Experimental Fridays...Derwent ink pencils edition.

It may surprise some people who don't know me while I'm in atelier mode, but I tend to be a bit of a tight...um...
....fist, when it comes to my art making.

Over the years a steady stream of professors, mentors and friends dear enough (and brave enough) to actually "go there" with me have all informed me that this is a darn shame because some of my most entertaining, interesting and just plain fun stuff can be found in my sketchbooks - created when I'm just playing around.

When that happens, this is what my sketchbooks tend to look like:

As opposed to this, when I was being Very Serious. 

Now both of these have their good elements and their bad elements. I learned from doing both of them and sometimes I do just feel like drawing in a more realistic way. But for my money, the one up top is about 100x more interesting to look at and fun to draw than the one on the bottom. 

One of my mentors told me that when I get too serious about my work it loses a quality of lightness, humor and whimsy and it become ponderous. Who wants to create "ponderous" art work? I sure don't!

 Another professor took me aside after watching me as I'd been in his perspective class for a semester... laboring after perfect vanishing points and angles until after every class I would find myself staring into space bleary eyed and exhausted while waiting for the BART train back home.  That professor told me "You know, your work loses a lot of it's charm when you try to make everything perfect. I don't think you ought to try for exact perspective, it doesn't suit your work. Your world is more engaging when it's full of wonky perspectives and chairs with curlicue armrests and things like that."

That was one of the best critiques and best pieces of advice I've ever gotten and I've tried to keep it firmly in mind as I proceed.

Of course for every professor and mentor who told me to lighten up, I've had one or three whose whole mission in life seemed to be to get all their students to ratchet down, freak out and tighten up... so it's a fine line to walk.

My current stance is that I am trying to balance not taking things So Very Seriously while also attempting to push myself and my craft in ways that cause me to continue to grow and evolve as an artist. It helps that I have discovered that for the most part the art which I have gotten too tightly wound up about was both no fun to create and no fun to look at.

Still, attempting to cut loose that inner critic whose tendencies veer towards the "never good enough" perfectionistic side of art making is a daily battle.

So in the spirit of Not Taking Art So Very Seriously, I have decided that every Friday is going to be my experimental day of art making. Monday through Thursday I can work through whatever it is that I'm trying to accomplish, but on Friday the whole notion of "accomplishing anything" has to go out the window. Friday is for mucking around with new mediums and playing a bit.

Today, for example, I was experimenting with new art supplies Soren picked up for me at our most recent trip to the art store in Berkeley.
These are Derwent "Inktense" water-soluable ink pencils. The guy at the store said they were not like watercolor pencils because they're made with ink bases rather than watercolor bases, which theoretically giving you a stronger color when used with or without water.

That seemed like an intriguing proposition so I thought I'd give them a try.

First impression? They have a really weird texture. I don't know about other artists, but I tend to be a little bit of a texture snob when it comes to my writing and drawing implements. I like for pens and pencils to have a certain flow. These pencils made a distressing "skritch, skritch" sound as I drew with them and seemed to find every bit of uneven tooth in my sketchbook.

The line quality was nothing to write home about either.

They reminded me more of charcoal pencils in terms of their texture and line quality than anything else.
People who know me and who've followed my adventures in grad school know that I am not a big fan of charcoal pencils.






I tried to sharpen them like normal pencils, but this was the sharpest point I could manage and it flattened out almost immediately.

In the future I think sharpening them like charcoal pencils - with an x-acto knife and a piece of sandpaper - will probably be the way I'll go.

Line quality being what it was dry, I decided to try to play around with what happened to it when you added water.

Interestingly, they seem to have all of the disadvantages of pencil and none of the advantages of ink. They went down chalky and neither erased completely nor blended smoothly. They did lend themselves to having their pigment picked up and transferred somewhere else rather well and that was the only area where they seemed ink-like to me.




I decided that to really see what the ink pencils were capable of, I'd have to sketch with them a bit. That definitely did teach me new things about the pencils. They were more useful in sketch mode.  Although their inability to blend away drawing lines was kind of annoying, I did eventually learn to work with the medium rather than against it. They work much better in a dry into wet modality than in a wet into dry mode. If the paper was already damp, the pencils blended much better and put down a lot more pigment. Working that way, I started to get the hang of how to use the pencils and where they might fit in with other media.

I found that by combining these pencils with regular watercolors, it was possible to smooth out some of the rougher edges and blend them a bit better. That being said, though, I ended up using a LOT more water than I'd originally intended. So much so that my multi-media friendly sketching journal started to pill up and shed those gnarly little paper boogers all over the place. Ucky tuh! 

The pencils definitely aided and abetted my desire to force myself to stay loose. I couldn't get too tied up in the finished product because every step of the way was a learning curve. These pencils are limited in certain ways, but once I figured out their little quirks I could see how useful they could be. I know I'll use them in the future. I just won't use them on anything other than a sturdy water-wash friendly surface and I'll be prepared to use them alongside other media (rather than stand-alone) on non-sketchy pieces. 

They would probably be very useful if I were wanting to do some ink-washes in places other than my studio where packing a pan of watercolors is always such a pain in the rear. With a couple of these and a cup of water from, say, the zoo's snack bar I would be good to go. 

The end product was something that I felt had a certain charm to it for a rough sketch, so all in all I am inclined to call my first ever Experimental Friday a smashing success!