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Wowzer. You kids and your lovely neat sketchbookery! I am too jealous. I don’t keep a sketchbook myself, because I’ve finally accepted that I can’t keep them neat or focussed, or organised, or free of shopping lists, or ‘to do’ lists, or lists of People I Currently Hate And Will Have Revenge On, or whatever. Basically, I rapidly end up using them as paper, rather than as drawing paper. So instead I have a big bulldog clip that keeps together a wodge of all sorts of different bits of paper, and I regularly weed out any non-drawing stuff that creeps into this wodge, and replenish it with new blank sheets as required. You get to use every last scrap and offcut from other stuff you’re working on, and I’ve found it cheaper than buying a new sketchpad every 5 minutes, too. It's ok.
Er, not that I have any sketch-stuff to show now. I don’t have easy access to a scanner at the moment. Boo. My sketches are all incomprehensible rubbish, anyway. I’ll just admire your fantabulously lovely sketches instead.
What I do have to show, however.... well, it’s sort of a sketch. I’ve been playing around this summer and trying to teach myself etching, and this is the very first etching that I produced (!!111). I’ve done, well, much better stuff since, I promise, but this is all I’ve got that’s been scanned and uploaded, so I’m showing it despite its many, many flaws.
Ok, so, first, it’s not such a great likeness (Buuuut - drawn from memory! In maybe 10 minutes! In a medium I was wholly unfamiliar with!), but it’s, uh, supposed to be a portrait of this mysterious pianist called Charlie Spand, and it’s sort of from my soon-to-be-forthcoming Barbelith Music Forum thread on Boogie-woogie pianists of the 1930s and 40s, I think, I hope. And, yes, there’s lots of Arghh Badness about the drawing itself, lots of lines gone awry and stuff, but leaving all that aside, one of the things I’m really liking about this technique is the swirly, inky, splodgy tone that you can get just by leaving a little too much ink on the plate. Real etchers knowingly refer to this as 'Plate tone,' apparently. I’ve sort of overdone the ol’ plate tone here, but, dammit, I love it. The ink smells nice, too. And I’m getting rather excited about how I can use this effect in this comic I’m working on at the moment, which should ideally have a swirly, smoky, late-night feel about each and every panel. So, yay. Subtle tones have always been a bit of a problem for me - I’m not a fan of washes, which to my eyes can be just too different to yr solid comicbook-y lines; I think letratone and suchlike looks mechanical and ARGHH UGLY; 'atmospheric' cross-hatching can seem, well, too much if you’re already using More Than A Certain Number of lines to describe the shape of all the solid stuff. I've been trying using a sort of scuzzy dry brush effect to do that sort of thing, and that's been okay. But I think I’ve finally found a reeeally good way to put *space* into a picture - to draw the air around the figures, so to speak - without needing to use anything too ‘solid.’ If that makes any sense. I like this effect because it’s almost not there at all.
So, anyway, that’s me. Do I sound overly ART-serious and furrow-browed? I hope not. I think I might be talking about things happening in my head that aren’t really apparent in this objectively-rather-poor first picture out of the press, but the point is, really, that I’m currently enjoying playing around with this whole thing. Also that etching involves TURNING A BIG WHEEL, and a fair amount of BURNING THINGS WITH ACID. It’s fun! Yay art. |
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