I Think of You in Black and White

by Posted on

I fin­ished this draw­ing about a week ago. I’d thought I’d fin­ished it the week before, but I gave myself some time away from it with the notion that it was pos­si­ble I’d want to go into it again. I went through the whole process with this, col­lect­ing ref­er­ence pho­tos, draw­ing her in pen­cil, going back to var­i­ous parts of her face in my sketch­book and work­ing out the treat­ments I might want to use both with pen­cil and then in ink. After the pen­cils were done, I used vel­lum over­lays to work out what I want­ed to do with ink before going in to the draw­ing and begin­ning to ink it. Turns out vel­lum reacts to ink very dif­fer­ent­ly than smooth fin­ish bris­tol board, but it was still very help­ful to work out the approach­es I might take. I did maybe a dozen of those “drafts” and got ideas for how to approach some oth­er drawings.

It has been point­ed out (by mul­ti­ple peo­ple) that it might not be a sign of men­tal health for me to have start­ed a por­trait of my ex. I’m not sure I can claim the expe­ri­ence was ther­a­peu­tic or cathar­tic. It seemed like the thing to do, and it’s just what I did: drew her por­trait in pen and ink. I don’t feel any bet­ter or worse about what hap­pened between us because of it, I just feel bet­ter about myself for doing the work and bring­ing it to completion.

It’s great to be draw­ing again. It’s as though I’ve had my hands tied behind my back and have just come unbound.

Published by splicer

2 Replies to “I Think of You in Black and White”

  1. That’s excel­lent! For
    That’s excel­lent! For some rea­son I thought you only did photos…but I new here and uninformed.

    Do you use the pen­cil sketch as a tem­plate for the whole process? Or do you just use it that way until you find the right ink­ing tech­nique and ink over the pen­cil? I’m curious…mostly because I can’t seem to ever bring myself to touch ink to the orig­i­nal pen­cil sketch. It’s a sick­ness, I know.

    Giv­en that I real­ly don’t know you…beside the fact that you are a very tol­er­ant dance teacher who did not point out that the clum­sy drunk girl kept step­ping on your toes…I can­not (or more to the point will not) give my opin­ion on the men­tal health­i­ness of using an ex as your sub­ject. How­ev­er I do want to say that there is no oth­er time that I feel tru­ly mis­er­able then when I can­not pro­duce art. It’s frus­trat­ing to have ideas in your head that won’t come out right, or even worst to tru­ly have the desire to cre­ate, but there’s noth­ing. It’s just a void. It makes me feel help­less, and the depres­sion gets worst.

    So yeah I’m for any­thing that helps with the cre­ative process, because that (at least for me) helps with every­thing else.

    Umm…yeah…sorry. Didn’t mean to be so chatty…hope it made sense, I’m sleep deprived.

    kiss­es.

  2. Thank you for your kind
    Thank you for your kind words.

    Yes, I inked over the pen­cil draw­ing after I had worked out some ideas on the vel­lum. In pen­cil, it looked like this:

    Yes, get­ting lines down on paper on a reg­u­lar basis nowa­days is quite the relief. That void you wrote of last­ed too darn long.

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