Goose Creek in Walnut Ink

A few Fridays ago, it was unseasonably warm, but the bugs and poison ivy weren't out yet.  I sat out and sketched by Goose creek, in the woods near my daughter's school, for an hour or two.  This was the result.  This was done mostly with a bamboo pen; some of it is my homemade soda can pen; and after I got home I worked in more details with a Hunt 101 nib.

detail:

White Barn Near Crestwood: black walnut ink drawing

I frequent a pen-and-ink discussion forum, and a talented artist there has been posting a series of drawings of barns that he has been doing.  They have been great to look at, and they helped push me to draw one myself.  I suppose I was already inclined, despite the long-ago warnings of one of my college professors (he had a list of things he advised us not to paint, because they were cliches: barns, ducks on ponds, sunsets, religious themes...there were probably more, but I forget what they were.)  My favorite buildings to draw are the ones that have a lot of "character"-- texture and wear.  So barns are attractive for that reason.

The subject was on my mind, and as a ran an errand through Crestwood a few weeks ago, I saw this barn.  I stopped and took some reference photos, and then did this drawing.  It's about 10 x 14 inches.

White Barn Near Crestwood

Details:

Falls of the Ohio Pen and Ink Detail

black walnut ink on paper

 This is another closeup of a pen and ink drawing. This section is about 4 x 4 inches. I really like the closeups because I like seeing the pen strokes and the patterns in the lines. That border between the representation of the scene, and the abstraction of the marks on paper, is what I find most exciting about any art medium.

Walnut ink house portrait,completed

I finished this house portrait a couple of days ago.  It was a challenge because of the darkness of the shadows on the dark house; building up layers of walnut ink to create large areas of deep value can be difficult because each new layer of crosshatching goes on less smoothly than the preceding layer.  Also, it was a struggle to make out the details in the source photographs.  At any rate, I am happy with the final result.

This is 11 x 15 1/2 inches on bristol paper.

walnut in house portrait work-in-progress

Scritch, scritch, scritch goes the pen nib

black walnut ink - work in progress

House portrait in black walnut ink, 11 x 15 inches

Details:

House portrait in walnut ink, 8 x 10 inches

Sketching with walnut ink on lunch break

I took my sketch pad and walnut ink out on my lunch break today for some quick sketching. I went over to A. P. Sawyer State Park.  I used some homemade cane bamboo pens and some twigs I had cut.  It had been a while since I had gone out to draw on my lunch break, probably late last summer?

House portrait details

Here are a couple of details from the house portrait I just posted.  I usually enjoy the close ups more than I enjoy the work as a whole because I like to see the pen strokes.

Walnut ink house portrait

Black walnut ink house portrait

11 x 15 inches, finished yesterday.  This is a beautiful limestone block house overlooking the Ohio River.  There is a steep hill along the driveway, and the house is so broad across the front that I could not back up enough to get the entire house in one reference photo.  That made the layout a little more challenging, but the clean lines and right angles of the architecture helped.

7 x 10 black walnut ink house portrait

I completed this last night around 1 a.m.  I wondered at the time: What percentage of my commissions reach completion between midnight and 2:00 a.m.?  More than half, for sure, and maybe more like 90%.

This is a 100-year-old house in Pennsylvania that belonged to the grandmother of the person who commissined it.  She said four generations of her family grew up around this home.  The photo references I was provided were not of the greatest clarity, but I think I was able to make out enough between the two photos, plus a little help from Google Earth, to capture it pretty well.

House portrait in black walnut ink

A detail to show what is always my favorite part, the trees:

detail of house portrait

Another walnut ink house drawing

 This one is about 9 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches, on hot press watercolor paper.

Detail:

House portrait finished today

Black walnut ink on Bristol paper, 9 x 16 inches. 

 

Englarged for detail:

House portrait in progress

Gathering walnuts at lunch

Today I spent my lunch break gathering walnuts. Time to make more ink!

Black walnut ink house portrait

Just finished today during my lunch break. This is black walnut ink on paper, 8 x 11.25 inches.

Black walnut ink house portrait

and a closeup:

Black walnut ink house portrait - detail

Walnut ink house portrait

This is one I finished a couple of weeks ago. It's 11 x 15 inches, walnut ink on Bristol board.

Black Walnut Ink House Portrait, 11 x 15 inches

This is on Bristol paper. I chose not to use any washes on this one; it's all cross-hatching.  I couldn't get the scan to go dark enough to pick up the shading on the sidewalk and pavement--you can barely see it, but it's a little darker on the actual drawing.

A couple of detail shots:

Pen & Ink house portrait, with detail

Here is another house portrait done with black walnut ink.  Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to scan the drawing, and instead used my sub-par little camera. The detail shot turned out better because you can make out the texture of the line work.

This drawing is 11 x 15 inches on Bristol paper.