INAE Enterprises

Metamorphosis, transition, change, tension.  These are small drawings, averaging 6 x 8″ in pen, ink and pastel.  More new work can be seen on my website in the Mixed Media and Ceramic sections.

Pierced Drawing No.1

19 x 26″.  Pastel and ink on paper.  The first in a series of ten drawings of piercings.

Pierced Pear

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.

What is this?  What I am seeing?  What does it mean? Ooooh.  For more information, see the Week 3 Sketchbook entry on this blog.

Time: 6 hours.  Paper:  Sennelier pastel card.  19 x 26″.  Media:  Black, white and gray pastel.  Actuals: a standard laptop run amok on MS Vista and a bonsai root trained on a circuit board:

Process: I love drawing on pastel card, basically like drawing on sand paper. It allows for many clean layers of pastel.  If only it came in 54″  x 10 yard rolls.  First layer:

Second layer.  Drawing from bonsai, overemphasizing the circuit board and linear perspective because I liked it that way:

Third layer.  Printed out bits of my Perl program (CTRL + PRTSC) graphically enhanced,  (Print Mask for GIMPs).  Pastel on back of print, then traced with ball point.

A wonderful thing about posting class samples on a blog is that as long as I take images throughout the process, I can ruin the actual but still have a sample posted.    This allowed me to push the drawing really far, take some creative risks.  To complete my Punk Genre drawing, I added the 70s punk slogan “No Future” in wet charcoal, furthering the concept initiated by the wrist watch parts though personally I’m a bit uncomfortable with text in drawings.   Then I shot the drawing a couple times with a 20g shotgun when it was damp so paper would be punctured rather than shredded.   I glued drawing onto heavy black paper for structural reasons.  This flattened the texture created by shot somewhat but emphasized the punctures and stabilized the paper.    Detail:

Final drawing meeting requirements for Week 1 Out of Class Drawing:  Gestural with characteristics of  Tribal and/or Graffiti

Time: 4.5 hours  Actuals: sprocket, piston, gears, butterfly wings  Paper: Canson Edition Light Gray 22 x 30  Media: black and white ink, gray felt tip marker, black, gray and white pastel  Process: Squeezed sponge loaded with ink+water onto paper for splatter effect.   Brush and ink wash to find center, define general shape.  Traced sprocket and gears with gray felt tip marker.  Gestural marking with black, gray and white pastels.  Used wet brush on pastels to refine gestural marks.