More Sketchbook Pens: Four Edsons

These are now past­ed into my sketch­book, but are not actu­al­ly sketch­book work, but drafts. I’ve men­tioned this before, but often what I do when I’m not cer­tain how to pro­ceed with a draw­ing is to place vel­lum over the pen­cil draw­ing and take dif­fer­ent approach­es at ren­der­ing the sec­tion in ink. Some­times these come out as almost ful­ly-real­ized draw­ings and oth­er times I’ll work only on one the area of the draw­ing. Some­times I’ll rough out some ideas crude­ly and oth­er times I’ll spend hours try­ing an approach com­pli­cat­ed enough that I’d rather do it twice and like it than once and real­ize I don’t. And as you can see, some­times I take notes along the way to remind me what to do the next time.

It’s not uncom­mon for me to like some of my drafts more than the final draw­ing, or at least to like some aspect of a draft more than I liked that aspect of the final. The bar­rel of the Edson to the upper right has a nice lumi­nous aspect to it that the final piece also has, but not with quite the depth that the draft did. The spring-loaded cam on the sec­tion also looks nicer to my eye than the final. Of course, the draft has a num­ber of aspects that make it not a can­di­date for prime time: the waver­ing of the out­lines and the incon­sis­tent black­ish tone of the nib’s reflec­tion, these come from the care­less­ness that it a result of my focus on oth­er aspects. So some­times I get some part more right in a draft. It’s an aspect of work­ing that I have to accept as long as the final piece works.

The fol­low­ing drafts are all a lit­tle crud­er, but it’s not hard to see what I was try­ing with each. The last one at the bot­tom is the one that sold me on the deci­sion to use stip­pling for the satin plat­inum fin­ish of the Edson’s cap.

Gen­er­al­ly I use stip­pling very spar­ing­ly. It feels a bit like cheat­ing because it’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to make smooth tones with­out ever mov­ing a pen across the paper. The required eye-hand coor­di­na­tion is less than with hatch­ing or out­line draw­ings and stip­pling is much more for­giv­ing of mis­takes. Con­se­quent­ly, when I see pen illus­tra­tions that use a lot of stip­pling, I feel a lit­tle cheat­ed. There are some tech­ni­cal­ly excel­lent draw­ings out there that look near­ly pho­to­graph­ic because they were cre­at­ed entire­ly in stip­pling. It takes skill, but some­thing in me revolts at see­ing that kind of work. It feels as though the artist played it safe. Even when rep­re­sent­ing mun­dane objects, art should nev­er be safe.

I sup­pose a sim­i­lar crit­i­cism could be lev­eled at me because I make so many drafts, but in the end I have one sheet of paper. I may get a few prac­tice runs, but it comes out on that sheet of paper the way I did it the one time I knew I was­n’t work­ing on a draft. It’s also pos­si­ble to do very inter­est­ing things with stip­pling, so I don’t wish to write it off entire­ly. Some­times, as here on the cap of the Edson, stip­pling is a good tool to bring out a par­tic­u­lar kind of light and tex­ture. You will cer­tain­ly see me use it, but usu­al­ly I try oth­er meth­ods first and stip­ple only when I’m con­vinced it’s the best approach.

So I’ll close here by para­phras­ing one of the world’s best-sell­ing greet­ing cards:

Boy: «Do you like stippling?»

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p style=“padding-left: 30px;”>Girl: «I don’t know, you naughty boy! I’ve nev­er stippled…”