ANTI-TECHNIQUE

I am wary of watercolor technique. You might call me anti-technique. Open any introduction to watercolor book and the pages are bold and bright and frankly intimidating. Those books demonstrate all sorts of standard watercolor practice. For example, they might show how to flick color dots onto a wet portion to create a splotchy effect. Different brushes with differing amounts of water create a different effect. There are additives which say block out a portion of the paper keeping that area white. The list is endless.

So call me stupid, but at least so far I have tried to steer clear of these effects. It might be the purist in me, but I simply work to apply a uniform color to the paper. I let it dry, and then I put on another uniform color. Sometimes I see my approach more like Joseph Albers; there is absolutely no technique in his color studies. And I have tried to keep my drawings to be not about effect. Boring, I know.

However, I did happen to discover the following effect completely on my own. And the only requirement is that you use a Pentel EnerGel pen. There are of course a bunch of versions of this pen. I have happened to use a Metal Tip with a 0.7 mm ball, only because it happened to be lying around my desk.

The serendipitous effect of using this pen can be seen on these drawings. The water gently fuzzes the lines. So there is a softening and blurring of the lines by pulling off some of the ink. This also will darken the color that you have chosen, so the drawing assumes a higher contrast than would happen if you drew with either a pencil or a pen with waterproof ink.

While the drawings have a cool look, there is something in my prudish background that says that they are cheating. The blurring technique seems to reduce the amount of transparency. The drawing becomes something that is more about the effect, than the content. But again, that is my puritanical midwest upbringing coming out.

So if this sparks any interest, try out any pen that is sitting around you. The inks of some may not run at all. While I am sure that others will run even more.  Just let the technique trump the content.