Distant Towers
Another of many sketchbook experiments. I like to play with different styles, in this case using a simple thin line with little to no variation. Sometimes it's easy to get too fancy with thicks and thins and rendering, but when you restrict yourself to a monoline there's no room for that. Another aspect to this experiment is to draw straight ahead and see what emerges. Sometimes you "draw yourself into a corner", and it collapses into a mess, but sometimes an unexpected image surfaces. The unpredictablity is what makes it interesting...along the way you make discoveries about which lines/shapes/forms are key to building your image, maintaining the perspective as you go, etc. You learn equally from the failures as well as the successes, but of course the failures are a lot less fun.But that's what sketchbooks are for...
posted by Paul Rivoche at 9:58 AM
5 Comments:
i like this drawing quite a bit, one question though:
When you say that you draw straight ahead, does that mean you go straight ink and build off of one image. no sketch underneath? If so, what did this drawing start with?
Yes---on ones like this I just start and keep going, until it either works or crashes, in which case I just start another. No underdrawing. The fun comes from trying to figure out each step ahead. In this case I don't remember exactly since I did it a while ago, but I know that I started with the figure, maybe the shape of the helmet. Then built from there, adding the body...at each step I try to ask myself what it should be, what might make it interesting. Of course I have a few pet themes I like to draw, so that helps. In this case I decided to draw the figure as being a rider on a strange animal...then thought "why not make it on an overlook?"...then lastly I worked on the distant vista, starting with the main tower and building around it. Generally you could say I work from major to minor (in terms of shapes and elements) and from foreground to background...with some side trips here and there!
Once a main theme or subject emerges, kind of crystallizes, you go with that and build on it to its conclusion.
Again the fun in doing this is the suprise, trying to trick yourself into drawing something unexpected. Straight-ahead drawing of all kinds(whether with pen or brush) i find to be useful, I started doing it because I found sometimes pencilling I'd fall into habits of mushy-scribbling indecisiveness...not clearly deciding and defining exactly what the form/shape/line was, but skating through by just vaguely pencilling in many lines and hoping clear form emerged.
This approach forces you to decide right away--be direct and commit--of course like I said it leads to many failures, but those failures are no worse than the frustration of the mushy-pencil look, andsometimes, excitingly, you get gifted with a breakthrough of one kind or another...
Remarkable! Process and result.
ohh how many blog do you have :)!!! allof them are cool !!!
Thanks clive! and joe too...! I try to keep all the blogs fed...sometimes they go hungry for a bit though...
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