Helen's Drawing / Sketching Blog

We have just moved house, and my new home has a small wood-fired heater. It's a wonderful thing, gathering twigs and old pinecones from beneath our own trees for kindling. My fire-making skills are a bit dodgy, and yesterday morning I woke to find the log I'd left burning had turned into charcoal! So of course I had to test out its drawing properties! It turned out to be way too hard for drawing on paper, but it worked brilliantly on the courtyard bricks. My daughter decided to try to make paint, and discovered that soaking the charcoal in water allowed it to create a thick, dense coating. We spent a wonderful hour decorating the bricks, firstly with zig-zag paving patterns, then they evolved into sunbursts and curves, circles and squiggles punctuated with stripes and dots. They began confined within the each pair of bricks then gradually expanded across them. And what a mess we made! Hands covered in black! Fantastic!

I haven't had so much fun drawing in ages. I found myself wondering about my stone-age ancestors and whether those moms might have spontaneously made marks with their children. Did one of them draw a rayed sun like we had? It reminded me of how important it is to get back to the basics of drawing. It was the sort of drawing I used to do a lot of - instinctive, hands-on, messy and physical. None of this tidy A4 sketching for the scanner. How did you 'used to' draw? Have you left it behind for the drawing you 'need' to do?

Sometimes I'm being tentative about drawing - especially when I'm 'out of practice' or tacking a difficult subject. With pencil it's so easy to make tentative, uncertain marks, or to constantly erase and try again. Working with pen and ink forces you to be decisive. There's no 'maybe' with pen, no 'softly does it'. It's on or off. Yes or no. You have to oberve, visualise your marks and then commit to them. It might seem counter-intuitive to use such an unforgiving medium when you aren't feeling confident, but I hope you'll consider trying it. If you make a 'mistake', just go with it - don't try to second-guess. Pretend you're Matisse or Picasso. You're allowed to make interesting lines that are doing their own thing. You aren't a human photocopier. Ink pen drawing forces you to stop dithering and dive in feet first, and the results are often surprisingly good.

Try a few different approaches. Try pure contour drawing with interesting and elegant line. Try hatching and stippling to give the impression of tonal value, or add an ink or watercolor wash. Its important to start off with the right equipment - a fountain pen generally won't do the job so choose the right drawing pen. If you're using a dip-pen, you'll need to select and maintain your pen nibs.

I like to draw with fiber tip archival pens - Pigma Micron are nice, as are Copic Multiliners, and there's a dozen other reputable brands around. Look for ones with archival pigment ink if you want your work to have longevity. They don't have the interesting and varied line of a dip pen, but they are clean and convenient. The ones I use the most are probably the Artline brand - they're available at our local newsagent, so I always have a few to hand so that I don't end up doodling in blue ballpoint or my daughter's glitter pink gel pen.

Light and shadow fall across strands of hair, so its tone is always changing - you cannot use a pencil-stroke to represent every hair in a realist drawing. This tutorial shows you how to draw short and long hair by observing the highlights and using negative space drawing. The examples are quite detailed, but you can also use the principles of the negative space (which could also be called reserved-highlight) approach in quick sketches. Mentally map out the highlights and draw bold darks with broad strokes, lightly working in suggestions of texture, without becoming too detailed.

One of the hardest things about portraiture is getting the mouth right. You need to observe carefully, and really study how the mouth locks into the structure of the face, and notice the subtle changes of plane that occur. This article on Drawing the Mouth has examples and tips to help you draw a realistic mouth.

How do you set a price on your art? This is a tough question. When a reader recently wrote asking how to fix a price on pencil drawings, I really struggled to come up with a definitive answer. In short, "it depends"! There are so many variables. With some types of artwork, particularly graphic art and illustration, bodies such as the Graphics Art Guild have developed strong pricing guidelines. Undercutting of rates is frowned upon in professional circles.

As a freelance artist or designer you need to take a professional attitude to your pricing and marketing. Our Guide to Desktop Publishing, Jacci Howard Bear, has an excellent guide to working out hourly and flat rates for desktop publishing. The same principles apply to artwork up to a point, but it depends on your market. For decorative and domestic art, realist work of various genres and so on, a visit to your local galleries can be useful. Find artwork that is similar to yours and use their pricing as a guide.

Portrait artists often tie the price of a drawing to the size and number of figures in the drawing. This is directly related to the time required to execute the work, so is a useful method and one that 'unartistic' clients can understand. As your reputation and demand for work grows, the price increases accordingly.

For other genres, I'm not keen on using hourly rates as a guide. You might need to consider it, especially if the work you do is detailed and time consuming, but there's the implication that more time=better art. And we know that this isn't true at all! Often a quick sketch can be a marvelous piece worthy of a generous pricetag. The art-as-manufactured item formula (overheads + materials + hourly rate x time) doesn't really take into account the aesthetic quality of a piece - you'll have a boring, overworked, labored-over drawing at $400 while a brilliant, dynamic ink sketch rates a measly $50.

Contemporary Fine Art is a different game and the value of this work is incredibly subjective. Art History guide Shelley Esaak comments on this in her blog entry on expensive art. A drawing can be an investment, the price the buyer is willing to pay depends on the future value of your work, as well as any intrinsic value within the work itself. Their perception of your professionalism and commitment, and your current reputation, are important factors then.

I'd be interested to hear how others tackle the problem of pricing. I certainly don't have a canned solution, but I hope some of these ideas might give you a starting place.

"You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas." - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I have to admit to being a bit of a Steven Pressfield fan. I loved The Virtues of War - images from that book stay with me still - so much so, that when I saw 'Tides of War' in the bookstore, I bought it without even glancing at the cover blurb. I'd coveted 'The War of Art' for some time, and it was well worth the wait. Some readers might not enjoy Pressfield's opinionated style, but I liked his directness. I don't agree with all of his views (such as that the origin of creativity is external to self) but that's the beauty of a book. You can take the ideas that are useful to you and leave those that aren't.

There are some surprises here too. Take 'support'. Support is fundamental, right? We're all in this together. But Pressfield looks at the flipside, and it makes sense. 'Support' so often manifests as endless group meetings, rehashing the ‘same-old same-old’ and making excuses. In ' Resistance and Fundamentalism', Steven Pressfield comments that human beings are not wired to be alone: we are wired for community. Hence the extreme discomfort we feel when we decide to be free, to live according to conscience rather than prescribed rules. For a small book, he covers a lot of ground, referencing western culture from Socrates to Tiger Woods.

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The paradox of choice seems to spill over into every aspect of our lives. When I was little, if I wanted to make art, it was simple - a pad of paper, a box of colored pencils. There wasn't really any choice. Now, if I feel creative, I first have to decide on medium - pencil drawing? Colored pencil? watercolor? Or maybe collage? Should I use the watercolor pencils, or the Derwents, or the Prismacolors? Or maybe I should use the pastels.... or maybe I should have another go at finding my way around Adobe Photoshop? And spending time learning each of these mediums means that I've never fully mastered any of them.

I also like to knit, but rarely do, as I always think I should spend the time doing 'real' art. So it occurred to me that if I just knitted one kind of thing - just socks, for instance, which I perversely enjoy working on - it would make the hobby far more manageable - limiting the yarn stash and the range of needles. I'm applying the idea to other activities too, paring down hobbies to low-maintenance versions. One of my favorite blogs, Zen Habits, posted an excellent article on this idea a while back, labeling the concept 'Haiku Productivity'.

If you find that you are often juggling too many things, with never have enough time for good quality work - whether it is a rushed concept sketch or storyboard, lack of preparatory drawings making a design or painting weak, or wishing you could learn to draw but never putting pencil on paper - the 'Haiku' approach might help. Limiting your choices can save you time setting up to work, and help you focus more quickly on the task at hand, and help you maintain the technical skills that you need.

Some limits to try:
• Stick to one medium: use only charcoal, or only graphite, or only Graphitint or pastel.
• Use only black-and-white for a while
• Limit your scale or format: trim some paper to a uniform size, and work on compositions to fit that page.
• Explore a single subject
• Group projects by theme or medium, and focus on one
• Push one project to completion - no multitasking
• Put all the 'someday/maybe' sketches and notes in a box, and focus on what you're doing right now.
• Organize materials so that irrelevant stuff doesn't spill into your workspace.

There are some key points to keep in mind when drawing eyes: they must be positioned correctly on the head, and must be on the correct plane - that is, if the head is turned away or tilted sideways, the eyes must be too. Visualizing a line through the pupils will help to get this right. There are many subtle changes of plane around the eyes, with complicated lines and shadows. Taking the time to observe will make all the difference to your drawing. Read the newly updated article for more on the fine art of drawing eyes.

I enjoy Manga but haven't had the opportunity to read as much as I'd like. I love the artwork - these artists can really draw, and the influence of traditional Japanese art and aesthetics really appeals to me. (So much so that I bought four-foot-tall Bleach and Final Fantasy wall hangings for my office at a recent games expo). There's a combination of strength and elegance in the best Manga drawings. Of course, with the huge volume many studios produce, there's the same variation in quality that you find in any medium, but usually the demands of speed and quantity are met with economy of style - not sloppiness.

So as you'd imagine, I'm turning fifty shades of envious green reading about Manga guide Deb Aoki's Comicon visit and her interview with Tite Kubo, creator of Bleach. Deb also got to interview Hiro Mashima, creator of Fairy Trail. The masters of Manga talk about aspects of their work including drawing, story-telling and character development, and publishing. A must-read for any artist hoping to get into Manga or other styles of comic art.

I thought it was serendipitous that just as I went looking for her de-stashing post, Tammy had posted a project featuring a glass frame pendant. I LOVE the Emily Dickinson pendant that she's created, it's lovely and so unusual. You could create something similar with drawing, doing a crisp, finely rendered portrait in or image with delicate, decorative work in the background. I'm thinking about a Celtic tree form in a pewter frame. Something abstract in a minimalist frame could also be interesting.