy after an oil by Maggie Laubser (1886 - 1973), whose work I admire:

Sketched from various reference photos; I first made the sketches in ballpoint pen and then filled them in with a few washes of color:

A Medieval project (4)

In the previous part of this project, I worked on the page layout of my fake parchment. For the next part, the instructor wanted students to experiment with various aspects of writing, in preparation for writing the manuscript. In particular, three aspects of writing will be investigated, namely ductus, angle and weight.

1. With ductus is meant the number and direction of pen strokes, as well as the order in which they are made.There are four basic strokes that make up letters: vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved. With modern ballpoint pens, we tend to forget about ductus, because with these pens, it often does not matter that much - they give a line of uniform appearance, irrespective of how the pen is pulled or pushed on the writing surface.

Individuals will nevertheless develop their own way of doing it. I seem to remember being taught this in primary school as well, though I can't be too sure, as my older brother taught me to read and write before I went to school, and so I never paid much attention in those classes! Nowadays, at least here in South Africa, many schools seem not to put much emphasis anymore on how a pen should be held and how the pen strokes should be made.

As noted above, with ballpoint pens it does not matter as much as with older writing implements such as fountain pens or dip pens, as we shall shortly see.

In the illustration below I indicate the ductus of some letters made with two different implements. The top line shows the basic strokes. In the second line, I indicate the direction and order in which strokes were made. This applies to my own handwriting, and will not be universal with all people.

In the third line I continued the analysis, this time comparing a ballpoint pen with a dip pen. With the ballpoint letters, one hardly needs to indicate ductus, because with a ballpoint the letters can really be formed with a single, continuous stroke. With a dip pen, on the other hand, you rapidly run into trouble if you try to use it in the same way as a ballpoint, because the dip pen nib cannot readily be pushed forward; all strokes must be made with a pulling motion. With the letters in ballpoint, I could use a single motion and just change direction, without having to lift the pen, whereas with the dip pen I had to make separate pen strokes, as indicated.

2. The writing angle refers to the angle at which a pen's nib is held with respect to the horizontal or vertical. As with ductus, in the case of a ballpoint pen it makes no difference, and indeed, because of the symmetrical shape of the ballpoint nib the term doesn't even make much sense when talking about writing done in ballpoint.

With dip pens of the sort used during the Middle Ages, it makes quite a difference, as can be seen in the diagram below. Changing the angle at which the nib is held creates quite different letter shapes. This is particularly noticeable when using  broad nib. With thinner nibs the difference is not so apparent.

3. With weight is meant the difference in width between the thinnest and thickest strokes in a script. Scripts where there is no difference or the difference is small is referred to as light scripts, whereas script where the difference is big are considered to be heavy scripts. As can be seen in the diagram, the type of pen used makes a big difference. Ballpoint pens give an even and very light script. In cursive writing with a ballpoint, a slight heaviness can enter if, for example, less pressure is used on upstrokes than downstrokes (as is taught in some schools), so that downstrokes will be slightly broader. However, it hardly noticeable.

With dip pens with flat nibs, the writing is heavier the broader the nib, as can be clearly seen below, despite the fact that I have no experience in writing with these pens and am therefore not exactly skilled at it.

Only one thing remains before I can start to write my manuscript, and that is to choose a text to copy. I decided on Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shalott, which has a medieval theme even though it doesn't date from medieval times. I am going to attempt to copy out and illuminate the entire poem. This will be a project for another post.

Previous posts in this series:

Part 1: Making the parchment

Part 2: Creating quires

Part 3: Preparing the parchment for writing

Part 5: Copying and decoration

Part 6: Binding