Monday Morning Art School: Gel Pen and a Water Brush

Everything you need for pen-and-wash will balance comfortably on your lap, thanks to modern technology.
A fifteen-minute pen-and-wash sketch.

I slipped my sketchbook in my purse before church, only to find when I got there that my pencil had apparently been eaten by a bear. It was useless. That left me scraping around the bottom of my backpack, where I found a Uni-Ball gel pen and a tiny sample card from Turner Watercolours.

Recently, pen manufacturers have started offering fraud protection technology. This is because of a new form of crime called ‘check washing.’ That’s a kind of identity theft where ink is removed from a check and the check is reused. In response, pen makers have created waterproof and acetone-proof pens. Good luck getting the ink out of your clothes, but it’s a boon for artists looking for inexpensive, waterproof pens for pen-and-wash drawings.
Initial drawing.
There’s a tiny, unremarkable, ranch-style house across the road from our church. It’s best to practice drawing everyday objects. If you can get the composition and pattern of lights and darks right on a prosaic little house, you stand a much better chance of getting them right at Niagara Falls or some other equally-grand place. In painting, the composition should always come first.
Without a pencil, I couldn’t even put hashmarks on my paper. Sometimes flying without a net is a good thing, though. You’re stuck with your decisions. I laid out a simple line drawing, and then massed my dark shapes in with the pen.
More darks.
Pen drawing is supposed to be fast, and eyeing up proportions is a learned skill, just like reading. If you’re an absolute beginner, you might want to do a measured drawing of the building on another page first, in pencil. Then close that page and work fast on another page. Your mind’s eye will remember the proportions. If you have no idea where to start with that, do this exercise first.
My pal Mary Byromteaches a wildly successful weekly class in southern Maine called The Traveling Sketchbook.  We occasionally compare materials for our classes. It was Mary who reminded me of the versatility of the lowly waterbrush pen. The genius of these brushes is that they eliminate the need to carry water separately. 
I watched Richard Sneary, who is one of America’s top watercolorists, using the same waterbrush pen with watercolor pencils to do a value sketch at Parrsboro. That’s a technique I use and teach. If that kind of value study is important for him, it’s doubly important for the rest of us.
As far as I want to go with the pen. Now to find some color.
There are many makers of waterbrush pens. They’re cheap and I have a few tucked here and there, including at the bottom of my backpack.
My ‘watercolor kit’ for this project. You can do better.
I didn’t have a watercolor kit handy, but I could still mix paint on the sample card and fill in the big shapes with color. I really recommend that you carry a small watercolor kit instead, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Everything you need for this exercise will balance comfortably on your lap. That’s a big improvement over pen-and-wash of the past. We used to need a pen holder, nibs, a bottle of ink, watercolors, a brush, a water bottle and a cup.
Voila! You’ve just done your first pen-and-wash drawing. This is another simple way to make a sketch without dragging around a ton of supplies, and it’s a good way to work in advance of a bigger painting.

Of course, the other—probably more common—way to do pen-and-wash is to start with the watercolor painting and enhance it at the end with the pen. That’s a technique for creating more finished work, often used in illustration. It’s usually done on a hard paper like Bristol board or hot-press watercolor paper.
I’ve got one more workshop available this summer. Join me for Sea and Sky at Schoodic, August 5-10. We’re strictly limited to twelve, but there are still seats open.

Not the Kardashians, but working on it

Parrsboro, NS, is working its way into being a regional arts center.

Breaking Dawn, by Carol L. Douglas. Second runner up at Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival.
This weekend there were lots of well-known faces at the Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival. Organizers snagged Richard Sneary to judge, and there were high-profile painters in the mix. It was a festival of luminaries, and the painting was first-rate. I’m hoping that translates into Parrsboro becoming an arts destination for tourists and city-slickers.
It’s not an impossible dream. Five miles down the road from my home is Rockland, ME. It started as a shipbuilding and fishing town, expanding to include canneries, grain mills, foundries, lumber mills, cooperies, tanneries, quarries, and other miscellany of coastal living. By the mid-twentieth century, its historic industries were moribund.
The Age of Sail workshop aboard American Eagle was scheduled to coincide with a gam, a rafting up of the historic vessels on Penobscot Bay.
Enter the Farnsworth Art Museum, established by Lucy Farnsworth in 1948. It’s now the nucleus of a gallery scene that now rivals any art scene anywhere, both in volume and in quality.  Roughly 36.7 million tourists visited Maine in 2017, and we’re on track to break 40 million this year or next. Art is a big part of that tourism, and an important part of Maine’s image. I wish that for Parrsboro. If anyone can do it, the folks at Parrsboro Creative can. They’re smart, focused people.
One of the nicest things about traveling is meeting new people who tell me, “I read your blog.” This weekend, many added that they subscribe to two art things, my blog and Poppy Balser’s newsletter. We’re both daughters of the Great White North and we both love boats. Poppy is a terrifically nice person, so I don’t mind at all being lumped in with her.
Hard at work about American Eagle, photo courtesy Ellen Trayer.
My blog is an example of that old maxim about genius being 99% perspiration. It works because I get up early every morning to write it, Monday to Friday. Other than holidays, the only time I don’t write is when I’m out of network range, which was the case during last week’s Age of Sailworkshop.
It’s such a pity that I couldn’t share it with you because it was downright magical. American Eagle should really be called the Kindness, because the crew is so good-hearted. Any doubts as to whether a painting workshop on a boat could work were laid to rest. All participants enthusiastically said they’d do it again next year.
Ellen demonstrates a paint-throwing technique to Lynn. We waited until we were off the boat before we did this.
Michael Fuller isn’t a plein air artist but he gamely tried the Quick Draw at Parrsboro anyway. “It makes you notice the transient things,” he told me. I think that’s what the boat workshop did as well. In a sketchbook done on the move, one takes away impressions, not finished pieces. The discipline will make you put away your cell phone and change how you work.
The discipline of getting up early is equally hard to break. I found myself restively trying to ‘sleep in’ on Saturday, so at 4:30 AM (Atlantic time) I quietly dressed and headed from my host billet near Fox River to the beach below Ottawa House. I stopped for coffee and a bagel at Tim Hortons and figured I was too late for the sunrise. I was wrong; the subtle pyrotechnics went on for some time.
This piece was the second runner-up, or third prize winner. I figured Richard Sneary gave it to me as a reward for being the only person nuts enough to get up that early.
Neither Parrsboro Creative nor American Eagle have set their calendar for next year, but I have every intention of doing both again. It was a wonderful week. I’m just sorry that you couldn’t be there with me.