Sketchbook Drawing Tip: Soften your Linework with Diluted Ink

A useful tip, and some gorgeous sketches, REBLOGED from Citizen Sketcher

Marc Taro Holmes's avatarCitizen Sketcher

16Jan10_Dilute Ink (3)

I was out sketching the other day, (at the Montreal Biodome) and wanted to try a slight tweak to my sketchbook drawing method. Nothing too revolutionary – just the simple idea of sketching with diluted ink.

Sometimes I’m in the mood for an aggressive high-contrast drawing. It can be a lot of fun – especially if you’re working quickly (like these 5 min gesture drawings).

But other times I feel like having a black line under a watercolor sketch is a bit overpowering.  Of course you can also sketch directly with watercolor (with no drawing at all).  But that can be a bit nerve wracking. I find it takes a lot of focus. Or a willingness to draw three drawings and keep only the best one 🙂

So – this is a bit of a middle ground. A more relaxing way to draw.

16Jan10_Dilute Ink (1)

I took a small…

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The Day After the Day Before

We make such a fuss over a ‘record’ snowfall… when that record amounts to nothing more than an inch here, an inch there… like this had never happened before.
Now the sun is out. The streets are being plowed. We can get back to the horrors of everyday life, where the water we cannot do without is poisoned to save money for the rich, where we blow children to pieces with remote control flying robots in the name of fighting ‘terror,’ where the willfully stupid frantically work to destroy our schools so children growing up will be as stupid as they are and maybe won’t notice what we’ve done to them… but not to worry. Another generation or two–if that, and the other life forms–those that have managed to survive us–will be able to live when the last human has perished… likely at the hand of the next to the last human, who–even as he dies, his heart stopped…squeezes the trigger of his open carry… will, find themselves

… free at last, free at last… with no need to thank us… or the spooks we invented to justify our destruction of all that might have sustained us.

Let us all count our blessings.

 

 

Illocality: Joseph Massey

IllocalityIllocality by Joseph Massey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Massey beautifully erases the distinction between nature, and the random clutter of parking lots… fragments of human artifice. One is never left with the false tranquility of contemplation of the “natural world:” The observing eye in these poems is not passive, or restorative of some lost numinosity of childhood, as in a Wordsworthian sense. Sex shop signs, bricks, asphalt parking lots, broken glass… and the windows themselves, through which the world is perceived, sharpen senses to a cutting point, prick one’s body into a wakeful anxious dream. They pry open the mind to an awareness of things–things… pregnant with ideas that exist beyond words.

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Slavoj Žižek: The Anxiety of Retroactive Trauma

Bloom, or course. If poets, why not philosophers?… or painters? or musicians?  Thinking about art history and criticism–my question is–and this has been on my mind for some time, as an artist of an eclectic bent–why this need for pedigree? For lines of descent? For a clear central stream of perpetual renewal and repetition, or repetition as renewal? How male! What is the anxiety here, if not fear of the feminine, of creation without the paternal marker of ownership and mastery? What is the critical scorn for eclecticism if not an expression of enforced patriarchal monogamy–itself, but a disguised longing for polyamory? May love be free to choose its favorites, and free to choose again! Fuck the Gatekeepers!

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

The essence of Slavoj Žižek’s vision is that philosophy is the result of a critical act of buggery, by which another, earlier philosopher is deliberately misread, and hence re-written, retroactively absorbed and incorporated into the ongoing project of the making of a Subject. In one of those impromptu interviews he has had over the years, Žižek once related the notion that “Hegel didn’t know what he was doing”. He went on to say,

You have to interpret him. Let me give you a metaphoric formula. You know
the term Deleuze uses for reading philosophers—anal interpretation, buggering them. Deleuze says that, in contrast to other interpreters, he anally penetrates the philosopher, because it’s immaculate conception. You produce a monster. I’m trying to do what Deleuze forgot to do—to bugger Hegel, with Lacan [chuckles] so that you get monstrous Hegel, which is, for me, precisely the underlying radical dimension of subjectivity which then, I think…

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