daily-ish notes…

  • on fountain pens, part 2.

    I ordered a couple fountain pens last week, and since they’ve arrived I’ve been dabbling in doodling with my new toys.

    Specifically, I ordered two LAMY Safari pens, a yellow one with an extra fine nib and a black one with a medium nib.

    Fountain pens feel different on the page than the felt-tipped markers or roller-ball gel pens I’ve been using for the last couple of years. There is a more tactile effect to their contact with the paper, a subtle scratchiness and that moment of flow as you see the ink setting into the page and drying a millimeter or two behind the leading trail of your sketching path. There is a unique satisfaction to their flow on the page, and I’m enjoying them immensely.

  • on messes.

    I had thirty minutes at lunch today to do my daily sketch, so I went for a walk and found nice place to sit in the atrium of the local theatre where there a ton of benches and plants and natural light. A thousand little scribbles turned into a mess of vegetation and some hurried painting started to push through into a plain old mess.

    It didn’t turn out terrible, but messy is tough and there is a fine line between art and jumble.

  • masked off.

    I’ve been experimenting with masking.

    No, it’s not anything unique or new, but I’ve been playing around with the notion of a crisp white border around my painting. A box made of masking tape defines the rectangle of paintable area on the page. Sometimes the border is thin. Sometimes it is very wide, so wide that the picture is floating in the middle third of the page. Sometimes I lock the image into that space, and sometimes I let the sketch slip outside the boundaries in a controlled way.

    Masking has proven to be an interesting addition to my toolkit.

  • re: waiting for paint to dry.

    Watercolour painting has forced me to become more patient than I’m used to.

    I’m used to pushing through. I’m used to getting stuff done sequentially and quickly. I’m used to checking off items from a to do list to complete a task.

    But then I paint.

    Watercolour sometimes forces you to sit and (literally) wait for the paint to dry.

    Just wait. Not do. Not touch. Not proceed. Just wait.

    That can be a good type of hobby to have.

  • on photo expeditions, part one.

    I went for a long walk with the dog this morning with the intention of not only getting out into the spring air, but also of snapping a small collection of reference photos for future painting efforts.

    I nabbed some landscapes of the river valley.

    I captured a few perspective shots under the bridge over the river.

    I pointed my macro lens at a dozen little wrinkled berries left over after winter.

    I took about twenty pics of the dog, too.

    I think I might be set for the rest of the month’s daily art.