I love pen and ink drawing. It has a visual charm and character unlike any other medium.

I assume that I came by my affection for it from realizing as a teenager that pen and ink drawing was the basis for comic books and cartoons, but I was also exposed at a pretty early age to the amazing pen and ink illustrations of Howard Pyle and other illustrators of the Brandywine School in my visits to the Delaware Art Museum, where I also encountered beautiful pen drawings by some of the Pre-Raphaelite artists.

It’s medium that doesn’t get as much attention as more colorful forms of expression, but it’s still there as the basis for much illustration, comics, cartoons and concept art, as well as standing on it’s own as a method of sketching or creating finished drawings.

There are some good resources out there on pen drawing if you dig for them, and you’ll occasionally find some for free.

A case is point is the Project Gutenberg eBook version of Pen Drawing by Charles Maginnis. (Amazon listing here)

This is a relatively short treatise published in 1903, at a time when pen drawing was in its heyday as a ubiquitous method of drawing that could be easily and inexpensively be mass reproduced as illustrations in books and periodicals.

The tone and attitude of the text are a bit dated, but is fascinating as a bit of history for that, and the instruction is basically sound.

The illustrations are not reproduced well, one of the frustrating things about Project Gutenberg that I’ve railed about before, but some of them fare better than others and can give you a taste for some of the excellent pen and ink artists featured from that era, including Joseph Pennell, Daniel Vierge, Herbert Railton, B. G. Goodhue (image above, top), Martin Rico and Maxime LaLanne.

Author Charles Maginnis was a noted architect and the book is slanted a bit toward architectural rendering and supplemented with the author’s own drawings (image above, bottom), but he also includes examples from more figurative artists like Howard Pyle, Will Bradley and Alfonse Mucha.

If this whets your appetite and you want physical pen and ink instruction books with high resolution images of great pen and ink drawing, look for copies of Joseph Pennel’s Pen Drawing, Pen Draughtsmen and Arthur Guptill’s Rendering in Pen and Ink.

[Link via ArtDemonstrations.com]

No, you don’t want to get it.

The New York Times has published an article, A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity, on the case of Dr. Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist who suffered from a form of dementia called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD, in which certain parts of the brain are adversely affected and diminish in function, while others are apparently enhanced by some compensating action within the brain itself.

FTD is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s actions are different and more specific to certain parts of the brain. Adams’ particular affliction was a variant of FTD called primary progressive aphasia, PPA, in which patients lose the ability to speak. The action of the disease apparently releases inhibitions on other areas of the brain, enabling them to increase their function, in this case, the right posterior brain, which brain researchers have been coming to associate with artistic endeavor and creativity. Artists who suffer damage to that part of the brain often lose their creative abilities.

Adams, a scientist and gifted mathematician, lost her ability to work with numbers along with her speaking abilities, and began to exhibit a desire to create visually. She had a passing interest in drawing when she was younger, but never pursued it. To the surprise of her family, she abandoned her scientific work and took up art with an uncanny intensity.

At first she was painting architectural house portraits of houses in her neighborhood. As things progressed, she became fascinated with the music of composer Maurice Ravel, who, unknown to her, had suffered from the same disease.

Ravel composed Bolero, his most famous composition, while he was suffering from the disease. Adams became fascinated with this work in particular and created a visual interpretation of the musical piece. An expert in this kind of brain disorder has described Ravel’s piece as “an exercise in compulsivity, structure and preservation”.

You can see Adam’s interpretation, called Unraveling Bolero (image above, bottom) on a page devoted to Adam’s work on the Patient Art Gallery web site of the Memory and Aging Center of the University of California at San Francisco. Unfortunately, the page is in frames, so I can link directly to it for you. It’s the 5th thumbnail down, with the magenta border. There you will also find other examples of her work, like her paintings of houses and buildings, and other pattern based work, like her interpretation of Pi.

You can also find examples of Adam’s work here, along with a complete series of wonderful, almost Escher-like illustrations from An ABC Book of Invertebrates, by Adams and her husband, Robert Adams.

So here we have a disease that apparently rearranges the brain’s functions, and in these rare cases, unleashes a flood of creativity.

Like I said, you don’t want to get it, but it may help us understand the creative processes of the human brain a little better; just as the cases of artistic savants like Stephen Wiltshire and Gilles Tréhin can tell us some thing about the function of memory and mental visualization in relation to drawing.

It has long been assumed that the red chalk drawing shown above is a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

It certainly looks like what we expect or want the great Renaissance artist to look like, his penetrating deep-set eyes gazing out at us from distant past, weighted with the perhaps painful wisdom of great insight into the nature of the world and the ways of man; but its status as a self portrait has been called into question in recent years by prominent art historians; leading to the inevitable question of whether we really know what Leonardo looked like.

There are even those who claim, based on the assumption that the above image is a self-portrait, that similarities between key points in the facial structure show that the enigmatic face of the Mona Lisa could have been modeled on his own.

I don’t buy that one, but I have always accepted the above image as a self portrait, mainly because I recognize in it that “look” that I’ve seen in hundreds of self-portraits. It’s a look that I associate with a particular shift in mental state associated with drawing, something to do with where and how the eyes are focusing (see my post on Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain).

It’s a little hard to tell from this reproduction, and I was hard pressed to find a better one on the web. This is a very old, and very delicate, chalk drawing that is difficult to reproduce, and to see it more clearly you need to look for it in print, as on the back cover of Taschen’s excellent volume Leonardo da Vinci: Sketches and Drawings by Frank Zollner (part of a two volume set of his paintings and drawings - technically not in print in the US, but you can sometimes find it used or even discounted). There, and in other good reproductions, you can see the way the eyes are focused right at the viewer (or a mirror) and have that particular look of an artist deep in the mindset of concentrated drawing.

Still, scholars are saying the assumption that this is Leonardo is in question.

The only portrait of Leonardo for which we have reasonably reliable attribution is Verrocchio’s David, a statue for which Leonardo is believed to have posed as a boy of 15, but it’s difficult to draw immediate comparisons between that and the image of a man who is at least in his late 60’s.

This all leads to a fascinating four-minute presentation at this year’s TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Conference by Siegfried Woldhek, in which he does an astonishing analysis of Da Vinci’s drawings, systematically narrowing them down to possible candidates for self-portraits.

Siegfried Woldhek is a well known Dutch illustrator whose speciality is faces. He’s drawn over a thousand of them, mostly political and literary portraits and caricatures, for newspapers and magazines in Europe.

Drawing on his own experience (if you’ll excuse the expression) and the assumption that Leonardo, who drew everything around him with a passion bordering on obsession, must have created some self portraits (an assumption with which I agree), Woldhek searches through Leonardo’s drawings for evidence of a record of his own visage.

The resulting talk is a wonderfully condensed argument, establishing (without question in my mind) that we do indeed know what Leonardo da Vinci looked like, and from more than one image.

[Link to TED video via BoingBoing]

Barrett Bailey is an Alabama artist working in the classical realist tradition.

Though you will find small still life paintings and an occasional landscape in his online galleries, Bailey is primarily a figure and portrait artist. The Paintings section of his site includes paintings in a range of sizes and degrees of finish, from small portrait sketches to larger scale figure works. For an idea of the scale of his more recent paintings, glance at the photograph of his studio on the Bio page.

Particularly appealing to me are his drawings, both figure drawings and portraits. These are primarily in graphite or charcoal, often on toned paper, and have a variety of surface textures.

Bailey’s site includes a video of the creation of one of his drawings in time lapse, condensing two an a half hours of drawing into less than two minutes. (I mentioned this video previously in my post about ArtDemonstrations.com.)

His bio section also includes a Bookshelf, with some of the books he recommends on figure drawing, portrait painting and related subjects.

Barrett exhibits in Alabama and New York, where he studied at the New York Academy of Art. He in an instructor at Huntingdon College and teaches private Portrait Drawing Classes in Montgomery.

My Father’s Hand is a tribute blog, created by designer Amanda Wray to showcase the drawings of her father, Samuel Wray.

Samuel Wray was a commercial artist in some capacity, though I know little about his commercial work other than that he did some inking and lettering projects for comics, notably for a Robinson Crusoe comic.

The drawings that his daughter has posted are personal, drawings of figures and faces, sketches and self portraits. The postings started in 2006 and are sometimes accompanied by descriptive passages.

Along the way, we get glimpses of the man and his sometimes distant relationship with his daughter, her fascination with his process of drawing and her thoughts on the drawings themselves.

Wray’s drawings are often confident, with solid draftsmanship and a loose, informal line quality. Most are in pencil. He sometimes draws in ink, with tones in wash, and his ink line can be alternately definite or searching. In some of his pencil drawings, as well, he can have a more tentative line, with a delicate quality, seemingly contemplative.

My understanding is that Wray was suffering in his later years from the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, and was in struck by a car a few years before his death. His daughter started the blog about a year before he died, and was offering reproductions of the drawings, the proceeds of which originally went to him and now go to his widow. There is no formal offering of particular reproductions, simply a contact email link.

I assume the ability to purchase reproductions is still in place, as the blog is still on the web, even though Amanda’s posts stop a few days after her father’s passing in 2007.

[Link via Neil Hollingsworth]

I’ve always been fascinated by self-portraits (not that I’ve done that many myself). Here is not only the artist’s personality expressed through their work, but through their own inner or outer vision of themselves.

Many of history’s great paintings have been self portraits, from Durer and Rembrandt to Sargent and Van Gogh, artists have made self-portraits into powerful statements with the full force of their personality and artistic skills.

One of the most intriguing things about self-portraits is the variety of approach, in terms of materials, the nature of the composition, attitude of the artist as sitter, and the background, setting and objects an artist can choose to surround themselves with.

American Artist, the venerable artists’ magazine, has opened the entry process on this year’s Self-Portrait Competition, in which the selected winners will have their self-portraits published in the magazine. The magazine’s web site has a slide-show of recent entries, about 70 of them at this point, which already constitute a colorful (in more ways then one) assortment of approaches and interpretations of the idea of self portraiture.

In addition, they have provided an inspirational gallery of self-portraits from the history of art, including some greats like Durer’s Christ-like advertisement for his painting skills as a young artist, Chardin’s lifted-eyebrow self-appraisal of his scarfed head, three of Rembrandt’s always remarkable self-images, Sargent’s dignified banker-esque stare, Élisabeth-Louis Vigée-Lebrun’s beautiful 3/4 length portrait with palette, brushes and full-dress finery, Anders Zorn’s frank self-appraisal, several of Ergon Scheel’s stark, gaunt visages and van Gogh’s hauntingly electric, blue and green study of intensity and emotional chaos.

That said, you can submit your own portraits, haunting or otherwise, to the competition for their entry fee of $20, and $5 for additional entries. The info page has general information and the registration page has the terms and conditions. The deadline is May 1, 2008 and entry is limited to U.S. residents.

I don’t know how many pieces will be displayed in the magazine. At any rate, it should be worth checking the recent entries page occasionally just to see the the variety and range of the entries.

(Image above, left to right, Row 1: Ted Burn, Dianne Panarelli Miller, Virginia Blechman; Row 2: Daniel van Benthuysen, Peter Nuchims, David Frank; Row 3: Johanna Uribes, Jim Kilmartin, Koo Schadler; Row 4: Cesar Santos, Spencer Sharp, F. Michael Wood, Ying-He Liu. The unfortunate shadow at the top of each image is the product of the cheesy slide show application the magazine has, for reasons that are beyond me, chosen for this display.)

ArtDemonstrations.com is a blog in which the author has collected and shares links to various art demonstrations and tutorials he has come across on the web.

Some of them are more useful than others and they take several forms, from a few steps in a painting process shown as photos, to longer step-by step breakdowns, to time-lapse videos of the creation of drawings or paintings (like the portrait drawing by Barrett Bailey shown above), to full half hour or more videos of painting demonstrations.

At first I thought that the blog might be from someone associated with SmartFlix, an instructional video rental service that features a number of art instruction DVDs, because of the ubiquitous banner. There is also a list of text links under his Google ads that look like a blogroll, but are actually links (presumably paid links) to items in the SmartFlix store. These are videos that might be of interest, but the listings feature no actual online demos or articles.

Apparently, though, SmartFlix is just a sponsor the author encountered after doing a short post on them. (They’ve contacted me as well, but I haven’t had a chance to check into the service yet. I’ll try to rent a video or two and give you a report in the near future.)

Some of the ArtDemonstrations.com posts are links to short promos for artists’ commercial video releases, including short excerpts from a new instructional painting video, The Portrait Sketch, by Jeremy Lipking, as well as other video clips of him.

In addition to Jeremy Lipking, the blog points to demos by other artists that I’ve mentioned on lines and colors, including Tony Ryder, Duane Keiser, and a couple by William Whitaker (from the blog’s listings for November, 2005)

Other posts mention books and web archives of books, as well as tidbits like old film of Picasso at work and a PDF of an article on Sargent’s painting methods (PDF link 28k) posted by Craig Mullins.

In addition to Mullins there are a few mentions of concept artists, though that’s one of the largest areas of available tutorials on the web, particularly in the portals like CG Society and ConceptArt.org. Still, most people with a particular interest in concept art are aware of those sources and I think ArtDemonstrations.com is better aimed at the broader art community.

Unfortunately, the author, who I can find referenced only as “Jeff” (and is apparently an artist himself and has contributed one or two of his own demos), doesn’t seem to post often; and has not yet included a number of readily available painting demos I’ve come across on YouTube and other places.

The idea of trying to collect a central reference for available art tutorials on the web is a terrific one, and I would love to see it pursued more aggressively; but instead of complaining, I should be thanking Jeff for sharing what he has.

Though there aren’t many pieces available online, the variety of subject, medium and approach, and the high quality of each, make the sketchblog of Simon Otto well worth a visit.

Otto’s blog is actually just excerpts from his contributions to insert name here, a group blog he shares with several other talented artists, who, like Otto, work in the film industry.

Otto himself is an animator at DreamWorks Animation. Though I couldn’t find any of his professional work online, you can see a list of his credits on IMDB.

His blog posts range from plein air oil paintings to digital sketches (apparently also painted on location with a laptop), to figure painting, to a series of wonderfully appealing sketchbook pages. The latter feature drawings apparently done in pencil and white body color on cream paper, and are my favorites of his posted work.

It’s an unusual approach; most toned sketchbook drawings tend toward ink and wash or monochrome watercolor. The combination of pencil against the cream and white areas, along with accents of textural tones created with lines, a technique more common to pen and ink, makes for nicely subtle and varied tonal range.

Occasionally, Otto will work with black body color or ink in place of the lighter tones, and he will sometimes punctuate his sketches with small areas of red or other colors. He’s not shy about tackling complex architectural subjects or cityscapes; rendering them in confident but sensitive lines and arranging them in interesting compositions.

Many of his sketchbook drawings are annotated with notes or dates, but for some reason they have been flopped in posting so that they read backwards, along with signs in the images. That does little to reduce their charm, however, and at the end of the available blog posts you’re left looking in vain for more.

Unfortunately, neither Otto’s blog, or the group blog from which it is extracted, have been updated since July. We’ll have to hope that Otto and his fellow artists get inspired soon to resume posting.

Most artists who have done much life drawing are familiar with sanguine, usually as a color of conté crayon or colored pencil. Not that many, however, have drawn with real sanquine.

Sanguine (Hematite) is a red-brown iron-oxide chalk, usually mined in Italy. It’s color, particularly when used on cream paper with touches of white, makes it wonderfully suited for figure drawing, and it was a staple tool of the old masters.

Sanguine was used widely before the development of conté or modern drawing crayons, which are made from ground pigments mixed with oil emulsion binders; and it allows for a degree of subtlety and control beyond what those convenience chalks offer, provided you’re prepared to deal with it as a “raw” drawing material.

KM Scott Moore has posted a wonderful short tutorial on Drawingboard.org titled Renaissance Style Drawing (Sanguine) — A Tutorial (images above), that goes through the basics of sanguine, from purchase to use, with a series of clear photographs. He shows starting a drawing with rough chunks of the material simply hand held; then, looking almost like tiny flint arrowheads, the chipped pieces of sanguine are set into a holder commonly used for uncased chalks and conté and used for detail work and hatching.

I was aware that sanguine, like the more processed chalks, can be smeared and stomped to create smooth tones; what I didn’t know until reading Moore’s article is that the sanguine dust, because it doesn’t have the oily binders found in the processed crayons, can be mixed with water to form a kind of “ink”, and washed on with a brush or even a pen.

Moore purchased his sanguine from Kremer Pigments in NY, now part of Sinopia. Here is their catalog listing for sanguine “lumps”.

The Cennini Catalog from Studio Products offers “reconstituted” sanguine, a powdered form mixed with Gum Tragacanth (a non-oily binder) to make extruded chalks that handle much like the original, but are less expensive.

Rob Howard, founder of Studio Products, has posted this beautiful sanguine drawing, a copy of a drawing by Hyacinthe Rigaud (more info here).

For many other sanguine drawings, see most old master drawings described as “red chalk” prior to the 1600’s.

The word “sanguine” comes from old French and Latin words meaning bloody or blood colored. The association of reddish faces with a courageous or hopeful disposition in European cultures, as well as it’s part in medieval explanations of physiology involving sanguine “humors“, led to the common use of the word to mean cheerful or optimistic.

Which leaves us with a nice double meaning for “sanguine drawing”.

[Link via Danny's Art Notes]

I don’t know about you, but I can sometimes be a little intimidated by my own sketchbooks, specifically in cases where I’ve made some drawings that I feel were particularly successful, and become reluctant to add to them, either from worry about carrying a sketchbook with drawings I like in it around and losing it, or simply feeling like I have to be confident I’m going to make a comparably good drawing with my next entry.

This is completely silly, of course, and counter-productive for an artist, but I venture to think some of you can identify.

How much more intimidating would it be, though, if the sketchbook in which you were drawing were full of wonderful drawings by other artists? Daunting? Perhaps, but how inspiring might it be as well? This is the situation facing the artists participating in Sketchtravel.

Sketchtravel is a project jointly managed by Daisuke Tsutsumi, a multifaceted artist who I profiled on lines and colors last May, and Gérald Guerlais, a French illustrator and background designer, who informed me about the project.

Sketchtravel revolves around a single sketchbook to which 50 artists will make contributions at it travels around the world.

Each artist contributes a single page of art, be it drawing or painting, though the rules suggest that care must be taken not to damage previous or subsequent pages with invasive tools or techniques. The drawings are scanned, both as a precaution in the event of the worst case scenario of the book being lost or stolen, and also so the virtual version of the physical sketchbook can be updated on the project’s web site.

The theme of the works varies widely, though it often focuses on the book itself and its travels.

One of the more interesting aspects of the process is that the sketchbook is making its zig-zag journey around the curve of the horizon not by post or package service, but carried by hand. It travels in a custom made, felt lined, oak case with brass hardware.

Each invited artist receives the sketchbook from the previous contributor in person, adds their contribution, and, in turn, hands it off to the next artist; though I found no mention of how the artists are selected or how the logistics of travel were determined. The site has a map marking the book’s recent travels and current location (as of this writing, the west coast of the U.S.).

The project was started in 2006 and the sketchbook currently has 24 artists represented in the virtual version on the site. You can view the contributions to date, along with photos of the book and pictures of the hand-offs from artist to artist. There is also a list of the participating artists with links to their individual web sites or blogs.

Guerlais also maintains a blog for the project, with more details about the sketchbook’s travels, the hand-offs and related news. The blog and the web site have content in both French and English.

As each artist adds to the book, presumably more inspired than intimidated by the work of those who have added their drawings before them, the book will grow organically into its final state as a collaborative artwork. When finished, the original sketchbook will be exhibited at the Arludik Gallery in Paris, after which it will be auctioned off to a charity association selected by the artists.

(Images at left, from top: Gérald Guerlais, Dominique Louis, Claude William Trebutien, Ronnie Del Carmen, Nash Dunnigan, Benoit le Pennec.)