Coast Guard Cutter Print

 "USCGC Blackfin"

16"x20" pen & ink

Years ago I made a pen & ink drawing of a Coast Guard cutter. The drawing is done using the stippling technique...a pen & ink technique where the drawing is composed of just dots of ink...there are no straight lines....just dots. I use Koh In Noor rapidographs to do this. Rapidographs are mechanical pens that have a steel wire in the barrel that allows only one drop of ink to come out each time you press down on the paper....it's prefect for stippling.

Anyway, I was just looking at the drawing again thinking about a woman who had asked me if I had prints available of that drawing and at the time I hadn't even scanned the drawing. I used to make my early prints here in the studio. Each drawing had to be scanned in sections then put back together in photoshop...lots of clean up to the scans and then I'd print a test scan. Printing was done on an Epson 1520 wide format printer I had bought with archival inks so the prints would last. I printed on good quality hot pressed watercolor paper. I'd print about 5-10 prints and then sold the prints as people ordered them. When I needed more I'd buy more WC paper and print up another batch. Making your own prints was a lot of work and "a lot of work" is a major understatement.

I did get around to scanning the drawing but that was on an older scanner that wasn't that good to begin with. Scanners, for those of you who have only bought one in the last 10 years, used to suck on ice! Software didn't work with operating systems, bad scanning quality, lots of  "noise" in the scan...ghost lines...ugh! I'd like to rescan the whole thing now with my newer killer scanner I have. It's a scanner/copier/printer combo but scans better than any scanner I ever had in the old days!  In the detail photo you can see the scan quality...not that good, ugh!

I was thinking about finally getting to making some prints but there might be a few snags...one, my old printer and printer drivers might not work with my newer computer. I also might have a major problem finding archival inks for it since I bought the printer way back around the late 90's....you know how fast the computer world is. It's a dinosaur at this point. Damn progress!  I'll have to check some things out before I even attempt this.
 

Painting and Pen & Ink

Before I painted I used to work mainly with the pen & ink medium. I was fond of the stippling technique and most of my drawings were large pieces...up to 18"x24". That's kind of an insane size to work with considering the small pen nib sizes I used. Stippling is the process of applying single dots of ink one at a time with a Koh In Noor Rapidograph pen. The ink work is usually done over lightly drawn pencil lines used as the guide for the artist to follow. I enjoyed pen & ink work. It's hard on my eyes now but I've loggged thousands of hours dotting away quite happily.

The effect of stippling is much like printed images you see in the newspaper....halftone images, a reprographic printing process, is simply an image being formed by dots of ink creating toned images which I call value images. If you want to better the values in your painting do pen & ink work...you'll see values easily after that.

When I started with pen & ink there were not a lot of art instruction books out there for it. Wanting better compositions I turned to reading painting books. Composition is composition so it worked for me. As for colors you just insert values. One thing about your point of interest is putting it in the right place and then directing the eye there. I had a drawing of a boat that really illustrated this point well.

Here is the initial point of beginning the drawing. Tha man working on the boat was my point of interest. That area should have the darkest darks and lightest lights.

 Continuing on, I began to fill in the rear elements and foreground area....keeping the foreground boat just a bit lighter in value.

Now it was time to finish up and adjust things along the way. You can see how the dark line of the rubber bumper leads right to the figure. The dark edge line of the shadow in the water leads to the figure as well as the nonskid deck surface doing the same. These linear paths leading to the figure help to establish the point of interest. The values kept stronger and darker in the area of the figure draw the eye there to to discover that man working. The foreground boat would normally have the stronger darks and lights but for this drawing with a midground POI the values were kept much lighter in the foreground. It worked.  

You can get very nice control of your values using rapidgraph pens...these are technical ink pens that can be reloaded and used over and over. Many artists today are now using throw away type pens since we now live in that state of mind. Good ones to buy for that are Pygma Micron pens which have acid free archival inks.
My favorite pen....Koh In Noor's Rapidograph which comes in different pen sizes and are refillable.

Savanna May

"Savanna May"

16" X 20" Oil on Canvas