What working in a journal teaches you – Bali Journal 2015

i have finished adding colour to the rice terraces.  I should learn not to delay between the line sketch and adding colour, as I get nervous about wrecking the drawing.  This is also heightened with a journal, as I will not be able to get rid of it if I mess it up. I think that is one of the reasons why it took me so long to work in journals, the permanency of work and what if I wreck the drawing and I am stuck with it?

But of course this turned out to be one of the great things that I have learned in the last year of working in journals, the mistakes aren’t as important as I thought.  I have learned to not only live with mistakes and imperfections in my drawings but to embrace them and see that they add life and feeling to the image.  I have also learnt to work through the mistakes and how to rescue drawings that were teetering on the brink of disaster.  The use of multi media helps me, I often find a different approach of a various  mediums can often be what is needed.

The few things that I now always check when a drawing is just not working are

• Line variation, I like to make sure that there are variations in the lines I am using and thicken up some of the lines or make breaks in the lines.  This gives much more life and movement to what I am drawing.  I have a very favourite brush pen that makes the most delicious tapered line.  It is a Kuretake Zig Cartoonist Brush pen and it is under $10.
• Darks, since I started drawing, I don’t get the values right in my images and it is usually because my dark areas are not dark enough.  So I always have to check my drawings and go back to what I have been taught, do I have the right balance of light, middle and dark tones in my image.  As I use a lot of my photos as references, technology helps by being able to make my photos black and white.  That often  sorts out the problems.
• Highlights.  Adding those last highlights is now much easier since I discovered good white pens.  My extra fine white sharpie is great to add in those highlight, (or fix a problem) and you can go back over them with colour to knock back the brightness and sink the area back into the drawing.

Back to the journal, my main disappointment in my last trip was not seeing the rice terraces, so this time we went for a day trip to the north of the island and did a half day walking tour of the rice fields   It was so interesting as the guide not only explained the rice production but showed us the medicinal and other plants in the region, plus something I had not seen before, clove trees  I did not realise how big the trees are and you can smell the cloves as you walk by them.  You could also see the cloves being dried on large sheets beside the road.

Cloves drying by the side of the road

I also went back to one of my previous pages and added a drawing on a urn that was beside the bridge.  I drew the urn, but the spread didn’t work and I thought I had wrecked it, but a couple of days away from it and with fresh eyes I realised it had no darks and by adding in a very dark background it matched in with the other drawing and the spread was saved.  A drawing is such a journey and there is hardly a drawing I do that I don’t hate at some stage, but as I learn more I find that I am able to see were the problems are and fix them or learn to let go of the perfection and embrace the wonkiness

Urn and offering. Water colou and ink. Bali Journal 2015

Bamboo bridge and Urn spread. Watercolour and ink Bali Journal 2015

Karen

PS I have written this post on my IPad, so please forgive any problems as this is not my preferred way of posting.