“On the Beach”11×17 Inches
A couple moths ago as I was meandering around the internet and social media and I ran into some short videos of an artist making art. Or it may have been more than one artist but the technique was the same.
The artist was working on small piece, let’s say around 6×9 inches, and it was on paper. The artist would make a drawing and then tape over part of the drawing and make a new drawing on that taped over part. The artist would do this a bunch of times until there were a lot of layers of tape with lots of paint, ink, and pencil. It was a cool video. Watching the drawing change as the layers were added was fun. Plus it looked fun to do.
After about a month of seeing a handful of these videos I decided it was something that I wanted to try myself. I didn’t want to make a video of it but I wanted to try drawing with a bunch of layers. So I grabbed a few pieces of 5×7 inch paper and a whole bunch of different pens, markers, paint, and pencils. Plus some tape.
In gas you don’t know, it’s tough trying to learn any kind of new technique. I already know a lot of good techniques and can make some good pieces using them. So the spend time learning a new technique where there is no guarantee that I could make something good is a tough sell to myself. But eventually I was buying.
After I had all the paper and tools out I faced I problem. I had no idea what I wanted to draw and no idea how to make a drawing this way. Finally I decided to just dig in and start putting marks on paper. I had three or four drawings going at once so that I could let the paint dry on one piece and move on to another. It was a bit of a disaster. I gave it up after about three hours of trying to make something. I tucked all the pieces away and moved on.
Then a couple of weeks later I looked at the pieces again. They weren’t quite as bad as I remembered. They weren’t very good either but I didn’t write the whole idea off. I put it on the back burner.
Now we come to this week when I had an epiphany. It was the tape that I didn’t like but I don’t need to use tape to make layers. I have this stuff called “Positional Mounting Adhesive” (we called it 3M paper back in the day) that I’ve been using for other things since the early 1990s. It’s for dry mounting photos and such to various boards. It comes in a big roll, you place a photo on top of the sticky side, cut out the photo, burnish the back of it, and then peel off the backing paper. The burnishing (rubbing) transfers the sticky stuff off the paper it came on and onto the photo. It works real well.
Cartoon Art Card 5×7 Inches
Knowing that I could use the 3M paper on stuff to make layers made me realize that I had a ton of different papers that I could use. I like to try out new paper all the time but I almost always end up using the same Bristol board. But in the closet I had calligraphy paper, canvas paper, black paper, plastic paper, and a whole ten color set of super bright color paper. I could finally use it all.
I also have a lot of different pens that I could use to draw on that paper. I have a set of paint pens. For the black paper I have a white charcoal pencil and white paint pens. I have a nice silver ink marker. I have lots of different pencils. The choices I have to work on these different papers are plentiful.
On the upper left of my drawing table I have a pile of about twenty 5×7 inch drawings. These are all works in progress. It’s my go to pile when I want to make some art but have no idea what I want to do. There is a lot of half finished stuff in there.
Some of the drawings that were half finished were these 5×7 inch cartoon art cards that I made for my Great Gatsby project. My cartoon art cards are made up of a character’s face looking at us as there is a word balloon over the characters head that says something. In this case it was a quote from the Gatsby book. The problem was that they were really boring.
Most of the time when I make a cartoon art card, whether 2.5×3.5 inches or 5×7 inches, I draw weird faces. That’s what I like. Weird faces make whatever I write for the balloon more interesting. The problem with the Gatsby ones were that the faces were regular. They were just the faces I came up with for the characters in the books. Normal stuff. It was boring. That’s why I abandoned those drawings months ago. But now it was time to pick them up again.
I grabbed about six different papers and put the 3M paper on the back of them. Then I cut off small pieces of paper the size I thought looked good and pasted them on top of the drawing. Then I drew on top of that new piece of paper with whatever drawing tool would work. I’d even write words of some of them. The first one took me three hours to do but in the end I liked it. It breathed new life into a stale drawing. I have plans to do a few more and add them to my Gatsby project.
Cartoon Art Card 5×7 Inches
After completing a few new 5×7 inch ones I decided to go bigger. Back when I was putting a bunch of drawings into the InDesign document for the Gatsby book there was one that I had in there but then cut out. I just didn’t like the drawing. There was something missing from it. I found it bland and it was my least favorite of all the ones I did. That drawing jumped into my head as one I could improve with this new layering/collage technique.
This technique takes a fairly long time. The first 5×7 inch one I did took me three hours but it speed up after that. I probably got the next one done in two hours and the one after that in an hour and a half. But this 11×17 inch one took me a good six hours. I think I started it around 11AM and didn’t finish until about 7PM.
I didn’t like the original face that I drew on the male character so I just pasted a new piece of paper over the old face and drew it again. I think I count twenty seven pieces of paper pasted on the color marker drawing. Some have small drawings on them, some have writing, and some have decoration paint and ink marks. It almost looks simple when it’s all done but it took a long time getting there.
In the end I have to say that I really like this new technique. I plan to make some more 5×7 inch Gatsby cartoon art cards with it. I also want to see what abandoned drawings that I can receive with it. It really is hard to learn a new technique but when it works out it’s a good feeling.