Red Fox Studies

Recent homework from the Gesture course on Schoolism. Apart from our usual model drawing assignments, this time we also had to research an animal of choice. We are to study the anatomy of one animal so that we are able to draw it without using reference.

As you might have guessed, I chose a Red Fox for this assignment. This is only a selection of the many sketches I did, both on loose sheets and in my sketchbook. One of the many great things about this course it how much it makes me sketch. I have started a new sketchbook early october -one of those thick old-fashioned a4-sized hardbacks-  and it is already filled halfway through! Mostly with gesture sketches and café drawings done for the gesture course. 

All of these are 100% traditional: ink, (Pentell Pocket Brushpen, Pentell Sign, Pitt Brush Pen) and color pencil on paper.

 

Nosferatu Sketches

Since Halloween is almost upon us I thought it'd be nice to share these sketches of Nosferatu I did earlier this week. He's a fun character to draw. I watched the orginal 1922 film earlier this week, it is in the public domain and full versions can be found on youtube and vimeo. 

I did the sketches above before watching the film and as you can see I gave him normal vampire teeth, instead of the silly evil-bunny teeth he has in the film. The sketches below I did while watching the final scene: death by rooster!

 

Hylpen

This is a drawing I did as a gift for my parents. This month they celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary! It is a picture of the old city Hindeloopen, one of the eleven cities of the Dutch province Friesland.

This piece was done with brown bistre ink, I am having a lot of fun with this material. I used different washes of ink to create the difference in tone, mixing the ink with water to create lighter tones. To get those sheep I had to carefully tape of the areas where I wanted the sheep, using a scalpel to cut the tape in the desired shape (those sheep in my previous post were setches for this drawing), after inking the background with a brush I removed the tape to fill in the details of the sheep. I used brushes for the main shapes and background tones, and then used dip pens to fill in the details.

This piece is prety big (44 x 19 cm) and the ink has caused the paper to curl a little. Because of this it was hard for me to make good scan. I'll post another pic when I have it framed.

Beh.

Some sketches of sheep. The image above is a really small doodle with brown bistre ink (brush and dip pen). The image below is done with pencil and the last image was done with a Tombo.

I'd never really drawn sheep before, it always is a lot fun to draw something new. You think you know what a sheep looks like but when I started to look at pictures and did some initial sketching I discovered that, as always, you never really see something until you draw it.

These are sketches for a bigger illustration that I will show you here soon.   

Wishful Thinking: Drawing like Rembrandt

Comedién (Pantalone) - Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669)

At times it's pretty sweet to be living in Amsterdam. Not in the last place because there are so many awesome museums available. Although today quite a few are (partially) closed for renovations. Luckily The Rembrandt House is not one of them. This museum is located in the house where Rembrandt actually lived and worked for nearly twenty years. In the house are many paintings but only a few are by Rembrandt himself, they do have a very large collection of Rembrandt's drawings and etches.

Rembrandt might be best known for his paintings but he also made fantastic drawings and etches. As a draftsman I am always very attracted to this side of the great master's work. Right now there is an exhibition at the Rembrandt House called Drawing in Rembrandt's Day. The museum also organizes a workshop focusing on seventeenth century drawing techniques. Yesterday I had the chance to join one of those workshops.

At the beginnning of the workshop we were told about the different materials artists used to draw with in the time of Rembrandt. They used charcoal, graphite, crayons, as well as inks and ink washes. The ink they used is called Bistre Ink and has this wonderful brown color to it. They used brushes and pens made out of reed. Rembrandt also was fond of using a goose quill pen. At the workshop there were only a few quill pens, but luckily most other people there were happy to use the other pens and skewers that were offerd, so I got to use one of the quills throughout the workshop.

The image above is a smaller sketch paper that I used to try the different materials, we were encouraged to test the way different tecniques and materials could be combined. After we had messed about a little we were given a large sheet of paper and were given a photo we could use as inspiration. I chose a picture of a church and set to work: setting tones with a brush, and adding details with the quill pen.

I am always trying to work very controlled and I had fun using the bistre ink because it forced me to let go a little. I wish we had had more time! Apparantly bistre ink is still for sale today and I really want to get some of it to do more drawings like these. The quill actually worked really nice but I think that a regular dip pen would work just as well. (I will probably not make my own quill pen, it's rather complicated: you have to cook the quill and then have to cut it with a razor blade)

This is the final drawing I did. It's not completely finshed. I would have liked to add a little more detail. Still it shows the nice effect of the ink washes and especially at the tower you can see the loose lines of the quill pen.

 

After we had cleaned the brushes we went back to the museum and looked at the exhibition. Looking at these drawings after just having used the same material changed my perception. To show you what Rembrandt did with the same material I posted a drawing that was part of the exhibition, at the top of this article. If you look carefully you can see that he made a correction to the guys arm (screen right), he drew it in line first and then chanced the shape with a brush to enhance the gesture.