The Width of a Line

This little Daler Rowney Book is now completed, with more ballpoint sketches:

A sunny day seduced me to think it was already warm enough to sit outside and sketch:

At some point my blue ballpoint pen ran out of ink, and I switched to a black one – cheap, and with a very thin line, just as Peter Cusack has described the ones he uses. I think I get why. There’s a whole world of subtlety that just wasn’t possible with my thick blue one, and which I am just starting to explore.

As usual, more pictures and bigger resolutions on flickr.

My charcoal sketches were going along great until I had to sharpen my pencil. When it was about half the length it had when I had started sharpening I gave up, and decided to keep in my sketching to media that take being ‘on the road’ a lot better. But I didn’t just want to go back to my usual pencil & line stuff, so I turned to my waterbrush:

Then I rememberd Peter Cusack’s Subway Sketches from Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life. His sketches are deeply fascinating to me, as he sketches almost the same subject matter as I do, yet his sketches look completely different both from mine and from those of other public transport sketchers. His sketches seem to be all about planes, and portray volume in ways I feel I have never succeeded to do. So I decided to emulate him for a while. Not to claim his style as my own or to imitate forever, but to learn from it what I can. Because I think there is a lot. My first attempt, now back with the pencil, concentrated on hatching (which I so have to practice properly one day!):

But they were not satisfying at all, so I looked at his actual sketches again, and for the first time ever I’m now using a ballpoint pen for sketching, as he does (except I do use blue). I absolutely love it! I never really liked the pure lines ballpoint pens make, neither in drawing nor writing, but the nuances that are possible with this less linear style of sketching with them are amazing. Here’s one of my first attempts, more already on their way:

After the beige comes grey …

… and then brown:

More on flickr.

After I finished my little Daler Rowney I started with another Fabriano Artist’s Journal – this time the ‘Classic’ version, alternating between bright white and a more crème colored paper:

But I felt like experimenting more with washes, and combinations with dry and wet media (keeping the pencil lines while enjoying the flow of the brush as well), and ended up with (mostly) charcoal and wash (with a waterbrush):

I started really liking this technique. I also started to be really annoyed with the Fabriano Journal’s paper, because although I love it for everything else, it cannot hold a wash properly. So this buckled. A lot. And for the first time in a long while I decided to abandon a sketchbook before it was finished to be picked up again later, and to turn to something else for now. The something else is another little Daler Rowney Sketchbook, similar in size to the last one I used, but with 150 gsm paper (in contrast to the first’s 100 gsm), which holds up well to my washes so far:

As usually also found on flickr.

It is filled now! I made some experiments with ink wash in it:

But although I found them intriguing, I did not stick with them. I also didn’t know when I made this drawing:

that there was (and still is) this wonderful exhibition on, of Carl Blechen’s ‘Amalfi Sketchbook,’ some of which done in a somewhat similar technique about two centuries ago (but in very different weather!):

Wow, way to go. This exhibition teaches a lot about monochrome but painterly sketching, and landscape, and how to arrange lights and darks on a page. I found particularly interesting how he used lines of untouched white around dark areas as a kind of halo indicating the light coming from behind. It is fascinating to see how someone from that era went about sketching his surroundings, and used these records in later paintings:

(Source: http://www.museumsportal-berlin.de )

The rest of my little book got populated with people from public transport again:

You can check out this sketchbook as a whole (or look at those sketches in full resolution) on flickr (as a slideshow as well).

These are from the little Daler Rowney Book as well.

The daily scanning is going really well so far. It is easy to perceive scanning as an integral part of the ‘come home – boot – check emails – get sucked into web’ routine. And this routine doesn’t even take much more time that way, while it actually produces something useful.




I love it when I manage to draw more than one person from a scene, and I’m really pleased with how these turned out:

This is a ca. A6 (4 x 6″) Daler Rowney 100g/m2 110 sheet book with a black stiff cover that after two weeks of use (aka carrying it around all day) has already lost the spine. Partly because it is just not very stable, and partly because I used my pencil as a lever and basically burst it apart. But I do enjoy drawing in it (and that it does not smear as the Fabriano Journal does), and it is very effective for churning out lots of sketches without having to think much about them.

These images also hopefully signify the start of a new habit: to scan my sketches (and other drawings and paintings) on the day that I make them. Starting to scan when a book is already full is just overwhelming (and hence less likely to be done at all). I have too many unscanned books sitting on my shelf already. Scanning is important to me not just for posting stuff, but because it is a kind of searchable backup. It is much easier to locate, say, a bunch of people reading the newspaper in my tagged flickr piles than by going through the books themselves. This means the scans aren’t just an archive – they are a tool for producing juxtapositions, combinations, and doing visual research in ways that the books alone aren’t.

In the past three months I’ve filled my first Fabriano Artist’s Journal, after having lusted for it for years.

I think that the cover held up remarkably well for something that isn’t as strong and stiff as a moleskine, for example. I absolutely love the paper. The different colors are excellent for experimenting with different media—I’ve started to use chalk & sanguine on sketches, which works well on the medium toned pages, or dark ink in a waterbrush + chalk on the really dark ones, where pencil is just too faint (but not many experiments in this first batch!). But in general this paper is great for pencil: it has the feel of a smooth paper, yet a texture that makes it easy to get a great variety of lines out of a HB propeller pencil, from faint and exact to dark and dirty. The only thing it does not do is hold up well with washes. Remarkable opacity for paper with this small grammature. The further you get to the middle the less flat it opens up, so not too good for spreads. One caveat: If you use both sides of a page/spread, you’ll might want to have a fixative handy. I noticed my pencil lines rubbing off, at least where I made them dark, but I was too lazy to fix every day, and it shows. I don’t mind that much, as my sketches are never really ‘neat’ anyway. Also, I do not write in my sketchbooks much, so I’m not sure about how well it is to use with pens etc. Here the specs from dickblick; I bought mine at Cass Art in London.

These are sketches from the first section, a rather neutral beige:

I love London, maybe simply because I love how it looks. Compared with Berlin, most of the houses where people actually live are small, and kind of askew. Outside plumbing makes for interesting lines and patterns, and the chimneys are really cute.
I like the colours of brick walls, especially old ones where different kinds of bricks mix.

The storefronts (old school ones) look so colourful, and the typography so elegant (well, certainly more so than my attempts to reproduce it).

I find the stark difference between front and back surprising, and often I prefer the back, maybe because it looks so very much not like the tidiness that is Germany.

London even seems to love me back a bit; or at least it felt that way when somebody sitting at my table in a café asked if he could buy the little sketch I had just finished, and commissioned something bigger as well. Here a preparatory sketch and a photograph of the finished watercolour:

This one is much bigger than the others (which are more or less postcard-sized), 35 cm to 25 cm, and I took my time with it, hence more details.

There’s exactly four different activities that about 90 % of people on public transport seem to engage in at any given moment, according to the contents of my sketchbooks: They stare into space:

They read:

They play/deal with their mobiles:

They sleep:

Yes, sometimes people talk to each other, but only to certain hours; and once I caught a lady knitting.