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Moira Donohoe's Art Blog/Drawing

8/15/2015 5:41:22 PM | By Moira Donohoe | 2 Comments

Moira’s Blog

Thoughts on drawing

I think drawing is the backbone of many art practices especially painting and sculpture. Drawing helps flesh out ideas, and resolve issues with composition and structure. It also can stand alone as a viable art form. Over the years I have used many different tools to draw. The artwork reflects both the nature of the artist and the materials used. The images selected here are from various sketchbooks or newspaper illustrations I made over the span of the last 25 years. Some are using traditional media such as pencil, ink or charcoal. Some use these media with unconventional tools like sticks and feathers. There are scratchboard drawings, ink wash drawings, and drawings made from charcoal collected after a burn in the forest or campfire. They all loan their particular characters to the finished drawings, or the sketchbook drawings which I consider more along the lines of brainstorming.

The following pencil renderings use a conventional 2B pencil, a carpenter pencil, and a 4b pencil. The B indicates it is soft, and the 2 that on the scale of soft pencils, it is close to center. HB is in the middle of the pencil scale, with softness increasing as you go up in number. For instance 2B is softer than HB, 3B softer still. My softest pencil is a 6B. Harder pencils have H after their number like 2H, 3H and so on. The higher the number, the harder the pencil. Harder pencils also leave lighter marks but can dent the paper if you press too hard. Soft pencil lines smudge easily and are capable of rendering rich dark tones and fuzzy lines. Hard pencils are cleaner and good for tighter less atmospheric drawings. I never use a pencil sharpener preferring the variety of lines one can achieve with an exacto or knife sharpened pencil.

Tree drawing using a carpenter pencil Aspen using a 2B pencil Contour Tree drawing using

a 4B pencil

The following ink drawings were done with brush, sticks, and pen. It is fun to take a bottle of ink and sketchbook into the woods and pick up sticks as drawing tools wherever you are. Each stick leaves a myriad of lines depending on which part of the tool is used. Lines and textures can be stamped, scribbled, or drawn roughly or delicately. A lot of variety can be achieved in one drawing. Other natural materials like feathers and pine needles impart their own unique marks. Both the quill end and soft part of the feather can be used, and depending on whether a pine needle is single or in a bunch, different effects are possible.

Ink wash with brush and pen Yosemite Pioneer Village Ink Wash with brush Summer Wildflowers

Illustration in Anchorage Daily News by Moira Donohoe

Ink and stick drawing Tree Ink wash and pen drawing Trees

Charcoal is versatile in that it can be energetic and messy or elegant and refined. Great atmospheric effects can be achieved with charcoal. Vine charcoal from willow is light and ephemeral, and compressed charcoal much heavier and denser. The fireplace charcoal tends to have characteristics of both of the above manufactured types.

In His Hands Charcoal Yosemite Buffalo Soldier Shelton Johnson, Charcoal

Scratchboard is a panel with a coating of fine white clay with a subsequent layer of India ink. The image is made by scratching fine lines with a sharp tool through the ink surface to expose the white clay underneath. The final image can be very finely detailed like a wood engraving, or loose and freer, and many things in between.