Summer Drawing Project – Lesson 15

Meandering curves to make your pages roll.

Take your rhythmical lines a stage further and make them create a curvaceous surface on your pages.

Look at curved surfaces to study that are linear. I found some shells, a fabric shopping bag and some fabric that I could ‘scrumple’ up.

Perhaps you have plump stripy cushion or a striped tea towel or a piece of striped fabric you can make undulate to create a rolling surface.

Perhaps you can see rolling hills with lines of crops or trees.

Perhaps you have a shell that has a linear pattern.

Perhaps you have a stripy fruit or leaf.

Make yourself 2 ‘L’ shapes from strips of white card or paper. These two ‘L’ shapes can be moved to over lap more or opened out to make different sized rectangles or square ‘windows’.

Make your ‘L’ shapes resemble the same proportion as your sketchbook page and place them over your surface if it is a large one to select an interesting (but not too complex) composition. I used this to select an area of my fabric but no need for the shells as they had their own shape. If you’re looking out of a window at stripes outside, you could tape your ‘L’ shapes to the glass to give you a selected view of your stripes. 

Try different areas until you find one that shows a simple composition: the one below left is a simple one and the one on the right is quite complex. Start with a simple one!

 

Use any way of drawing your lines – it could be a crayon used on it’s side, a wide paint brush, a strip of card, a fine pen, depending on the sort of stripe you are drawing. You could also use the sgrafitto method of ‘scratching back to a different layer or scratching into the paper surface as in last weeks lesson.

 

The drawings above and below have been made by drawing the wavy lines to echo the observed undulating fabric stripes with the point of the seam ripper into the wet surface of the paper. Just copy the stripes and this creates the undulating fabric surface for you.

  

A second stage of this drawing you can see in the image below adds slight shading to suggest the darker dips in the undulating fabric surface. This was done by adding a ‘dash’ of extra ink while the surface was still wet so that it would blend gently into the first stage.

 

The drawings below have been made from a very simple striped fabric composition – just one curved fold. Both drawings were made with a strip of card, dipped into the ink – the left hand one into a watery ink and the right one straight into the ink pot. Notice that the dip between the fold has been dabbed with ink to suggest the shaded ‘valley’. The left hand shading has been done with a light touch with the sponge and the right one with the card dipped into the watery ink. This shading helps to suggest the depth of the undulating fabric folds.

It’s a good idea to draw the same composition more than once, maybe using different media or even the same media as you learn a lot about the surface by looking more deeply and trying it again and again.You’ll get a lot better!

If you’d like more of a challenge, arrange some stripy fabric to make a more complex composition of stripes. The stripes below have been carefully drawn with a fine pen to record a more exact copy of the different directions that suggest the more complex arrangement of crumples. The ink in this pen is not permanent and it’s possible to smudge it with a damp brush or sponge or even your finger. This is how the darker areas were created to suggest the valleys. If you can find a drawing pen like this, you’ll enjoy using it this way. (The speckled marks are from the drawing on the reverse side of this page. Although this looks quite good in this drawing, you might like to consider drawing only on one side of a page if you’d prefer.)

The same undulating fabric has been drawn using a cotton ear bud or cocktail stick for finer lines dipped into bleach into a pre-coloured page. This will need to have been a colouring media which will react to bleach such as writing ink and brusho. (HINT – Work in a well-ventilated space; don’t use a paint brush as the bristle will be effected by the bleach and – do a test first).

Be patient, as the bleach doesn’t give a white line immediately. It’s a skill to get the right amount of bleach onto your cotton bud – by keep dipping into the bleach and not expecting it to ‘stretch’ as you do with inks and paints.

Now for some shell surfaces – both drawn with a  wide paint brush that is very old and bristly. The brush has been dipped into the ink pot in the left hand drawing and into the watery ink in the right hand one.

 

Remember, in all your drawing – just draw the stripes.

Next week’s lesson finishes this section of linear rhythms. It will be published on Monday 25th August.

Summer Drawing Project – Lesson 14

MAKING MARKS BY ABUSING YOUR PAPER SURFACE

Find sharp implements in your workbox, tool box, kitchen drawers that you can use to tear into the surface of your sketchbook pages. For these examples, I used a seam ripper and a blunt craft knife blade that was sharp enough to effect the cartridge surface.

Last week you were asked to conjure up linear rhythms in your drawings by listening to the beat of music or the rhythm of a dance step. This week you will be creating different linear rhythms by conscientiously changing something as you draw your lines across the page. Repeatedly changing simple elements along a line such as width or direction or tweak of some sort can establish a visual rhythm. These two pages show lines that are but with a slight difference each time, using the same rhythm, but altering it slightly in each row so that the overall page gives a sense of a developing composition

The left one is made up of lines that are made a bit like a sideways zigzag or backstitch format; each line is stretched and spaced out a bit more each time as the lines are drawn towards the right hand edge of the page. The lines in the right drawing have a sort of zigzag ‘judder’ along each one, but in a different place developing a more accentuated ‘judder’ as the lines progress towards the bottom of the page.

Try this idea yourself using a pencil of pen before involving different media. Keep working with this idea of progressive rhythms as you turn to the following methods.

As I was doing the drawing on this page below, I was aware of the similarity to the repetitive nature of hand writing and how your loops and swirls seem to unconscientiously make rhythms within a line of writing – especially if asked to write the same work or phrase over and over again. (Perhaps you can remember doing that as a punishment at school!!)

This rhythm was drawn with the point of a seam ripper (seem left) onto a sketchbook page that was cover with wet ink – quite a watery one – in fact using just the dirty water from the water pot in a brush that was not rinsed out! The sharp metal point ripped into the WET paper surface so that the ink collected in the soft paper fibres of the cartridge paper page. Hasn’t the black writing ink become lovely colours! I’ve no idea where that blue came from!

Other drawings which use the same method, also reflect the rhythms in hand writing, even though they have no recognisable letter forms. The drawing below shows how the sharp point of the seam ripper has really broken the paper surface in the central area but the first lines drawn on the left and the last lines on the right were much gentler and just scored the surface. The watery ink was applied with a thick paint brush in vertical columns which you can see make a lighter grading from left to right which all adds to the rhythm of this drawing.

The two images below show two stages of a drawing onto wet pages of watery ink. The final stage in the right hand drawing has been gently rubbed over with the side of a piece of white chalk to emphasise the raised burrs made by the point of the seam ripper.

     

Another item of ‘paper abuse’ I found was an old craft knife blade – seem on the right in this image below. This made wonderful burrs as it was scraped heavily over the paper surface. This was done after the watery ink had been applied so the paper was nice and soft and ready to accept a bit of ‘abuse’. This sharp edge wanted to make its own type of mark even though I was still trying to make similar rhythmical marks as before – the craft blade giving a new character to my marks.

The rhythmical lines below left have been made with the same craft blade, but this time the blade has been scraped into a different type of surface. The ground surface has been made from two layers of media - one on top of the other – a layer of blue oil pastels on top of a layer of plain wax candle in this case. This method of drawing is call sgrafitto, where one surface is scraped away to reveal an underlying surface.

Both the wax candle and the oil pastels were thickly applied in order to make the scraped off marks clearly visible. You can see the blue oil pastels being applied thickly in the right image below, but the plain candle wax is white so not visible – until the blue is scraped off, of course, as in the left image.

 

If you’d like to try this method to make your rhythmical drawings, I suggest that you do a trial page in your sketchbook first to see which combinations of media work best for you. Remember that both should be applied heavily to give solid coverings, especially the lower layer which should completely cover the cartridge surface.

Here is my test page. It is a bit scruffy as it is well used to remind me of what combinations work and what aren’t as effective. All the patches in the left vertical column have candle wax as they’re bottom layer; the patches in the second column from the left have wax crayon in the bottom layers; the patches in the second column from the right have oil pastel in the bottom layers; the patches in the right column have a stabilo pencil wax crayon in the bottom layers. You can see the labels to show what medium has been added to the lower layers and lines scratched into them to test the effectiveness of each combination of media. It was a fun exercise to do.

The page below has been prepared with a layer of candle wax and black oil pastel and then rhythmical marks made with the blade edge.

 

The page below has been prepared with a layer of wax crayons on the bottom and in the top layer, a large felt marker (left half) and black writing ink (right half). Note that liquid such as ink will normally be repelled by the waxy surface as you can see here with the blobby surface. A tip is to add a small drop of washing up liquid to the ink - in an old jar lid, as below, just to mix a small amount and not to the whole ink pot.

   

The right image below shows how the rhythmical lines have been placed in a diagonal way as if radiating out of a corner of the page.

  

The final drawing of this lesson shows rhythmical lines drawn in two different directions which forms a sort of grid pattern from the same type of rhythmical lines I used earlier and above.

   

I hope you’ll enjoy finding implements that are good to score and incise the surface of your sketchbook pages and developing ways in which you can create lines that show interesting rhythmical patterns.

Keep a look out for interesting rhythmical patterns in your environment as you will be drawing examples of visual rhythms next week. Perhaps as you look at tree branches or the way a bunch of group of flower stems appear; notice the way long grass sways in the breeze or the way sand seems to ripple. Take photos if you see a good example. Lesson 15 will be posted on Monday 18th August.

Summer Drawing Project – lesson 13

 

Continuing the theme of making marks that show rhythm, this week by using a range of different textural effects on your sketchbook pages that will help to give the drawn marks a rhythmical effect. Ideas of ways to create simple bands of relief on your sketchbook pages -

• Make folds or creases.
• Score lines with implements by pressing hard onto the plain page – stiletto, seam ripper, scissors – hint to place scrap card behind page if you’d prefer the scores to remain on the one page and not go through to other pages beneath.
• Add strips of paper or masking tape.
• Make lines with glue stick (Pritt)
• Make lines with candle wax.
• Make lines with a thick medium such as emulsion paint.
• Make perforated lines  of holes with sewing machine, where the needle makes lovely burred edges so use back of page or place sketchbook in machine upside down!
• Any other way you can think of.

You might like to make a sampler page of several of these ideas so you can try out different media on them to find the most successful combinations and ways of showing off the rhythmical textures best.

Tools such as a pipette, small paint brush, scrap paper and finger will be useful but not essential.

Hopefully the large images below show some of the different relief surfaces up as there is very little colour at this first stage! The textured lines on the page below were made by applying thick emulsion paint with the edge of a strip of card.

The page below has been scored with a stiletto that added interesting rips to the surface.

The page below has been scored or indented with the end of scissors.

The textured lines on the page below are ripped strips of masking tape.

The textured lines below are made with a glue stick on the left half and candle wax on the right half.

Lines of perforations made with a sewing machine needle – page stitched from the reverse side to make the relief ‘burrs’ point upwards.

Now to make marks on these surfaces that will reflect and be effected by the different types of relief surfaces. Here are some ideas, but experiment with different colouring media yourself.

Make simple marks, such as lines, rather than complicated marks, so that you give your relief surfaces the chance to show up clearly. Allow each relief surface to decide on the way your marks look. These are a few ways in which my pages have turned out.

The page below was scored in horizontal lines. Grey pastel and watery lines of ink (from a wet brush that was still dirty) make vertical lines, showing off the scored surface in the first stage on the left. Then more scored lines were added diagonally while the surface was still wet in the second stage on the right.

 

Below, another page of scratched score lines – this time made diagonally. Black ink, pulled downwards with a piece of scrap card.

The indented scored lines made with the scissors point shows up well after black chalk has been dragged across the surface of the page below. The second stage was to allow red ink to dribble downwards to see if the dribble would re-direct itself along the score lines: it did, but only in the last couple of dribbles! To add more interest, it was decided to make the dribbles more interesting by adding more scores across each dribble in the opposite angle.

     

Another page which uses dribbles. Here are the stages of making marks on the needle perforations page, below. I noticed that the burrs around the perforations weren’t enhanced in any way by the dribbles – probably too narrow -  so I smudged the ink dribble with my finger and found that this showed up the rows of perforations more successfully – see right hand image.

  

…. and then I over-did the smudging – see above - and had to think of a way of rescuing the perforations by adding some white chalk – see below!

However - the over-smudging had the benefit of pushing the coloured inks through the perforations onto the back of the page.

The page below was folded and opened many times. The sharp folds created slight ridges which trapped smudged coloured chalks well.

The ridges of the lines made the dried glue stick and candle wax allowed me to do more smudging – this time applying the coloured chalk onto my finger and then dragging it over the ridges – see below.

 

Again, I felt it needed a second stage and used the chalk stick straight onto the page – but trying not to over-do it this time!

The final page is the relief surface made with ripped strips of masking tape. Grey chalk was dragged diagonally across the strips and then a very dry brush of red ink in the same direction.

I’ve used mainly straight lines in these pages and also a limited range of colours. This to make it easier to concentrate on the interesting details of how the different media and relief surfaces are responding to each other. You will now have a good idea yourself and will be able to make further use of these combinations in following lessons.

Remember to stabilise any pages that are likely to smudge further by spraying a fixative over them, either from an art shop or by using a cheap aerosol hair spray!

Lesson 14 will be posted on Monday 11th August.