Inktober 2019, Day 8: Frail

I was very satisfied with the way the background linework turned out in this. I tend to go high contrast and get the darks to be very dark, but I was looking at some drawings (or etchings?) by Anders Zorn and wanted to try some more hazy, atmospheric effects with ink. I used a few photos of a local Rococo building and some hazy photos of New York in the early 1900s to cobble together some references but I didn't draw this from a photograph.

Inktober 2019, Day 8, prompt word "Frail." Dip pen and ink, 8 x 11 in. by Ciana Pullen. [Image description: realistic black and white pen drawing of an outdoor scene at night or twilight in a hazy rainy atmosphere. In the foreground is a dirt or gravel path with a big puddle, and a leafless tree branch with two tangled balloons dangling near the ground and blowing around. One is popped. In the background is a hazy domed Rococo building with lit windows reflected in the puddle. A formal hedge and row of trees, stretches from the building toward the viewer.]

Inktober 2018, Day 27 "Thunder"

Day 27 of Inktober, prompt word "Thunder." I previously wrote about Inktober here. This is an edited version, but I'm posting these daily on my Instagram, @St.Rhinoceros:

Day 27 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Thunder." Dip pen and ink. by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: realistic black and white drawing of a thunderstorm. A small landscape takes up the bottom eighth of the image; towering storm clouds take up the rest of the space. A tiny single-wide trailer home on blocks sits on a wooded hill overlooking a valley and hills. Far away at the horizon a tornado has formed. In the middle ground a huge cloud is raining into the valley, creating a sweeping diagonal swath of lines and light from the bottom left up to the top right of the image. Several puffy black horizontal clouds are silhouetted against the rain. Behind the raining cloud, and to the right and behind the hill and trailer home are towering puffy cumulus clouds. Lightning jumps between two clouds. Shadows form on the ground from the clouds and the composition is overall dappled black with finely lined shades of grey. The storm appears to be moving toward the tiny trailer home.]

Inktober, day 2 "Tranquil"

I'm participating in an online drawing challenge called Inktober, where you challenge yourself to complete one drawing per day in ink throughout October and post it online. There is an official list of creative prompt words which people can choose to use, and I am, because it's fun to see what everyone else did for that prompt. Participation is completely casual and chaotic, so judging from Instagram I think around 4,000 people are doing it. The point is simply to improve your skills and motivation while finding community in an otherwise lonely discipline.

I've been posting low-quality phone camera pictures on my Instagram account @St.Rhinoceros but I finally scanned some drawings in and edited them. I'm starting with Day 2 here because I stupidly drew Day 1 so large that it won't fit on my scanner which means I have to photograph it with perfect ambient light that won't leave a gradient (and it ALWAYS leaves a gradient). I'm not in the mood to do that right now. So here is Day 2, prompt word "tranquil":

Sketch for Day 2 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "tranquil." This is my husband and I relaxing in the Schlosspark in Berlin, a huge garden behind a restored Baroque palace called Schloss Charlottenburg. The garden adjacent to the palace is strictly formal in the Baroque style, while the rest is a wooded area around a winding river in the Victorian style of Frederick Law Olmstead with the occasional Italianate formal area around a sculpture. A resident flock of sheep move from field to field and keep the lawn areas under control without mowing them. It's in the middle of the city but so quiet. [Image description: a black and white pen sketch of a landscape with a large tree on the left with sunlight filtering through its leaves, a ribbon of river in the middle with a reflection of the trees and shrubbery, and a riverbank on the right with trees and a sculpture that are illuminated by rays of sunlight flowing diagonally from left to right. A row of formal evergreens cuts the composition horizontally at the waterline in the bottom third. Under the tree on the left in the mid-foreground a couple of people lie on the ground on a blanket sleeping or looking up at the sky. The style is somewhat academic but looser.]

The Rachels, Music for Egon Schiele

[Video: a song by Rachel's from the CD "Music for Egon Schiele." Shows a still image of the CD cover while music plays, a black & white sepia-purple-toned Schiele painting of three small winter trees or saplings on a hill in front of a cloudy sky that is drawn as a series of horizontal lines, framed in dark mustard yellow.]

A piece by Egon Schiele, I couldn't find the title of this one. [Image: a black & white line drawing on white paper of older European village-style town-houses on a hillside. The shapes in the top middle houses are filled in with scratchy yellow and brown paint and small areas of red. The linework begins in the top right and the groups of right angles tumble downward across the horizontal page. The final effect is of an unfinished sketch or possibly an unfinished quilt made of burlap.]

Kleinstadt, by Egon Schiele. 1912-1913. [Image: dark square-shaped composition of houses in city blocks. The bottom third is solid black; the middle third is several rows of houses; the top third is another row of houses behind a street or canal which forms a horizontal line then veers off diagonally to the top left and is the same black as the bottom. All the shapes are outlined in black, with many lines appearing hasty or crooked. The shapes of the houses are filled in with blocks of muddy brownish colors-- red, green, ochre, thin white paint--and all roofs are black. The effect is of a quilt or collage.]

Sunflowers, by Egon Schiele. [Image: color painting done without black outlines showing a column of sunflower plants in front of a bluish-putty-colored sky. The plants, mostly large greenish brown leaves with a few flowers sagging over the top, are so visually packed into a rectangular area which takes up most of the picture plane that they seem to be a figure or monolith rather than a group of plants.]

Suburb, by Egon Schiele, 1914. The date of this piece, the beginning of WWI, makes the rows and red posts look like trenches and barbed wire to me. Hard to look past that, but worth it, as it's a beautiful composition. [Image: Squarish horizontal composition of houses and horizontal stripes of pale smoky blue and charcoal grey, possibly roads, bodies of water or rows of plants. The style is similar to the two house pieces above but completely colored in. As with the other two the lack or confusion of a horizon flattens the piece into a quilt-like arrangement. The houses themselves are muddy white, yellow and red, and the fields in front are dotted with thin bright-red posts.]

Egon Schiele, "The Bridge." [Image: A square composition of a bridge that stretches from the horizon toward and slightly left of the viewer where it exits the frame. To its left are empty spaces, maybe fields or river banks. All the shapes are outlined in black but filled in with monochrome icy wheat colors, making this piece less like a quilt, more like a Japanese woodblock print or old sepia photograph. The bridge is made of repeated gridded pylons and a a repeated grid of guard rails, topped with broad, flat linear rectangular structures that repeat four times into the distance and are echoed by a few telephone poles to the right. The top third and right half of the piece are simple flat shapes that balance out the busy criss-crosses and diagonals of the left.]

Egon Scheile, "Boats on Ruffled Water." [Image: vertical color painting of boats on water. Though linework is involved it isn't the quilted technique of the house pieces above. It looks much more like a straightforward Impressionist Monet or Whistler painting of boats at dusk, except that the reflections of masts and rigging on rippling water turn the bottom two thirds into an abstract pattern that Schiele emphasizes by keeping the linework sharp and even, creating what looks like texture by dragging a pencil through thick paint, but I can't be sure of that from the 2-D image. The boats are arranged to create a line cutting from the middle left to the horizon at the top right. The water is pale turquoise, the sky is soft sunset-pink,and the boat hulls are pinkish white, jade green and reddish brown.]