Old Techniques
Here are another couple of old drawings I’m digging up from the distant past. They were both done in ink during high school using very different techniques. The first one was a pen and ink drawing of Grendel that my English Literature teacher commissioned me to do. My interpretation had a comic book flavor to it.
The other drawing was an experiment I had done with a Q-tip. I got the idea from a book on cartooning (The Complete Book of Cartooning by John Adkins Richardson). You simply dip the Q-tip in the bottle of ink and gently roll it along the paper surface. Naturally, you get different results on different types of paper. This, I believe, was a plate finish bristol board.
It’s funny how a single experiment can direct the course of your artistic life. Looking at this image and the bit of adventure I had in making it, I recall how it might have been the first time I consciously attempted an unorthodox method to get results. In my adult life as someone who still draws, I find that I have never really stopped experimenting. It seems to be a part of my drive as an artist, that exploration into something new, even if the results are less than agreeable.
That calling may have been fostered here in this rough image of a ruin (perhaps an appropriate metaphor for what usually happens with experiments).