INAE Enterprises

Time: 12 hours  Paper: Strathmore illustration board, 40 x 30″  Media:  Rostow and Jung Akua Kolor slow drying black ink and white acrylic  Actuals: my studio:

Process: Unreal amount of time going up and down ladders balancing a big piece of board and Rotring Art Pen loaded with gray ink for initial layout.   After researching noir comics, I decided to melodramatize perspective, adding a stair, changing floor tile size, increasing proportional ratios which led to a rather a messy layout as I use only permanent drawing media, no pencils, for reasons too lengthy and vitriolic on my part  to go into here.

At this point, according to How To Draw Noir Comics by Shawn Martinbrough, the image is to be Xeroxed several times for working out where to put the black before inking the actual.  This would probably work on a smaller drawing but reducing my 40 x 30″ to even an 11 x 14″ digital print turned the lines to mush.  So I just dove in with a light gray ink wash until it looked all right.  So much for process.  I’d say about half my initial lines, about half the effort I put into it ended up under several coats of black ink or several coats of  white acrylic:  seven wolves were reduced to two, I had a really cool floor tile reflection going on in the window that had to go,  the bird in flight looked like it was hanging from a light fixture, not flying around it, so one of my light fixtures also bit the dust.  On and on.   Most disconcerting was that even at 40 x 30, even in a glorified negative space drawing, one false step with the brush and motorcycle helmets became a pile of rags, ravens turned into sparrows (oh well, ravens are so overused anyway) or wolves in the snow became floundering Dachshunds.  I never did get past gray scaling to black and white in the purist sense either:  see detail below.  Nevertheless it was a rather special week seeing everything as a Noir Comic and realizing the enormous potential of this assignment in effective linear perspective.

I was inspired by the dramatic linear perspective effects of Noir Comics.   Decided to try out some of the methods using the marvelous and challenging angles of my studio.  Preliminary sketch:

Final drawing meeting requirements for Week 2 Out of Class Drawing:  Proportional Line with characteristics of Punk Genre(s).

Time: 1 to 2 hours a day for 4 or 5 days.  Something like that.  Paper: Rives BFK  34 x 26″  Media: black and white ink; black, gray and white pastel.

Admittedly a bit of overkill for a line drawing.  Still, it is a build up of lines.  Detail:

Actuals: Watch parts and a piece of broken glass.   I found the broken glass in a dumpster.   I had made the watch parts I had available into earrings prior to this project so ended up having to draw from the earrings:

Process: Loaded Rotring  fountain pen with ink + water for gray ink:

Worked on inking in  proportional line drawing of watch parts in gray then spraying with water for runs and splatters.  Admittedly, at this point, I was doing very unpunk things like swiping up runs with a kleenex when they threatened to mess up really good parts of the drawing.

Inked in watch parts with black ink and used spray bottle to splatter gray ink over paper stencils resembling broken glass.

Finished with black, gray and white pastels.  Used wet brush on pastels to define glass.

Two sketchbook drawings for the Week 2 assignment exploring Punk Genres.  I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of the anti-aesthetics of 70s punks to the romantic aesthetics of  Steampunk culture.   This assignment was entirely inspired by a conversation I had with my Intermediate Drawing Class, or rather, it was me talking and they were politely listening as I went on and on about how edgy and grimy we, that is, the 70s punks were (I was there), as opposed to the aesthetically driven 00s punk genres.  At some point I realized I had entirely lost my audience.  When I asked if anyone knew what I was talking about, 2 students did that flat handed side to side airplane-coming-in-during-a rough-landing motion which could mean absolutely anything or absolutely nothing.   And so, this assignment for the Advanced Drawing Class.

I don’t require a sketchbook in my drawing classes though I highly recommend students have one.  Personally my sketchbooks are like an additional appendage: an extra arm, leg or bit of brain.   I am including an image from my sketchbook working notes for the Week 1 Out of Class drawing assignment Gestural Tribal/Graffiti.

I’ve glued actual butterfly wings to a pen and inkwash drawing.  The sketch has incorporated elements of the Tribal genre as well as my personal icons:  machine parts and butterflies.