With a quick search of my calendar I can see that back in June of 2023 (It’s January 2026 as I write this) I wrote a piece about my Three Marker Technique drawings. I’m not even going to go back and read it as I want to write something fresh about it.
I’m not even going to go in depth on the technique, since I probably did back in 2023, but I’m going to give the basics and then go on.
The basics are that I look in one of my Inkbooks for a thumbnail drawing, blown that drawing up to 6×9 inches, print it out in blue line on a 6×9 inch piece of Bristol board, and then tape the outside white edges of the paper to mask them out. That way I can draw over the edges if I had to (and I do). Then I draw over the blue line thumbnails with three different size markers. Small, medium, and large. Finally I pull the tape off and the edges are clean again. That’s the basic process. I even video myself pulling the tape off the edges and post them as “Tape Peeling” videos.
According to a search on my calendar I haven’t made any of these type of drawings in about a year. I don’t know why except that I’ve been working on other things.
When I first started working on these type of drawings they were without a final purpose. They were just me working on some images in ink. I had no idea what they could become besides a small 6×9 inch ink drawing. Over time, after I had built up a stock of them, they become fodder for some of my Big Ink Drawings.
My Big Ink drawings are a series of 22×30 inch drawings done in ink. According to my calendar I haven’t made one of them since 2024 and I only got one done that year. So it’s been a while since I worked on them. I made a whole bunch of them, around fifty, over the years and I used to look through my Three Marker drawings to find some images to blow up into the Big Ink drawings. Usually I’d redraw the 6×9 inch Three Marker drawings at 11×17 inches before blowing them up to 22×30 inches. That gave me more to work with.
The Three Marker drawings are also more spontaneous than my normal finished ink drawings. Since I’m drawing over a rough blue line thumbnail drawing with no pencil underdrawing there is no fixing mistakes. I just keep going with it. The point of them is not to be perfect but to work out some ideas for images. That’s what I usually redraw them larger if I am going to go on and work with them more. That’s when I can work out the details.
I mention all this because, as I’ve mention in previous blogs, I have a hard time getting stuff done in January. In hindsight I always seem to get stuff done but in these January moments it’s tough. I’m not sure what kind of projects and art I want to work on for the next year. So I stumbled onto doing some more There Marker drawings.
Years ago I attached two drawers to the underside of my drawing table. That’s where I keep a lot of the small stuff that I have in progress. I have three 6×9 inch envelopes in one of the drawers that hold already set up blue line drawings for my “Dreams of Things” series, my “Three Marker” drawings, and finally one for miscellaneous stuff. Last week I realized I hadn’t touched the “Three Marker” one in ages.
I had about five blue line drawings in the envelope and I thought that wasn’t enough to start with. I went over to my shelf, pulled out one of my Ink Books that is full of thumbnail drawings and started looking for ones I could use.
Setting them up consisted of putting the scan of the drawing (I have everything scanned already) into a 6×9 digital template, printing it out in blue line, and then taping the edges of the paper. It takes a few minutes to properly tape the edges so I think it took me an hour and a half to get twelve of them prepped.
Over the next week I got ten new Three Marker drawings done. Each one takes anywhere from half an hour to two hours depending on how things are going. I was going at such a good clip that after a week I set up ten more so that I could have more to choose from. That was not bad.
The Three marker drawings are really not finished pieces. They’re fun to line up and look at a lot of in a row but they’re not the same as something that’s been worked to its completion. There is not a lot of thought put into them at that point. But that is their point. Enough thought has gone into them that they make a very good step one (or maybe it’s step two). I can now look through them and figure out which ones are good enough to be made into something. It’s what that something is that I don’t know.
Possibly I can turn some of these drawings into digital prints. I haven’t made any of those in a while either but we’ll see. Last summer I got five 24×36 inch painting done. That was the first time in a while I painted. I don’t think I’ll be doing more paintings that size this year. But you never know. I might do some more Big Ink drawings. I know I have the paper for them somewhere around the studio and I always have plenty of ink. That might be the most likely destination for some of these ink images I’m working on.
But that’s what I’ve been getting done with my January of not getting much done. There may not be any big finished work in the mix right now but I’m getting some of the small stuff done.
“From small things, Mama, big things one day come.”