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

Bandon Oregon Sailboat

"Shade In Bandon Oregon"

16"x20" Oil on Canvas

Ok, just finished up the sailboat in Bandon, Oregon today. Geeze this one took forever to finish. Too many distractions lately. This is why an artist needs a studio up in the hills. I'm happy with it but of course there are always things I wish I had done differently...like the boot stripe color. By the way... a boot stripe is the line of color (here a pale greenish blue) painted above the bottom paint (here a dark red). That boot stripe is actually the same color as the stripe just under the cap rail and gunnel (the deck edge). I made a slightly darker mix of it when painting the boot stripe but it blended too much with the still wet paint of the hull so it reads lighter now. Also, the bottom paint should have been a true red darkened down with ultramarine blue but I used alizarin crimson just because that is my normal operating red. In this painting I don't like the crimson. Most bottom paint red is a dull true red color. Also, there is that loose thing...hahaha.

Still, I think it works and now on to the next painting.

Current Work In Progress

I haven't been posting much lately but not because of not painting. I've finished off about 3 or 4 paintings but they were versions based on a particular painting and I don't want to post 5 similar paintings on here. Also...the normal things that life brings, family and winter storm damage has kept me busy too. Winter storms bring not only bring rain but high winds which knock branches, and at times, trees down. We also have our usual bout of water getting into the barn and workshop so it can get really busy around here with back to back storms.

Bandon WIP...working title

So anyway....this is a painting I'm working on right now. Figured I needed to post something. This scene is from the coastal town of Bandon, Oregon. I passed through it on my way back from Coos Bay last year. Beautiful small town with great fish and chips, crab, quaint little shops and nice marina and waterfront. I haven't painted hardly any sailboats so I thought this one being worked on would do. Hard to not love the lines of a sailboat even if you are a powerboat person. I should have this one finished in another day or two. This image isn't the greatest since it was taken with a diiferent camera...my normal camera had a dead battery and it's charging now. I'm trying to keep my edges soft but my marine work always has a totally different look than my landscape work. I'll go back in the end and try and soften up some more on it.

A Detail of the painting....

Well...back to the easel...I want to get everything painted in so I can get to the part of dialing it all in. This one is taking forever to do...usually the marine pieces always take days to do. It's all of that detail and line work. I'd like to paint them looser but that never happens with me. I think I'm just going to have to live with my work like that, at least for now.

Framed in Black

Loosk pretty nifty!

Well, here is the boat painting in the black frame which really has very dark reddish undertones. I like it but then again I had the idea it would look cool in a dark frame. My general consensus is that landscapes with lots of greens go well in your typical gold frames and marine work...usually lots of blues and greys tends to go better with darker frames...ie black.

Of course I could be totally wrong with that thinking but it seems to work....to me, hahaha. How decisive. I'd be the first to admit framing is better handled by the people buying the work. They know what they want it to look like on their walls so why not let them just buy the canvas and head straight to the frame shop. Sure would make it a lot easier for artists to concentrate on just painting....but that would be in a perfect world. It's nice to present work in a decent frame and I've learned that lesson like a struggling artist usually does. You buy the most affordable, and usually, the cheapest looking frames that "most affordable" gets you. Then one day you look at the work of artists in galleries and then go home to look at your framed paintings and want to kill yourself...."what was I thinking!" is probably a sentance most artists have uttered at one time or another.


If you are serious about selling your work to people who want to buy it make sure you buy good frames...not affordable frames. Look around at professional artists whose work you feel is in the realm of your caliber, or vice versa, and pay attention to the frames. Do your frames look like that? If not then start saving your money for better frames. The presentation makes a world of difference and shows to the buyer you feel your work deserves better frames because it's better work. Hate to sound uppity but if you don't value what you create then why should a buyer value it anymore than you do.

Anyway, I think the boat painting looks really good in this frame...looked good in the other gold frame but I think black tends to go better with this painting. They have this really nice looking black frame that was reproduced from an English designed frame used mainly for landscapes at King Of Frame that I think would make this look even better....something to think about trying out as soon as I hit the California Lotto....by the way, King Of Frame has some killer frames and their prices are pretty darned good too....check them out if you haven't already.

Fishing Boat New Hazard..finished

"New Hazard"

12" X 16" Oil on Canvas
All finished up with the New Hazard. You know...painting a scene like this takes me forever because of the boat and surrounding details. No matter how hard I try to loosen up to speed things up it just doesn't happen. I almost hated this painting after working two days on everything but the water. I'd paint for a couple of hours and then walk away to get away from it. It got to be like hating to get back to painting it each time I stopped. Some paintings are like that though....not just marine paintings. Still, in general, marine work always take much longer to work on for me. I paint the water last so I can hardly wait to get to that point, haha.
I'm always reminded when painting marine scenes that you just don't have much control over your "style" of painting. Your painting "style" is governed by the painting gods and not you. I used to look over the marine (and cityscape) works of a painter friend of mine from Canada named Brian Simons. I absolutely love his loose, effortless style of work and drool looking at his boats and harbor scenes. Brians' work has that fresh look of a painter who is at the top of his game and the work looks vibrant and spontaineous. I used to wish I could paint in his style, or that style..any style that had that look. But....you don't make your own style the way you want it. It just comes out of you subconciously. I like to think that "your style is what happens while you're busy painting". So, I don't worry about how my marine work looks anymore, I worry about not painting more of them.
I'll let this one sit and dry and take another good long look at it to see if there will be need for improvements somewhere that I don't see at this moment. I'm happy!