A couple of pens from my sketchbook

This is how I got start­ed with the series of pen and ink draw­ings of pens and ink bot­tles. I’m not even sure what it was at first that intrigued me, but it’s not that dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out. I love my pens and these were good exer­cis­es in tex­ture and reflec­tion with a vari­ety of sur­faces. There were chal­lenges with these draw­ings, but they are sketch­book pieces, so I did­n’t want to take them too seriously.

My sketch­book is not just a place for me to exper­i­ment, it is also a place where I apply a lot of crit­i­cal judg­ment. I can see my mis­takes and my ten­den­cy toward cer­tain kinds of mis­takes very clear­ly in sketch­book work, where­as when I’m build­ing an image as part of a series, I’ll do every­thing I can to hide my mis­takes. The prob­lems I see in my «fin­ished» work tend to be indi­vid­ual prob­lems rather than prob­lems that are part of any recur­ring pattern.

Then, too, is the ques­tion of how suc­cess­ful­ly I blind myself to my own artis­tic short­com­ings. I’m sure that there are trou­bles in my more pol­ished pieces that are appar­ent to oth­ers but which I have no aware­ness of. There’s a lot less ego tied up in sketch­book pieces, and so it is eas­i­er for me to have per­spec­tive about the strengths, fail­ures, and oth­er qual­i­ties of such drawings.

The pen above and to the right is my 1945 Park­er ‘51’ that I wrote about in the post Meet The Park­ers, Part ‘51’. I still write with the ‘51’ quite reg­u­lar­ly, though per­haps not so much since I got my Park­er 61, which I shall have to write about some­day soon. The 61 is the pen I had been look­ing for when I was offered the ‘51’ and its style is a bit new­er. The 61’s design is from more than a decade before I was born, so it might be fair to call either «clas­sic».

The pen below is my Nami­ki Bam­boo in the rhodi­um fin­ish. I have one in black as well now, and they’re both ter­rif­ic writ­ers. You can read more about it in my post Pilots Great and Small. There are pho­tographs there so you can see for your­self whether I did any jus­tice to the rhodi­um fin­ish. This one would have ben­e­fit­ted from a some­what less hasty approach; though I very much like the loose curves of the threads and the bar­rel right above the threads and the over­all val­ue of the fin­ish feels right, the tex­ture of the fin­ish does not. The lines are too shaky and to look smooth and they don’t even look casu­al­ly put down. The per­spec­tive is a bit awk­ward as well, as the pen seems to be going in three dif­fer­ent directions.

These of course are all things I can cor­rect when I do it the next time. I don’t know whether either the ‘51’ or the Bam­boo will find its way into the cur­rent Pens and Inks series, but I encounter some of the very same chal­lenges when I work on those. The more ink goes down in my sketch­book, the bet­ter the qual­i­ty of the lines I make at the draw­ing table.