Pen and Inks

I've been working with pen and inks for most of my life. Whenever a relative who doesn't spend that much time with you hears that your interest is "art", generally you get a bottle of india ink and a quill pen of some sort. I used to get aggravated at it (I mean come on, I've got a bottle of ink NOW that I've been using for close to 10 years. I just don't go through it that quickly.), but now I'm kind of glad that I got all that ink lo those many, many years in a row.

For one thing I can whip out pen and inks in a fairly short amount of time. They became kind of my fallback "when you've got artist's block" way to shake loose the old creativity. Any time I am stuck for inspiration, I can always go do a pen and ink of anything and it usually helps me get started on something else. Throw out a couple of nice little pen and inks and you've started looking at the world in a compositional kind of way again.

And the second and most important reason is simply this: I like pen and inks. I always have, I always will. I am drawn more to an artist's drawings and ink sketches than to full blown paintings. I like the paintings mind you, but more than likely I will probably like the planning stages more. It is a view into the artist's workings that you sometimes can't see in the polish of a finished painting.

So I decided to post a few drawings I've been working on lately (and a couple that aren't THAT recent) because I've gotten a little burned out on painting in the past couple of weeks and wanted to get back to the basics. I had fun doing them and I hope you like them.