Early Stage Edson

Some of you have seen this fin­ished piece, but as I’m open­ing up my in-progress scans for pub­lic con­sump­tion, this is one that grabs me for a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent rea­sons. First, I’m very proud that the first lay­er of hatch­ing was all arcs to sug­gest the shape of the pen. Hav­ing that down first helped me move for­ward with a sense of dimen­sion that I don’t always have when I’m putting lay­er over lay­er of cross­ing lines down on paper.

The Edson/Aurora piece is one where I real­ly pushed my lim­its. There are aspects to the fin­ished draw­ing that I hon­est­ly did not think I could pull off. The arced hatch­ing was the first of these where my first thought was «no way, that’s not going to hap­pen.» I’m learn­ing, a lit­tle at a time, that that thought is the sig­nal for me to go ahead and do it. The con­cen­tric arcs in the body of the pen were the first. There were at least four more times along the way. The tex­ture of the table­top, the cap of the ink bot­tle, the label of the ink bot­tle, and the lines on the note­book’s pages. These were all areas I knew I could­n’t do yet pushed for­ward anyway.

My fear—that I’ll get some­thing wrong and screw up the whole thing—isn’t so much allayed by my suc­cess, but by the results of my mis­takes. The lines on the page in the final piece are quite imper­fect, but I believe (and oth­ers have con­firmed this) that those imper­fec­tions add to the qual­i­ty of the drawing.

While I’m quite fond of the look of pen and ink—all inter­wo­ven con­trast­ing values—it’s nice to see the pen­cil work that was put down as a guide. See­ing the ten­ta­tive lines as I was strug­gling to get the shapes down on paper brings me a bit of plea­sure. (I just looked up «ten­ta­tive» in the the­saurus because I want­ed to use a dif­fer­ent word. The first entry was «pen­cilled in.»