Monday, July 24, 2006
Pen & Ink Intensive: Day 1
I'm taking a Pen & Ink Intensive session in the Botanical/ Science Illustration program at the New York Botanical Garden. It's solely a technique class, using nib pens (think calligraphy). We only used nib 102 today, but tomorrow we get use nib 104! The class was 5 hours today. The first 2 hours focused on drawing lines. I'm not including any of those sheets, but if you want to see them, just ask.
Once we mastered line, we played with outlines of simple leaves:
The afternoon was spent working on shading technique. We used a 16th century botanical print to work from, and then filled in the lines. This took 3 hours. I have a hard time making parallel lines with the nib. I think this is attributed to my familiarity with Micron inking pens, which have a consistent line. You can really see this in the top two right leaves. The more whimsical things in the picture were easier to do: the caterpillars and butterfly.
For homework we had to draw long blades of grass (no detail). Hank, my cat, ate most of the grass when I wasn't looking. Yes. My cat ate my homework. This was a challenging homework assignment due to the length of grass (This picture is 11"X14"). Keeping a constistent line proved difficult (you can see this with some of the darker areas in the picture). This was my second attempt; my first ruined by a single drop of ink that fell in the middle of the page. Alas, the life of an inker....
Once we mastered line, we played with outlines of simple leaves:
The afternoon was spent working on shading technique. We used a 16th century botanical print to work from, and then filled in the lines. This took 3 hours. I have a hard time making parallel lines with the nib. I think this is attributed to my familiarity with Micron inking pens, which have a consistent line. You can really see this in the top two right leaves. The more whimsical things in the picture were easier to do: the caterpillars and butterfly.
For homework we had to draw long blades of grass (no detail). Hank, my cat, ate most of the grass when I wasn't looking. Yes. My cat ate my homework. This was a challenging homework assignment due to the length of grass (This picture is 11"X14"). Keeping a constistent line proved difficult (you can see this with some of the darker areas in the picture). This was my second attempt; my first ruined by a single drop of ink that fell in the middle of the page. Alas, the life of an inker....
# posted by Marcos @ 11:47 PM 
