Exercise 1 – Making Marks

The first exercises have been about making marks on the paper. For this exercise I mainly used A3, medium texture cartridge paper.

I started off simply by doodling lines, shapes, and shading free form onto the paper, using a variety of different pencils.

My observations included:

- it was tricky to work at a large size with a soft pencil and to maintain a constant quality of line throughout because the pencil quickly wore down to a thicker, blunter stub. This affected the amount of detail that I could achieve. Turning the pencil round to use a sharper edge of the point resulted in a thinner, darker line.

- Harder pencils held more detail but didn’t achieve so much contrast in tone.

- Softer pencils made more use of the paper texture.

- Charcoal on cartridge paper gives very black, almost inky results. It is easier to draw thicker, imprecise lines than thinner, detailed lines. It was easy to see how charcoal could be used to imply form through the use of shadows and dark tones. At the same time, it would be easy to overwork the charcoal. The dust generated by the use of charcoal did dirty the ‘clean’ areas, and even blowing it away would leave a residue.

- I found the dip pen one of the most exciting tools to use. I found it gave a variable and dynamic line. Further interest can be introduced by deliberately causing ink blots. I particularly liked the look of shading built up of layers and layers of fine pen strokes.

- I didn’t find the PITT artist pens to be as versatile or as attractive in use as the dip pen. I used a variety of thicknesses (S, F, M, and B) but they all gave a ‘felt pen’ feel to the drawing.

- On the other hand, the Pilot drawing pen (01), which was much finer and harder, required so many strokes to build up a reasonably thick line that the end result became almost as dynamic, although in a different way perhaps, to the dip pen.

- I was surprised how ‘firm’ the bamboo pen was – it felt like drawing with a stick. Also, the ‘nib’ is not as efficient as that of the dip pen and therefore I discovered a tendency for the lines to start out quite thick before tapering quickly to a finer line as the ink began to run out. Once I had discovered this, I was able to start using this feature. I felt the bamboo pen was most useful for larger detail.