Category Archives: Journaling

First Round: Ink Fade Testing (lightfast)

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At the end of December I was wondering if my inks were lightfast, or not. I was wondering given that I’ve done a great deal of drawings with these inks, mostly sketches in my art journal and I was considering venturing out toward finished art with inks. I want to be sure that the art that I sell lasts longer than it takes me to create it. Art lives in very different circumstances from sketches, ie in full light and on the wall. My sketches stay in sketchbooks or live on the walls only when I’m contemplating.

Now, the middle of the winter in the Northeast US is a terrible time to test the light fastness of anything. We’ve had a pretty mild winter with plenty of sunny days.  I took all of my inks with my glass dip pen wrote their name on a sheet of paper twice and scribbled a roughly 1cm high line the width of the page.

Over the weeks I noticed that a few inks immediately changed color and some immediately faded.  Others didn’t show any changes until the last week or so of the test.

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The winners in terms of not changing color at all:
Noodler’s Black, Noodler’s Heart of Darkness, Noodler’s Luxury Blue

The near winners, or those that show little fading:
Noodler’s Eternal Brown, Diamine Chocolat Brown

Faded, but not badly:
Noodler’s Nikita

Terrible fading, losing a component of the color, color shifting, marked change in color and intensity:
Private Reserve Sonic Blue(withing a week), J.Herbin Bleu Nuit (within a week), Noodler’s Fox Red (within a week), Omas New Gray, Noodler’s Lexington Gray

Showing a color shift, and is truly darker than before, though not the same color:
Private Reserve Electric DC Blue

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So what does this all mean? Not much in terms of journaling and writing. I’ve looked at some of my sketches from a year or so ago using J. Herbin’s Bleu Nuit, Noodler’s Red Fox, and PR Sonic Blue and can’t see a difference. It takes time in the sun for much of these changes to take place and most of the issues won’t affect anything in a closed journal. I won’t stop using these colors for sketching or journaling anytime soon, but I will stop using the fugitive colors in finished art work.

Don’t Pin MY Stuff #donotpin

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Pinterest. Sigh. I've written about how much I dislike Tumblr and Pinterest due to finding a ton of unattributed images on both sites. That was way back in September of last year.

And now this article created a firestorm on twitter this afternoon. (search for #donotpin on twitter)

My feelings on Pinterest (and tumblr) can be articulated as follows:

  • Pinterest should link back to the creator DIRECTLY
  • Attribution should never ever be stripped.
  • They should only create a thumbnail of the image, not store a hi-res image.
  • Their weak section in ToS "you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Cold Brew Labs the rights in such Member Content, as contemplated under these Terms" is complete bull shit and probably won't hold up in court should an artist be damaged by their website. After all they know how their users USE their produt- to pin stuff that doesn't belong to them. If you pin my stuff without my permission (without attribution) then you have damaged me.

Every click on either of the 2 services that should come here is a damage. I know my pics on flickr have been pinned and shared on Tumblr. Imagine my surprise at finding my art journal pages shared without attribution? Shocking, only not, when you start to follow an image around the service. One person pins it, another pins from their pin, and another and another. After the 3rd click you stop looking for the original page out of shear frustration. How many sales have been lost to good honest artists and craftspersons to the vortex that are these 2 sites. I'm not suggesting that  they shouldn't make money off their service, but they should be more fair to the artists and crafts people who are really the driving force of their site.

This quote gets at the heart of why I hate pinterest so much, "If someone pins a photo on Pinterest, they've created a competing version of the image, which could siphon image search traffic away from the source site." (Link to original article.)

Pinterest and Tumblr may just drive me toward watermarking my photos, though I hate watermarks. It's the only way for me to drive traffic to my blog if someone steals an image.  So, you know, don't pin my stuff.

 

Another Cowboy

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Another Cowboy

I thougth I'd show you another cowboy drawing. I started this guy the same as the last- with the Pilot Technica .04, quickly scratching out the basic lines. This image is about 5×7 inches just a little larger than the last few drawings I've loaded up.

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After that I added the shades of gray, using layers to get darker shades of gray.

Another Cowboy

Finally I added black with the brush pen.

Obviolsly I'm totally digging these brush pens. I've found a figure drawing class and I think i'm going to go and draw with this pen combination. Additionally, I've used the Loew Cornell pens I reviewed here with this technique and it's pretty cool when they bleed into the gray ink. Also the pens are way more comfortable when used for drawing than when writing.

Review: Update Pentel Pocket Brush Pen to Eyedropper

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I wrote about the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen here. I suggested in the post that perhaps the pen could be converted to eye dropper fill rather than use the carts. I find that the pentel carts are pretty pricey, though it is awesome ink. They range from $2 for 2 ($2 per cart whoa!!!) to $ 11 for 6! (Jetpens has about the best price I could find.) Converting this pen to eye dropper amount to a massive savings. I found I went through a cart pretty quickly in regular sketching and using the black to fill in the background.

 

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I loaded it up with some Omas New Gray. Which is a nice pale silvery gray that layers well, perfect for sketching. It is not a lightfast gray so it should stay in the journal and not on the wall. I’ve posted here about turning a pen like this into an eyedropper and this pen is no different. I used a blunt syringe to fill the barrel with juuust under 3ml of ink. That’s 3 carts of ink, in one fill. While I used a dye based ink I could fill it with a pigment based ink as it’s designed for that, which mean it’s even more awesome.

After letting the ink get to the brush I noticed that the ink flow is a little faster than with the Pentel ink. This could be because the Pentel ink has pigment or is thicker than the dye based ink. The Omas Gray ink has good flow even in a fountain pen. I’ll be trying out more inks once I run through this one. The other good thing is that I can fill my black pen up with Noodler’s Heart of Darkness once I run out of carts of black. (Scored 2 more with this pen.)

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The best thing about turning this pen eye dropper? It’s simple. All you need is a little silicone grease from the plumbing section of home depot and an eye dropper or a blunt syringe. Money saved? Each fill will save you about $3 over using cartridges.

 

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Promote What You Love

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Leslie 017

The "Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate," images are rolling around twitter and facebook these days. While I agree, and I've seen first hand how powerful promoting something you love can be, both for you and the person; I think it's foolhardy to ignore what you hate entirely.

The story with the ostrich sticking it's head in the sand is a good one, bad things don't go away if you ignore it. The same for tryingto think only positive thoughts, you can't make bad things or depression go away by thinking it away. We aren't magnets and the world isn't fair and sometimes hard work doesn't pay off. Sometimes life sucks.

BUT I've learned that you can make things work for you if you spend some time and are honest with yourself on how you can take that bad situation and force it to work.

My matra will be "Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate; but keep a mindful eye out for the bad stuff."

Watching some RSAnimate

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Yesterday I met with a friend of mine, he's a terrific artist and we had a nice long chat over great coffee. During our talk we spoke of the TED talk about school killing creativity. When I got home I looked up the talk, it's a good one and linked below. You should watch it.

In some ways I think that our root fear of play and experimentation in our art and journals, where does it go as we age? We were all pretty creative when we were 5 and 6 and even 7. But at some point we all want to draw realistically (this is tied to developmental milestones) and I think get frustrated and quit. If you look at most kids at specific ages they all go through this. Some of us never get past the frustration.

The next video is about the paradox of choice. It's not directly related to art, but I think you'll see why I put it up here. I think we get into a mode of overwhelming choice when we walk into an art and craft store. It's why it's so easy for companies to shove crap down our throat when we don't really need or want it. Step 1: Overwhelm the consumer with too many choices and Step 2: Prey upon that and TELL them they NEED specific parts to create a project. Never-mind that you could unlock their creativity by teaching skills rather than spoon-feeding a specific project. But then unlocking creativity isn't as good for the bottom line as selling a specific project that requires the person buy items off a list. (Think #cultofstuff)

 

 

 

The final video, in which I think I could do an entire post about, is about the movement about staying positive, and that you can bring everything to you by presenting a positive front. Slap a smile on your face and everything you've ever dreamed of can be YOURS! I'm not afraid to say that sometimes my life and my brain are dark dark lonely places. Sad. I've got a relatively good life- a nice enough house, a car that runs, a lovely wife, a DayJob that pays my bills, and good health. Honestly, I've got it better than many people. I'm happy about that, I won't lie. But there are days when I hate everything about life. It's not wrong to say that sometimes, life isn't fair and life sometimes sucks. That's realistic.

I'm not suggesting we all let it hang out. No, I think we should be realistic in what our lives are like, it's not all sunshine and roses, sometimes it's dog crap on the floor and a flat tire on the highway or a bad day at the job. Not being honest about these facts of our lives is as ridiculous as always painting a smile on your face and pretending they don't happen. These dark spots are WHY I art journal. I pour the shit out onto a page and then turn it. I paint dark little scenes on watercolor paper and then pour ink on it. Denying these aspects of my life isn't honoring myself. Hiding it away doesn't make it go away. No matter how many pretty pages you paint in your art journal doesn't make everything alright.

The process is what makes things right not the product. It's okay to slather paint on a page and just turn the page and never look at it again, every page does NOT have to be finished. MOve on, just like your life moves on. It's the nature of an art journal that you move on. You grow as a person and grow in the art journal. Don't let false positivity hold you back from creating something that is wonderful because you are afraid to explore something that is not happy or perceived as not positive.

 

Honesty, Authenticity, Truthiness and Resonance

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When I was in school everyone talked about wanting to make "honest work." The new buzzword for honest work is "authentic." We could spend days over glasses of red wine and mugs of coffee (as we did in college) talking about what this means. In the end it all boils down to, "I want to make work that resonates deeply withing myself and has deep personal meaning." End of story.

Or is it?

I think the truth of all the discussion and thinking on these topics is that essentially we're afraid of what we put on the paper/canvas/board/ or in the journal. Many of us make work and hide it away. It's why the art journal is so perfect, at the end of your art session you close the covers and never ever have to confront what you made again. Simple right? Except you're missing out on a  prime piece of the art journal process- learning from what you've put down and thus from yourself.

I think that fear is why we also buy into what the industry pumps out for us. It's far easier to follow the industry's recipe for success than to forge our own path and style.

Maybe the real question we need to ask ourselves is, "How do we move past the fear and into creating our work? How do we learn from ourselves to create work that resonates deeply?"

It's this hard work that an art journal is intended and supposed to help us explore. If you never look back at your pages and be critical of them (without gessoing over them) and learning from those pages what are you missing out on. If you focus on nothing but making pretty pretty pages I think you're missing out on a very important part of art journaling.

Here's a challenge: Go through your art journal, either the current journal you're working in or a recent one. Use a sharpie, write on the margins of a page what you'd change on that page. If you are too chicken you can use a post it note. If you get bold, draw right on top of the page with your sharpie.

Journal Flip: Moleskine #3

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I started this journal the spring before I found out that a family member was going to need emergency open heart surgery and have her aeortic valve replaced. I found out that August and the surgery occured in November. Not long after finding out I ordered a new journal, the happy summer drawings and paintings didn't seem to fit with the down and somewhat sad theme that seemed to pop up.

I've never bothered to go back and fill the remaining pages. I don't think it would fit with the journal. Sometimes it's time to simply move onto a new journal and start fresh. It's okay to simply move on.

 

Watercolor Play Experiments

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I've been using watercolors for close to 20 years now. It's crazy when you thinkg about it. The first 5 years or so of using watercolors, I hated them. I used them primarily to add a toned color to a sketchbook, large flat washes of one color, let it dry then draw. Lovely.

Then about 10 years ago I decided I was going to master them. I never did. What I did do is learn how to use them better. I learned how to layer colors, be patient and let one layer dry before floating another over it.

I also learned to love the happy accidents, like the things you see in my current videos.

I learned to give up control and get beutiful results.

I get messages on youtube where people ask me, "How do you do this? Where did you learn this?" The video below is my answer.

 

The truth is, you have to give up control. You have to be willing to get something ugly to get something that really is beautiful. Sometimes in the midst of the ugly is just one spot that speaks to you and will motivate you to create more. Then you try again and again and again and find more beauty, and beauty in colors you'd never have combined before.

I don't usually use the word play, I prefer experiment, test, and try. The truth is that when I use those words with other people they give me a look like it's scary. If I cay play, suddenly we're out of science class (I forget I was a geek and loved science class.) and back in the area of playful experimentation where we can leave behind our concious thoughts and truly try things out. So get in there and play.