Lily Drawing Complete 54 x 23 inches
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June 17, 2006
Today I am about a third of the way through another pen and ink drawing, this one of my god-daughter, Lily… Although Lily is usually smiling and showing off, I liked her ambiguous expression in this image… Yesterday noon, Lily and her Mom, Sarah, showed up at the studio with a half-hour to kill before their lunch date (one of Sarah’s costume design grad students was hired by the Metropolitan Opera, and they were going to have a goodbye luncheon across the street)…
So I asked Lily to model for me and designed this drawing in a half-day, by far my fastest drawing design effort to date! By around six PM I got my drawing machine going and it began following the paths I’d defined, dragging another fine-point pen over a 66 x 45 inch sheet of paper…
Here’s a brief (1 minute and about 1mb streaming download) video of the “Lily” drawing in progress…
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Mike, what are all the noises we hear in the background of the video? This is just a pen, not a cutter … Is there a vacuum holding down the sheet of paper?
Hi, Dave — yes, the noise you hear is mostly from a Fein vacuum (self cooled, so won’t overheat when sucking against a closed head). The vacuum sucks the paper flat to the machine bed very effectively (I use masking tape to hold and seal the edges).
The bed is a one inch sheet of light density MDF into which I’ve carved a deep (3/4 inch) v-groove ‘waffle’ pattern (bottom side). The MDF is very porous and the waffling makes it even more so. The top is solid-looking and has been planed flat releative to the machine. This works very well when I machine plywood.
I have tried drawing without vacuum, but when I do, the paper stretches quite a bit in the denser areas and buckles up enough to bend the pen nib, so I have resigned myself to suffer the noise. Another drawback (or advantage, perhaps) is that the paper becomes a large air filter and over time (a week or more) develops a very pleasant gray cast as particles of who-knows-what (dust, mostly) are strained into the paper surface…
I’ve also experimented with coating the bed with a re-positionable spray adhesive, but this doesn’t hold the paper as securely, and some winds up adhereing to the back of the paper which I find undesirable…
Constantly working out the kinks and trying to improve, of course!
– Mike