I’ve mentioned before that I’m fascinated by Renaissance drawings on tinted paper with light and dark inks or chalk and charcoal.
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!
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