MiKe~
The picture of both me and ethan is amazing, we're gonna be famous!
And i LOVE the huge portrait of me,
the detail is sooo amazing! It's sooooooo cool!
Love~Arianna

We LOVE your drawing, THANK YOU so much for your intricate work, and we adore your subject, so glad that you left us out of it.
Your biggest fans, the Lanes
 

Hi Mike,

I love this portrait. So, how many pens? How do you interrrupt the process to change pens? What kind of pens (I imagine some kind of rollerball)? Pretty cool. Arianna, I think you're quite right that you will be famous! annie b
 

Thanks, Arianna -- yes, I imagine you WILL be famous, but probably not because of this drawing!
Love,
Mike

Hi, Annie!
This drawing dried up six "Pilot Precice V5 Extra Fine Rolling Ball" pens.

As you know, I have built some 'attachments' for my CNC machine to allow it to hold stamps, brushes, pens, pencils, engraving tools, mezzotint burnishers, drypoint needles, roulettes, etc.

It happens that that 3 inch PVC is the same diameter as my Porter Cable router (for which the machine was designed). So I can replace the router with PVC pipe very easily. For the pen holder, I cut a 5 inch length of pipe and glued in some dense sponge rubber with an 'X' sliced into the center. I have it fitted with an end cap with a pen-sized hole drilled in the center to prevent the pen from deflecting sideways and I shove the pen through this hole and up into the 'X' cut in the sponge. This holds the pen firmly enough to draw and the sponge allows the pen to move slightly up and down without much change in nib pressure in order to glide over any bumps in the paper without damaging the very thin and delicate nib.

I have the machine set up so that I can 'pause' drawing whenever I please by hitting a key on the keyboard -- this stops the machine and raises the pen about five inches above the paper -- enough to allow me to remove the pen and reinsert it or a new one whenever I please.

I'm capable of machining at about about five inches per second (and can 'jog' at about 30 inches per second to jump from one machining area to the next), but because there are lots of direction changes in these drawings (and the machine is quite heavy and has a lot of inertia when it's moving fast), I have it set up to accelerate and decelerate whenever it significantly changes direction (on these drawings, every few thousandths of an inch), so it actually draws quite slowly, about the same speed as you'd draw by hand, averaging about an inch per second.

I think the way I've conceived the drawing technique is pretty cool. The drawings are designed similarly to my neo-reduction method prints (except that I begin drawing the darkest areas instead of the lightest). The pen follows the outline of each tonal area, some quite large, many very tiny, spiraling at an offset I determine to lay down concentric lines which follow the shape of the area being drawn and 'fill' it. So the first 'layer' of the drawing fills the darkest contours. The next 'layer' drawn fills the shape of the two darkest contours, and so on until the last area drawn fills each non-white shape, overdrawing all previous layers. Because the shape of each contour layer is different than the previous layer's shape, a cross-hatched 'shading' develops as each layer over-draws the previous and the crosshatching, although mechanical, closely resembles the gray-scale source and is reminiscent of traditional engravings and pen and ink drawings.

So there are many interesting areas in these drawings which reflect Old Master drawings, and the concept is really quite similar even though the execution is different, very rational and mostly automated. It's been quite an interesting series, I think!

I hope to undertake some paintings again soon, as the drawings have sparked ideas for new approaches to painting, and I also want to produce some intense 'stamped' images in which I'll use an off-the-shelf self-inking stamp to produce tone in a similar fashion.

These processed might make some pretty interesting objects as well!

Best,

Mike