Currently Browsing: pen and ink 44 articles
Why Keep Sketching the Same Subject?
A friend of mine once said he couldn’t understand how I could draw the same subject over and over. I do that a lot. Most notably daily drawings for 4 and a half years of my dog Dottie. But my life is full of drawing the same subject over and over. Life drawing models I […]
Jack Unruh Retrospective Show
I don’t draw attention to many upcoming shows, typically I just go to a show and then maybe write about it—like when I go to a show at Mia. But Jack Unruh is one of my all time favorite artists. His use of pen and watercolor is stunning and quirky at the same time. He […]
Johnny Vegas—An Autobiography in Multiple Voices
Readers of RWU will know that sketches of Johnny Vegas make it into a post every now and then; and onto my instagram. I watch a lot of British TV. He’s on a lot of shows that I enjoy watching. I pick up a pen… Then the other day “the algorithm” threw out that Vegas […]
In Context: Notes While Reading…
I’m always writing things down. I’m always working on hat brims!
Journal Pages Just Happen: That’s Part of the Fun
One evening I found myself really digging in and overworking the black wool on the head of a sheep. It was one of those scribbly moments. A sheep flashed on the TV and I blocked it in (I’ve drawn hundreds and hundreds of sheep so I wanted to see if I could do a memory […]
Things Happen When You Sketch Directly In Ink
Things happen when you sketch directly in ink and you just have to learn to live with them. (Though you can do another sketch, or put in correction marks if that suits your purpose, I’m just saying…) It doesn’t bother me that this sketch of a character actor gave him a cross-eyed view. I love […]
The Kakimori Brass Pen Nib
This spring a friend told me about a new sort of dip pen: The Kakimori Brass Pen Nib. It’s shaped like a bullet. Channels all around the nib feed the ink to the point. (See the product photo at the left.) I thought it might be interesting to try it out because you can […]
Paper Nostalgia
Paper nostalgia is that pull and desire to work on a particular type of paper that you haven’t worked on in some time. I was trying to organize some of my images in my database and came across this one from almost a year ago. I felt an immediate wave of paper nostalgia. My first thought […]
Shakespeare and Hathaway: Private Investigators (And More on Magnani Portofino)
After my initial tests with Magnani Portofino I tried different pen and ink only tests. For today’s post I did a quick pen sketch of actor Mark Benton who stars in “Shakespeare and Hathaway: Private Investigators.” It’s a fun mystery show set in Stratford-upon-Avon where everything is Shakespeare-related. Benton plays Frank Hathaway, and the […]
Let Yourself Push Your Sketch Marks Now and Then
OK, we can’t get the whites of the paper back when we are working in pen and ink (unless we resort to the X-acto blade, or ProWhite gouache), but it’s still a useful endeavor to keep pushing with the lines. I find that working with a dried out pen pushes me to be a little […]