Last week I wrote about having a cold for twelve days and how that just killed any momentum I had for making art. It stops it dead in its tracks and whenever I get sick I fear I’ll never be able to capture my artistic drive again. Life drains that drive out of almost everyone and I always fear that I’ll be next. So this week I decided I had to get started on something.
I was just looking at my calendar and saw that the last Big Ink Drawing that I made was back in January of 2023. It’s August 24, 2024 as I write this so it’s been a long time since I made one. Of course, the first thing I had to do after deciding to make a Big Ink Drawing is to decide what the drawing is going to be of. I have a few different ways of doing this but the one I didn’t want to use was starting from scratch.
I have made a lot of drawings in my life and most of them never turn into anything finished. Since I scan in all my drawings right after I make them I have a whole folder full of thousands of drawings, a lot of them finished pencil drawings of some sort, so I can look through the scans for something I can work with. Then I remembered my drawer of drawings.
Underneath my drawing table I have a couple of drawers. In one of them I put finished or nearly finished drawings that I might work on in the future. Except for one the last couple of years I stopped using this drawer. I don’t know why. I used to go into it a few times a week to add drawings or take them out but over the last two years that kind of stopped being my habit and the drawings that were in there just sat there. I think it was during the week that I had my cold that I remembered it again and looked through it for the first time in ages. Then I sat down and rested again.
As I was trying to figure out what to make a Big Ink Drawing of I thought of the drawer. I looked through it and two drawing jumped out at me. One was of a female figure and the other was a man’s face among a bunch of design elements. I thought I could combine the two drawings into a new composition.
Here is a tip that I didn’t learn until I was around thirty. Always date your art. Whether it’s a finished piece or a working drawing put a date on it. In my twenties I used to be able to remember when I made things. But as I made more and more stuff and time went by I eventually forgot. Did I make this drawing in 1996 or 1998? I sure didn’t know. That’s when I started to write dates on everything. Also put names on things so you can tell one from another.
I mention that now because that’s how I know how old these drawings, that were in the drawer, are. The female figure (named “Run Around Now”) is from February 6, 2009 and the male face (named “Cleaning Windows”) is from July 5, 2010. They’ve been hanging around for a decade and a half waiting for something to be done with them.
Also the names of the drawings have nothing to do with what the drawing is of. They’re just random names I thought of as I was naming them. If you sit around waiting for the perfect name to come to you then you’ll never name anything. That’s what stops people from naming things. They think if the name isn’t clever and appropriate then they shouldn’t name it. I say to just give it a name so you know what to refer to it as (such as when I’m writing down in my calendar what I worked on that day) and don’t worry if the name is meaningless. You can always change the name later anyway.
After I picked out the two drawings I went to find the scans of them that I made way back when I made the drawings. Since I dated the drawings it was easy. I looked in my folder of scans for the “Date Created” of the digital files and looked for the ones created around the dates on the drawings. They were right there in it took about thirty seconds each to find them. I was ready to go.
I took the scans of the two drawings and combined them in Photoshop. The drawings fit together nicely and this part was really easy to do. Then I printed out the new drawing composition in blue line on an 11×17 inch piece of paper. My intention was to refine the drawing even more to be get it ready to be blown up and transferred to a big 22×30 inch piece of paper. It was then that I came to a complete halt.
It turned out that I didn’t want to refine the drawing on that 11×17 inch piece of paper. I stared at it and just couldn’t’t do it. I decided I wanted to refine the drawing at full size on the 22×30 inch piece of paper. I usually don’t do that with my Big Ink Drawings but this time I wanted to. So that’s what I did.
First I blew the drawing up to 20×28 inches (I want a one inch border around it) and then printed the drawing out in pieces on eight 8.5×11 inch pieces of regular inkjet paper. I taped the paper together and then taped the printed drawing onto the 22×30 inch piece of paper. I got my graphite paper, put it between the two sheets of paper and used a hard pencil to transfer the drawing onto the big piece of paper.
The transfer is never perfect but it usually good enough to start drawing with ink over it. But this time I still had some refining of the drawing to do so I got at it. It took me an afternoon but eventually I got the drawing refined enough in pencil to start drawing in ink over top of it.
That’s where I am now. I’m almost finished with stage one of the inking. I’ve got the basic lines down but next is figuring out where I want to put black areas, areas of texture, and patterns of line. That’s all the fun and unplanned (as of now) stuff that becomes the technique of the drawing. I’ll let you know how it goes.