quare id faciam?

Ballpoint

Thought I would respond briefly to Darrell Reimer's comment below with three ballpoint pen sketches from past drawing days, sketches that have always seemed to me particularly successful. (For each successful sketch in old sketch books, let me immediately interject, I have many more that are bad or abortive, pitiful reminders of erratic practice of the skill over the years. Here though you will be spared having to consider them!) Part of the reason these do rise to a degree of success, I think, is just that the instrument is limited – ballpoint's plainly not especially subtle or expressive for drawing, as I say. It can do certain things readily, but not many things. A drawing tool with a good deal of expressive potential – ink handled with a good brush, say – demands much; it calls for ability approaching more nearly to mastery, in order to be used satisfyingly. But a ballpoint pen is limited – and therefore unintimidating. If you've got some ability, though you fall short of mastery, a limited & unintimidating medium can be a great thing, a freeing thing, for sustaining & gaining confidence in what ability you've got. If, of course, you do mean to draw (hmm) closer to a fuller kind of mastery, you also have to wrestle with the more intimidating media, not merely satisfy yourself with the successes possible with the limited ones. (Could be plenty of further discussion from this point, I imagine, if there were time.)

So, these are three sketches of people's heads from probably about the same year, at a time when I was drawing relatively more consistently and confidently. It's interesting to me that each occasion seems to have brought more to the fore diverse components of what could be called personal stylistic spectrum, though each was done with the same pen on similar or identical paper. (Or rather, with the same model of pen. A ballpoint handles pretty differently at different stages of its life, as may be obvious. The 1st of these is plainly in the later stages of one pen's life, and the 3rd plainly from a more fresh pen. This factor does affect what you end up trying to accomplish, even on the fly, in my experience.)

First sketch subject was a guy who joined me in the room where I was reading in a library I used to frequent on Sunday afternoons, when I attended church some distance from where I was living. The fellow came in, lay down & took a nap – and I whipped out the sketchbook. Second sketch, thoughtful friend Dan Schantz – can't remember the situation. Third, the worthy Fisher, absorbed, as I recall, in a game of cards. (This last, I should say, in some ways illustrates particularly well what I'm thinking of when I write, below, of achieving clarity & economy in a sketch.)

(Sometime I expect I'll post together several old drawings of Mr Fisher, done on widely varying occasions over some years, – interesting for comparison.)

(I've been meaning to mention that I'm indebted to Darrell Reimer for the sidebar link to Canadian illustration site Drawn! – which you should check out, if you haven't already.)

  

posted by paul bowman @ 8:57 PM