The Enjoyment of Experimentation

Part of the fun I think of art, at least for many artists, is the ability to experiment, to just try something and see what happens. I'm not sure how this would translate to artists who paint or draw in great detail but my guess is that they too experiment in their own way.

In any case my recent drawings with Faber-Castell 'Pitt Artist Pen-Brushes' have been largely experiments. I just wanted to see what sort of image I would come up with using them. By definition almost the images would have to look different than my recent watercolors.

I think that you can see in these examples that each subject had me using the pen-brushes somewhat differently. The subjects are: Black Skimmers, Laughing Gulls and Forsters Terns at top, Tree Swallows in middle, and Yellow-rumped Warblers with Beech tree that was just leafing out at bottom.

Writers Unblock

I'm sure everyone has heard of writers block, where an author just can't get started writing. The same thing happens with artists. You just can't get started drawing, painting, sculpting.

But what do you call it when you can't stop drawing and painting? Ever since I picked up the Faber-Castell 'Pitt Artist Pen-Brushes' about a week ago I can't stop. Drawings keep pouring out. I think part of this is that I really can't work long on them. They are small, 6x9 inches, and they won't take that much work without becoming just dark blobs. The other thing I think is that I find myself very comfortable with them, even though I've already run into some of their limitations. Oddly enough I hated these when I first bought them 3-4 years ago. The point of the marker was just too broad for my comfort. Who knows why I like them now?

But that is the nature of life I think. Our tastes change. We'd all be happier if we admitted it instead of thinking that we needed to hold the same view on something throughout our life.

In any case above are two Least Sandpipers and three Glossy Ibises, one with two Canada Geese dominating the picture. All were seen on our trip to the Cape May, NJ area a couple of weeks ago.

Still Loafing

Fooling around a bit more with the felt-tip pens. These two are based on photos that I took, one an Ovenbird at Shenandoah National Park and the other a Red-headed Woodpecker seen at Lake Le-Aqua-Na State Park in Illinois. For various reasons I didn't think I could do much with them, much as I like both bird species.

But these felt-tip pens almost force you to work loosely because the tips are just too broad to allow detail, at least at the small size I'm using. So both photos seemed like they might be possible to work from. At least it was worth a try. The nice thing about a new medium is that you can play with it in numerous ways. I'm sure I'll be doing some more in the coming days and weeks.