TIM BAKER

Another two weeks flies by and another portrait session, this time with the bearded and behatted Adam, a man after my own heart with the waistcoat, shirt and tie (sadly no kilt though), and a nod to the current events with the Ukraine-supporting coloured hankies. Even the pieces I had a bit of a disaster with turned out fairly well this week – bar one piece only being shown in detail, unusually all pieces worked.

Pen trouble was the issue this week – my vintage pens having a strop basically…I’d not used the Wahl Eversharp Symphony 707 in a while, and I don’t know if it was the paper or if it’s dried out, it was more like ink and stick drawing, hard to get a line and rather too much shaking and pressing down for my liking.

The Wahl Eversharp fountain pen is one of those pens that is a firm flex, and need a certain amount of pressure to even write at the best of times. That’s why although it’s one of my most expensive pens (still pocket change to most pens, but VAT and postage added a lot) it’s actually not one of my favourites. But even for it, it was being rather dry, and like pushing mud up hill, so I need to give it a clean out or check over.

So I for the next portrait I switched to my one of my most recent loves, the Aikin Clement Capitol Cabinet, only to find it leaking all over my hands, it had leaked into the top. And the ink blobbed out when I started to draw – including a massive blob of ink where his eye was. I ran with it until when doing the wash it ended up spreading everywhere. Nightmare! So he ended up with rather a black eye…

I have compared vintage flex pens to racehorses in the past, they are great and the closest thing you get to true dip pen in a more convenient form factor – but they are highly strung and can throw a wobbly like this. I rarely remember what pens I use, tbh – I am not a pen blogger and rotate them, but in this case because of the drama I did.

So switching again to the other recent vintage pen that I find very reliable, the Evergood French fountain pen for some watercolour work as always I was desparate to do some but time is always an issue. That worked well for the next two drawings, although the pen ran out of ink hence the last one of Adam had to be finished with my Preppy Medium pen, as I simply did not have even the seconds to spare faffing with refilling the pen.

These sketches came out well, and vary from more of an almost cartoony simplistic illustrative style, more like Quentin Blake (who I have weirdly been compared to, I get what they meant) to more naturalistic pose from the side. I need to work on my foreshortening as the arms (not shown on purpose!) are laughably bad. Loved the greeny/grey tweed colour, quite hard to do that quickly though….

And the final piece wasn’t of Adam at all, it was his friend Dylan (I hope that’s how you spell it) and again like the Valentine Day PATP it was a 10 minute manic tempera paint stick painting. A lot of fun and went down well – people seem to like these quick paint stick portraits? I am not totally sure I get it, tbh. I guess cos they are so quick and expressive, not what I usually do, but as a friend pointed out, it’s the rest of the session leading up to them that informs the expressive nature.

I have been trying to up my technical side in tandem with the abstract/expressionist stuff, they do inform each other. I suspect people think the more way out and chaotic work comes from a lot of handwaving and the artist scribbles something in a few minutes and voila! Instant genius. No, it usually doesn’t work like that, you have to put the grind in on a lot of less dramatic and more accurate work, the prep work to get there.

It’s a culmination of many hours/days/months or years, that quick swoosh of a brush or scribbling furiously, to have the control to know what works, what doesn’t, and don’t go too far and make a total mess. It’s hard cos I tend to be more of an instinctual than conceptual artist, I never hardly measure, I almost randomly pick colours or media sometimes….but directing that into something more focused is the goal.