My kids know of my interest  — for Christmas Scott and Andy gave me a variety of white and silver ink-pens for my drawing experiments!  What a GREAT gift!  And they turned me on to JetPens.com at the same time (Japanese pens — VAST variety OMG — though my kids all tell me NEVER to say ‘OMG’ in public)!

In preparation for larger scale work, I made several series of small drawings in order to experiment with color and value for the tinted areas and to learn more about how the white inks might work for me in these drawings.  The first series were three drawings of “Danielle”.  I later made six of “Elizabeth” which I’ll show in my next post.

A little like the story of the three bears, my first tinted ground was ‘too dark’.  Then I came to the second drawing, and I made that one ‘too light’.  Then I made a third drawing and the ground in that one was ‘just right’ — or close enough.  My wife thinks “Danielle” is spooky looking, but the image stirs me in an indescribably delicious way (from Goldilocks to Peter Paul Mounds)…  I really like the way this drawing pulls at my gut!  I also really like the somewhat opaque nature of the white ink — it gets whiter and whiter with each subsequent layer (a dozen or so layers of white in this drawing) and covers both the tinted ground and the black ink in a very appealing way!

“Danielle 3″, Jan 2011, 20 x 12 inches, white and black ink on tinted paper

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyYwB56Tkbk

three Danielle drawings -- like the three bears, the first ground was tooooo dark, the next one was tooooo light, and the last one was JUST RIGHT (or at least getting pretty close)!

"Danielle 2", Jan 2011, 20 x 12 inches, white and black ink on tinted paper

"Danielle 3", Jan 2011, 20 x 12 inches, white and black ink on tinted paper

Danielle 1 underway in the bright morning sun

Danielle 2 (foreground) and Danielle 3 (top) just getting underway

setup for time lapse video of application of white ink to Danielle 3

BFK is a very soft paper — because the tip of the flow-pen actually touches the surface, the paper becomes abraded (deeply abraded) as the tip repeatedly passes over the same areas. The very rough and sculptural surface is quite attractice in this painting — everyone who’s seen it wants it. My wife, I think, got ‘first dibs’…

I’ve been working on this painting continuously since I first posted the images above on July 1 (by continuously, I really do mean 24/7, of course). The paper just couldn’t take any more physical contact — it had become extremely abraded and fuzzy — so I switched over to using an airbrush and painted it in many layers alternating between a deep blue-black acrylic in the mid to dark areas and white in the light to mid areas. That beefed up the color in the abraided (dark)areas. The development of color, texture (quite genuine sculptural texture, albeit fuzzy), an unusual impasto, and a kind of battle between white and black through all the layers of light and dark is VERY INTERESTING to me and has stimulated me to move in some new (actually ancient — I’m thinking mid-value ground with light and dark scribbles defining the image out of the mids, like renaissance chalk drawing, maybe) directions which I’ll continue to experiment with later this summer.

In the meanwhile, gentle reader (always wanted to write that somewhere — now seems as good a time as any, right?), here’s the current (and final) state of the painting I first showed in my July 1 post…

Using the Paasche Flow Pencil to apply acrylic paint to paper

another view of the Paasche Flow Pencil jig in use

A second attempt on BFK about halfway through

detail of finished painting with many layers of white over black and black over white