March 2020 Challenge

This is the month that we reboot the Ink and Unfailing Supplies drawing challenge. March’s phrase comes from French essayist Joseph Joubert.

The sun is clipped. Fogs.

NOTA. Hair, like rays.

Fogs that dust the trees.

This months guest artist is Edward Eden.

The only rule for the challenge is that the image must be a minimum of 4″ x 6″ or 6″ x 4″ and completed in 1 month. At the end of the month we’ll post the finished images side by side along with anything we’d like to say about the pieces.

Happy March!

– Richard

Work in progress

JPierro Card9 work in progress

Thought I would post this drawing in progress. Like I said on my first sketch for this topic, I interpreted the line Richard wrote “Boiled  sweets” as a woman covered with boils. After playing around with a couple more sketches I found myself with the desire of doing a simple scene with the two figures in a frozen moment on the page. The woman, his victim & treat, falling to the ground and him in his moment of bliss.

What I think I would like to do after I finish off the two figures is. switch to a walnut ink and give the drawing a backdrop. I pulled it into photoshop and added a piece of an old drawing to see what it might look like.

This ever changing blog will hopefully help me evolve as an artist, by trying different approaches to my pen and ink drawings. I expect to do plenty of drawings that don’t quite work out so well, but that is part of the process.

In Flight Retooling

After some internal discussion, “Ink in Unfailing Supplies” has evolved again, . The initial challenge was to come up with a 4″ x 6″ drawing each week. Which was fun for a while, until it became rather obvious that the date was less a challange and more a limitation. So we changed it to every two weeks. It was still limiting.

So here is the deal. Although our seed text idea will still drive our inspiration, and we will be including sketches and random comments/ impressions, we are removing the time element. I think that will give us the chance to produce better art for this project.

The current seed text will inform the next images. Stay tuned!

The Management

Richard’s Week 9 Sketch

Turning in my sketches woefully late this week as I was wrapped up in another project. In the first sketch I was working with an idea of a murderer that dissolved himself with acid. Then I left that and started working on the idea of a victim that had been posed with his head made into a candy bowl supported on the stem of an ice pick. This is how my work starts, in scribbles, which is ironic given the slightly obsessive finish, but anyway. If you look closely, you can see the outline of the murderer showing through the thin paper of my sketchbook. The candy bowl victim is superimposed on top. This is called a happy accident. It suggested something to me that I had not considered consciously. You’ll have to wait until Sunday to see what I mean.

Richard.

John Pierro Card 9 sketch

John Pierro card 9 sketch

This week I thought I would just play around with some inspirational pen and ink drawings. I only got around to doing one, but I like the ideas that came out from doing it. The way I chose to interpret the “Boiled Sweets” line was that it was a woman that was covered in boils, or my first thought that this maniac was boiling her to eat her.  The thumbnails and painter sketches are fun, but I don’t seem to be using them correctly, the spontaneity and my drawing style is lost when I try and become too premeditative. I was not happy with the way I attempted to do my finished drawing last week. The way I enjoy doing my drawings is by  starting with an expressive contour drawing and then filling in the details. With those details other ideas usually find their way into the drawing. Like I said, this for me is a an exercise in how to approach my pen and ink drawings, I’ll figure this out before we finish all 52. – John

Week 9 Card

Week 9 Card

A Wave That Touches the Sky, The Pointed Crag, A Sea Nymph or Maybe a Siren

Richard A. Kirk's Week 8 Art

In my finished drawing you can see how different elements present in the sketch are either embellished or discarded. Throughout, I kept thinking of seahorses even though the morphology has no specific seahorse references. The other thing that was niggling at the corners of my mind were the illustrations from Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish and the gorgeous chapter starts of watercoloured fish. The latter is a good example of how different elements can subtly influence the process without actually being evident in the finished product; a kind of cloaked intertextuality. Did I just say intertextuality. Richard.

“Don’t let despair get the better of you; rear up the conviction you have within you like a tower of rock; cling to it and never waver, even if the earth below and the heavens above should founder.”

The Duel, Heinrich von Kleist

JPierro's drawing Card 8