About a year ago, a friend saw my original fountain pen drawings of figures and wanted to take some off me to put on his wall. Those were done on regular A4 copy paper and done in regular school-grade blue ink, so I wasn’t too enthusiastic to part with them. I promised I’d do something more elaborate for him on better paper and a larger size in a similar vein for his wall.

As it is with these things, my attempts at drawing figures in that particular pen and ink style didn’t really continue into the rest of last year, although I did plenty of drawing. But when it was time for my friend’s birthday, I decided it had been a long enough wait and worked on this pen drawing of a wood nymph on A3 drawing paper.

This was done with the very same school fountain pen I’ve used previously but this time with black ink, and working on the heavier drawing paper and on the larger scale really helped. I’ll be putting up more process pictures and details in time, but for now, I’m glad to call this project done, and the results are quite pleasing.

Samir

My last bout of drawing with a pen resulted in a chance encounter with an old fountain pen from my school days. That led to a whole new fluidity of sketching as I tried my hand at a more hatching-heavy technique of drawing. After January was done and the new year began to sink in, I once again felt that urge to draw, that urge to think while not thinking, and so I took up the fountain pen again.

I did a quick fountain pen sketch to loosen up, the one of the man seen above, and mentioned my upcoming sketch exercises on Twitter. While receiving very enthusiastic responses to the idea, I also got some suggestions and favourites as to what I should draw. The common theme of all the suggestions was the human figure, so I decided to concentrate on that. Having done this one sketch in a style similar to previous attempts, I also set out to make the subsequent drawings more elaborate and detailed.

I started out with this strong image of an African tribesman. It was a good place to start because the combination of the dark skin colour and the sunlit image made it imperative for me to do some very dense hatching to properly express the sense of the visual. Also, it dropped me head first into the realm of human anatomy, because I find the male figure, especially the torso, to be very challenging to capture. The final results were encouraging.

Next I took on something that comes more naturally to me, a striking face with a fairly simple female figure, requiring only minimal structure. Here I began to realise the perils of drawing with a pen when you’re not completely familiar with human anatomy. There were several places in the line drawing where I strayed dangerously away from anything resembling correct human proportions. Some of them I realised and corrected, and some of the fun was in then making it a finished piece by smoothing out these deviations while hatching. Although, due to the simplicity of the figure, this one didn’t require a lot of cover-up.

After being very pleased with that last drawing, I jumped straight back into attempting that biggest of my drawing fears, the male torso. I glossed over the head and face in this drawing, concentrating on the musculature of the the arms and abdomen. That’s what I wanted to capture most. I quickly realised that since I didn’t understand it enough to minimise it all into a few lines, I was going to have to do a lot more hatching.

I began to use the fountain pen almost like a graphite pencil, or even paint, to get the range of tone and density of lines that I wanted to express this figure with. While I was at some of this furious hatching, Vishal decided to shoot a few clips of video, which is above. Considering even I am a little unconscious of the exact mechanics of what I’m doing when I get into the drawing frenzy, it makes for fascinating viewing, if pen-strokes and shading excite you.

Back to faces, and hands, because the hands were as much a part of my decision to tackle this image. After the painterly results of the previous sketch I was much more decided on what I wanted to draw and so did the basic lines for all the sketches that follow consecutively over a couple of days. Then due to other distractions and a healthy dose of laziness, it was over a month before I came back to these sketches and finished them, including this face.

The woman in the navy hat I did first, and it went pretty smoothly because I enjoyed looking at this image above all other factors. Since all these were done on A4 size paper, that shot of the full image doesn’t quite give you a sense of what the hatching looks like up close. These images while smooth in gradation are very detailed in line, and sometimes almost chaotic, as you can see from the magnified swatch of the face above.

Next in line was a woman’s back. The back is always challenging because it has no obvious physical features to stylise into making a representative drawing. All its nuances are hidden below the surface with mere hints of shade and indentation on the skin to indicate their presence. It’s tempting to draw the back as a vast flat plane, which sometimes works, but at other times that would look nothing like a human back, and so you must dig into the details. In this image, I did dig.

It was then time for a more classic nude. The fore-shortened left arm and the generally well-lit tone of the figure made capturing the nuances of the abdominal area a tricky prospect, but after much trial and error, the final image is pleasing enough, in spite of some proportional mishaps.

Having been brave about tackling the male torso, and also having braved the female back, I was feeling foolhardy enough to tackle the male torso from the back. And to make things even more difficult, let the entire figure be foreshortened! To draw such a dramatically angled figure, you really need to put all your efforts into seeing shapes and forms, and ignoring what you think a human body looks like. Which is exactly what I did, and the basic line drawing for this was probably done faster than all the others. The speed helped me to stop second-guessing what I was seeing and to simply react and record. Even though the shading was tricky because of the well-lit nature of the original image, I quite like the end result.

After my initial announcement on Twitter about the sketch marathon, one suggestion for subject that came from a dear friend, was to draw a woman turning into an eagle. Compared to other suggestions such as ‘draw girls’, this one was more elaborate, and required me to create something beyond sketching from a source so I left it for last. I started with a plain line drawing of a figure, as you can see above, and then augmented it with aquiline features, after having stared at many photographs of eagles. No, really. And the result was this:

I am pleased with the final piece. Even though I didn’t bother with thumbnail sketches and similar preparation to try to get exactly the right look, the figure does have a sense of drama to it and the hybridisation isn’t a glaring one while also being clear enough.

After braving many drawing challenges and finishing after all the delays and false starts, I am happy with what I did here. This practice of drawing with a pen has always been about digging into drawing without worrying too much about getting it right, and also about improving technique and courage. If you look back at the sort of rapid scribbly pen sketches I started out with a couple of years ago, you can see why I am satisfied with the progress made, even if the gaps between tries have been too many and too long.

Of course, this comes at the cost of time and effort. The simple sketches at the link above took around 15-20 minutes to do. The drawings on this page took more like 3-4 hours each to complete. That difference is inevitable, but also with time that time scale will reduce as expertise takes over from sheer persistence.

There is still much to be learnt. I have made several proportional errors in these drawings, not because I didn’t notice them later, but because drawing with pen meant there was no way to make massive corrections. Part of the problem was in drawing on a relatively small A4 sheet and trying to fit the entire image in after having started on one part of a figure using a pen; Things get reduced and squeezed to fit. Such things wouldn’t happen if I had a deeper understanding of human anatomy, but that too will come in time. For now, this set of scribbles is done, and hopefully more shall follow without the customary long silences.

Samir

The last time I tried to draw seriously was well over a year ago, and I was drawing with a pen to clear my head. This time was no different. I have a few projects on my mind at the moment, including the ever-postponed redesign of this site, and just planning out the various aspects of the many projects was getting tedious and jumbled. I’ve written before about how procrastination can be beneficial, this was one of those occasions. If you must procrastinate, you might as well get something done while you’re at it, so after a long hiatus, I decided to take up my pen and draw.

I’ve primarily been a pencil-sketcher through most of my drawing life. As a medium, the pencil has other characteristics besides erasability that give it a unique character, such as the ability to create smooth, varying tones. My experiment this time was to try a more hatching based approach to shading with a pen, so I started with the simple geometric shapes that are always a good test. The trusty sphere and arrangement of three-dimensional forms helps concentrate your mind on technique and away from the details of what you’re drawing, a useful trick. It’s obvious that my familiarity with pencil shading spills over here, hence the scratchy chaotic lines, which would have looked perfectly smooth with a pencil.

Then I plunged into something more challenging. Nothing is more challenging to draw than people, because our tolerance for visual mistakes in people is very low. Unlike my previous tries with regular (biro) ballpoint pens, this time I found a gel pen lying around the house and used that. Compared to the sticky ink of the regular ball-point, the gel pen produces cleaner and sharper lines, which are a challenge when your shading gets scribbly. But the over-all effect is not bad at all.

I continued to tackle more human subjects. Faces and the human figure are close to my heart, which certainly helps during long drawing sessions. With this figure, the gel pen really helped lay down the flat areas in the woman’s hair; it has an interesting consistency to it. This drawing was finished quickly compared to the others here, but they were all more involved than the pen sketches I’ve tried before.

Yet more figures and more complex poses followed. The foreshortening of the legs is something I always have trouble getting right. It ended up looking fairly consistent here, although it meant making plenty of adjustments as I drew. It is likely the details don’t match the original picture I was looking at, but thinking on-the-go and coming up with a good final result is just as useful a skill to develop.

I wanted to tackle this very stark portrait of a soldier from an old black-and-white film because it had so much black in it and it would challenge my shading technique, which it did in more ways than one. The gel pen I found had been in use and the ink finally ran out while I was about a third through this image. I didn’t have another similar pen to replace it with, so I filled an old fountain pen with some royal blue ink and continued with that. You can see the slight difference in colours between the two; The gel pen is a brighter blue.

The switch to the fountain pen confused my hand a bit, so I quickly moved on to the next drawing, using only the fountain pen; I took on this portrait of a model in a hat. One problem with the original image was that it was evenly light in tone. There were almost no blacks in there except for her eyes, so to capture the essence of it with the unfamiliar fountain pen, I had the exaggerate the drama of the shadows. I was also in a hurry to finish and leave for an evening outing, so this was quite hurried. My immediate impression was that this looked too rushed, but while that is true, I now think that, along with the more fluid lines of the ink pen, add a great deal of character to it.

I had set myself the task of doing seven sheets of drawings for my pen drawing experiment. For my last drawing, I took my time choosing something that was enough of a challenge to end with. I settled on this profile shot, which gave me plenty of scope for exploring the line of the ink pen. The hair in this image took several passes, and a lot of instinctive strokes before it finally looked like a satisfactory head of hair. In fact, I am more than satisfied with it, especially when I look at it up close in the actual drawing.

The ink pen is a joy to draw with. It produces a beautiful fluid movement that comes almost automatically, the very same reason schools used to encourage the use of fountain pens as students learned to write; It is a marvellous instrument. The only thing to pay attention to is that the ink is a lot wetter than in ball-point pens, so it takes a few extra seconds to dry. It’s something to watch out for as you move your hands across a freshly-drawn section of paper. The wet ink and the need to do several passes to get a deep dark shade also means regular paper is going to be on the very edge of tearing after the process.

Keeping aside the cautions for the medium, I definitely want to do more like these. While the picture of the woman in the striped cardigan was a 20 minute sketch, most of the others took well over an hour to do. I am quite slow at this at the moment, but in spite of that, all these were done over only two days. Well worth the effort, I think.

And now that I’ve fruitfully delayed working on other things, it’s back to work.

Samir

I started drawing more sketches very soon after my last session of pen drawings, within a few days in fact. I was in the mood. But after having looked at my last drawings, which were done with a fair amount of abandon, I started to think too much. The first drawing that followed (above) was stiff and over-done. Then I picked up another magazine for inspiration and tried again.

This is what I got, after a lot of struggle and long slow sessions trying to get everything looking just right. I wasn’t even sure what to do with the rest of the page, so I left it alone and decided to come back to it later.

That was over a month ago. Today, I needed to draw to maintain my sanity. When you feel overwhelmed by things, drawing is a great productive escape. So, I picked up the same magazine I had put down a month ago and started drawing very quickly. These are what I got.

Except for the very first drawing in this post, all the images here were put together by looking at a single magazine. They are all collages, including the drawing of the couple, which is made of two different images that I thought went well together. Speed was my main aim here and I tried various thought processes along the way. The man in the jacket was draw by blindly rendering the details without paying attention to the over-all image. The couple were drawn trying to use as little as possible to express as much as was needed. And in the last one, things were distorted and stretched to fit the elements on the page, rather than to maintain proportions.

The speed worked out well. All the three images drawn today were finished in little over an hour. If I keep this up, I might actually get somewhere with my drawing skills. I’m nowhere near making accurate likenesses, but I do think the images are becoming more interesting, which is what counts in the end.

Samir

I haven’t drawn in ages. Let me clarify. It’s not like I haven’t drawn anything recently, I draw doodles and thumbnails of things all the time. I’m a designer and a lot of my ideas come out in tiny visual sketches. But those are all documentary and explanatory drawings. I haven’t sat down and sketched anything purely for the sake of drawing in ages. Wanting to break the long famine of purely exploratory sketching, today I set out to do some pen drawings.

Most people don’t think of the standard ball point pen as a drawing instrument. I love it for drawing, and there are a few reasons for it. Firstly, it’s not a specialist artist’s tool. It’s office equipment, and the idea of using something so ubiquitous to produce beautiful imagery excites me. Secondly, I like the fact that I can’t erase my mistakes with a ball point pen. There is a certain freedom that comes from the permanence of the pen and ink on paper. You can just let go, put line down on paper, and simply live with your mistakes, incorporating them into the finished piece. It frees you up from over thinking the drawing process, and it also encourages a certain level of mental discipline to put down only those lines which you think are absolutely necessary.

I set myself the task of finishing at least three A4 sheets of sketches today, which I did. I sat down with a bunch of magazines, opened them up and chose interesting images in sequence which I then proceeded to sketch quickly on the paper, directly with the pen. There was no plan or decided layout. An image was chosen, it was drawn on the sheet and then another was chosen and drawn until the sheet was filled to satisfaction. Obviously, there was some thought put into where to place the next piece of imagery, but since all the elements that were to go in were never pre-decided, the collages have a randomness to them which I like.

For a beginning after such a long hiatus, I am quite pleased with the results. Each of these took me about 30 minutes to complete. While the quality of the drawing is not quite up to even my mediocre standards when I was drawing more regularly, It’s nice to see I haven’t lost it completely. A bit of regular practice should bring me back up to speed soon enough. At least with the excuse of putting up sketches on this blog, I can push myself to do this more regularly. Any sketching and drawing fans out there.? What are your experiences with sketching and keeping in practice?

Samir

All good things must come to an end, as does this edition of Comic Konga with this comic. I haven’t been the most punctual participant, but I’m glad I completed the set of five, and that too keeping to my parameters of using the same character. It’s been a great exercise and I will certainly tackle comics with less trepidation in the future. Anyone interested can subscribe to Vishal’s feed to know when the next one is happening.

Day 5: Love is in the Air, and our everyman robot is reacting in his own little predictably unpredictable way. The point of this one was to continue with the more complex scene setups, and to end with a straightforward caption piece. I’m quite happy with the finished visual because I had a specific look in mind and it took plenty of redraws to get it right.

The final, much erased and worked over, pencil sketch on A4 photocopy paper was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I hear love is a wonderful thing. And yet, everytime you see love visualised in images you see the same symbols and the same stale imagery. It gets to be very boring — to me at least. My try with this was to make an image about love that was not churned out by the Valentine’s Day marketing department, or by the Jilted Lovers Anarchist Cell. Is it romantic? No, probably not by most people’s standards. I do hope it is at least a little funny though and makes you smile.

Samir

With this, the fourth entry into Comic Konga, I’m practically on a roll. A major part of Vishal’s inspiration to start an event like this was to get people who are not regular practitioners into the flow of making comics. If you stick to it, I think Comic Konga succeeds in that very well.

Day 4: In Green Consumer Behaviour, our serial protagonist returns. I also return to multiple characters and dialogue with this one. I’m a fan of both the dialogue-based and the caption-centric single panel comic. I think they each have their charm, and one often works better than the other depending on the specific situation. I’m also exploring the medium a bit more and spreading my drawing wings by tackling more complex scenes. Staging is a lot of fun.

A pencil sketch on an A4 photocopy sheet was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I have tackled the issues of consumerism, consumer behaviour and the ever growing fad of green consumers in my writing before, but the topic is ever relevant and sometimes a single comic panel can communicate the situation as well, if not better, than long articles. Let’s face it, we’ve made a mess on this planet, and now a vast population of people think all of it can be undone purely my buying more stuff. Astounding!

Samir

The third entry into the latest Comic Konga event is here. A good sign since it’s one more than I managed to churn out the last time I took it on.

Day 3: Margin of Error, continues with my brown-paper-bag-robot character. He’s proven to be quite flexible and enjoyable so far and his further versatility remains to be explored as I put him through the paces in more situations. In addition to the repeat character, the other challenge I am taking on is to come up with only single panel comics. Like a short story, single panels are often more difficult to create than multi-panel narratives. This boiling down the point and the humour to it’s minimal essence can be a tough ask.

As always, the pencil sketch on an A4 photocopy sheet was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape before applying the blue tones and text.

This comic is meant to be about progress, growth, development, and the illusion of these. Living in a world and an age when we consider everything to be advanced and forever advancing, it’s nice to sometimes question our measures of progress.

Samir

After a forced hiatus — I was out of town for a couple of days — my foray into Comic Konga continues.

Day 2: Sometimes You’re the Dog, Sometimes You’re the Stick, is a further exploration of the character that I came up with for my first try at the event. He seems to be a perfect innocent character that could be used to expose all manners of truth about the human condition, and our reactions to the world. At once an every-man and a marginalised observer, let me see if I can at least pull off the the requisite five Comic Konga pieces with the same protagonist. At the moment that is enough of a challenge. If I can do that greater plans can be considered.

The original pencil sketch was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape before applying the blue tones and text.

This comic could be about dogs and sticks, or it might not be about dogs and sticks. That interpretation lies in the eyes of the beholder. I just know that it was fun image to draw and I always enjoy playing with the meanings of popular idioms.

Samir

Vishal recently announced the second Comic Konga. Five days of original comic content to be put up here seemed as good an excuse as any to get me cracking on some new material. So here goes with my first try called What is Philantropy Philanthropy. Like last time, I’m starting a day late, and it remains to be seen whether I will stick to the schedule, but I do hope to get further than before (only managaed 2).

Day 1: I really need to be drawing more often, rather than on such rare occasions, which lead me to try to come up with a recognizable character I could use for my illustrative endeavours. He doesn’t have a name yet (and not quite sure he should), but the little robot with the paper bag on his head has potential.

The original pencil sketch was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape before applying the blue tones and text.

I would very much like to explore this character further. I think he could prove to be a useful asset when I need to express a one-off idea or opinion but don’t want to elaborate too much. Let the testing continue.

Hope you enjoy this slightly esoteric (philanthropic) first in what I would like to make a more regular performance in the future.

Samir