Sunday 2 September 2012

Grand Island Lighthouse

WetCanvas is one of several art communities that I am a member of. Currently I am active in the pen and ink forum where we have a pen & ink project every month. Val, our host, painstakingly selects some wonderful reference photographs on a variety of subjects and all of us use these to come up with our own versions which could be entirely in pen & ink, or ink washes, or even ink and other media. 

For August 2012 Harry Seiler's very nice photograph of the Grand Island Lighthouse (also known as the Grand Island East Channel Light) in Michigan, USA was one of the reference pictures. (There were ten reference photographs in all and you can see all of them here.) I did two different versions of it. My first one was a 10 minute ball point pen thumbnail while the one that I have posted here took me around two and a half hours.

 In the thumbnail I had concentrated only on the massing of the lighthouse but in this one I focussed on the lighthouse and tried to get a slightly out of focus effect for both the background and the foreground. After I had completed it I felt that I should have used thinner lines for the background but by then I was stuck with the result of my heavy handed approach. That unfortunately is the way it is with pen & ink.