Pencil Jammers

There is a story of a snail that had fallen into a deep pit trying to climb out. It needed to climb thirty feet to get to safety. Every day it would manage to slowly crawl 3 feet up, but during the night it would slither most of the way back. My condition seems to be somewhat like this snail's in my attempts to improve my sketching and drawing skills.

Although my desire has been very strong ever since it was rekindled about a dozen years ago, every year I go through many months when I do not find the time or energy to draw. I have tried many different ploys to ensure that I do not slide backwards during these periods but so far they have only helped to a limited extent. My attempts to do at least one lunch time sketch every day worked only for a while.

However, around the middle of September last year I received an invitation from Ganapathy Subramaniam (GS), whom I had met online at WetCanvas, to join him on Pencil Jammers. Unlike many other art communities on the net PJ encourages its members to meet and sketch, draw, & paint together on location and in workshops (which members are free to organise on their own). In Chennai and Bangalore interested members meet every Sunday to sketch on location at various venues and then post their work in appropriate threads on the Pencil Jammers website.

As a result, from mid-September 2012 onwards, until a couple of months ago, I have been fairly regular at these Sunday morning sketching meets. I have been busy through the rest of the week and found no time to draw, but at each of these sessions I have tried to do one main sketch of about 90 minutes duration and a couple of quick sketches in about 30 minutes each at each venue. In this post I am sharing some of the sketches from the first two meets that I attended. Most parts of these sketches were completed on location, but I worked a bit more on each of them at home, mainly to add to the shading, and to darken some of the values through cross hatching

Cholamandal, is an artists' village in Chennai. I had been there many times to look at artwork and to attend films on art based topics, but for my friends in Pencil Jammers this was their first time there and they were charmed by the ambience of the place. As a result our group has visited the place several times since then.

I had been to the Children's Park almost forty years ago and had thought that it was a very drab place. I was very pleasantly surprised at how much it had developed since then and with its current popularity. Our group got there at around 9 am but within a couple of hours the place was quite crowded with visitors. I have discovered that I do not mind being watched while I draw, but that is not the case with many others and some of my companions decided that it was time to quit the place..

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Mylapore Festival

Chennai is considered one of the cultural centres of India. And, if there is one part of Chennai that embodies these more than the others do, it is Mylapore. While Chennai is said to date back to the 17th century (1644) when The East India Company established Fort St. George, Mylapore was already a large settlement then. There are records of settlements around Mylapore predating the birth of Christ. And, before the British, Mylapore was occupied by the Portuguese and the French.

This weekend we are witnessing the 11th edition of the Mylapore Festival, when the entire community comes together to put up a four day street festival celebrating the music, art, food, traditions and culture of the place. From a fairly sedate start this festival has grown in popularity over the years.

The kolam competition is one of the very popular events during this festival. Kolam is a drawing made on a swept and washed floor using white rice powder. Traditionally it is drawn early every morning by Hindu women in front of their homes. Last year I watched as a part of a very busy street was cordoned off to hold this event. These are some of the photographs taken then.

Amongst many other things Mylapore is famous for its Kapaleeswarar Koil a Shiva temple. There are references to this temple that date back to the 7th century, but these references place the temple on the seashore over a kilometer away from the present location of the temple. Additionally the present temple reflects the architecture of the 16th century although there are inscriptions within the temple dating back to the 12th century. The explanation for this paradox seems to be that the old temple by the seashore was razed to the ground by the Portuguese to build the Santhome Cathedral and that the Kapaleeswarar Koil was then rebuilt by the kings of Vijayanagaram in the 16th century.

These are two sketches that I made on location a few weeks ago. The first is of the entrance to the temple with a mandapam (hall) in the foreground. And the other sketch is of a house just outside the temple which caught my eye because it had its own mini-temple. I later discovered that it was the house of one of the senior priests of the temple.

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.

My Second Blog

I am very glad to say that from the day I decided to do it (towards the end of May 2012)  I have been quite regular with my "30 minute" sketches. In fact so far, on the days when I have not had the time to sketch during my lunch break, I have come home and managed to do one to keep going at almost a sketch a day. And I have been posting these sketches in my second blog to track my progress.

 I am hoping to achieve two things through this exercise: 1. To improve my quick sketching skills. My aim is to be able to sketch fast without sacrificing details (or at least the illusion of details) and to do that with a refined technique, and 2. To develop my watercolour painting skills.


Last Saturday I kept to my resolve to paint every weekend and did one small watercolour sketch - a landscape in monocolour. This one took me about 30 minutes but, when it comes to painting, I have decided not to impose time restrictions on myself since I will only be doing it at home and probably only on weekends.

 I had actually planned to do another one on Sunday but wasn't able to do that. Hopefully I will manage a cople of watercolours this weekend. Let me see...

I propose to share some (but not all) of these quick sketches on this blog too on a weekly basis. If you would like to see the rest of these quick sketches, or if you would like to know anything about the sketches that you see here, you could check out my second blog, Racing Against The Clock.

From Pen & Ink Projects and Challenges to Lunchtime Sketches

I was overwhelmed by the comments that I received for my last post and I thank all of you, the ones who appreciated my sketches and the ones who have encouraged me to take to painting and even offered suggestions on how I could get started. I have taken the suggestions to heart and soon I hope to start posting here in colour too. But, before I get to that I would like to finish what I started, which is a short account of how I have progressed to where I am today.

As I mentioned in my last post it was around 2007 or 2008 that I decided to concentrate on pen & ink. I was already a member at one online art community (WetCanvas) and I joined one more (I Draw & Paint) around this time. At both of these I started participating regularly in the monthly pen & ink projects/challenges. The drawings that you see here are some of those that I did between 2008 and early 2012 at these two communities. 

 Although I am fairly good at self motivation, I cannot overstate how much being a part of these two communities has motivated me to draw and has helped me develop my skills.

During this time I also tried my hand at watercolour a few times. These two were done late in 2010 and unfortunately, due to my lack of confidence in wielding a brush and the effort involved in setting up to paint, I have not put in the necessary time and effort since then to take my painting skills any further. Hopefully that will change now because I have drawn up an action plan to which I am publicly committing myself.

During the three months and more since my last post I spent hardly any time painting, drawing or even sketching. Finally, about two weeks ago, I decided to at least do one lunchtime sketch at work each day and post it in a new blog (to track my progress). I am happy to say that I have been fairly regular so far at this. Starting today I also plan to play with colour over the weekends and see where that takes me.

My thanks, once again, for your good wishes and encouragement.

From Graphite & Charcoal to Pen & Ink

I enjoy drawing and painting.

No, I think I should modify and also explain that statement. I draw quite often, though not as often or as much as I would really like to. And, I enjoy drawing. I usually sit down to it after dinner. There have been many occasions when I have been totally bushed at the time of starting. But once I start drawing  I lose all track of time and sometimes find that I have been at it much longer than I planned to. Invariably I feel very refreshed after such a session.

On the other hand, I would very much like to paint, but I paint infrequently. This is partly because I am still very much a beginner at it. Of course, I realise that I will always stay a beginner unless I paint. But the problem is that painting requires more of a setting up than drawing does. If it is watercolour, one needs paints, brushes, a palette or plate or dishes, a water container and so on. And at the end of the day's painting session these have to be cleaned and put away.

As a result, at least so far, whenever I have mentally tossed a coin to decide whether to paint or draw, the coin has invariably landed in favour of drawing.

When I took up drawing as a serious hobby about ten years ago I started with graphite and charcoal. My wife Nithi enrolled me in a two week portrait drawing course as a gift. The medium was charcoal & graphite. I attended the classes every evening after work, and stayed up late into the night to complete the assigments. At the end of the two weeks I was hooked and I have stayed hooked.

At the portrait drawing course - 1

At the portrait drawing course - 2

Three Pears - vine charcoal

But as I started drawing regularly I found even the degree of setting up that a graphite or charcoal drawing requires to be an inhibiting factor for me. I struggled to get the darks that I wanted with graphite. And, protecting the paper and the finished drawing were also issues. As a result I have switched to pen and ink.

These are a few of my early pen & ink drawings from around 2003 to 2007. They were mainly quick sketches using just one or two pens. During this period graphite was still my main medium, followed by charcoal. I think that it was around 2007 or 2008 that I decided to make pen & ink my main medium.

The sketch that you see of Mont St. Michael is a study copy of a drawing by Peter Caldwell. I found his book on pen & ink drawing very inspiring.

Mysore, A City Of Tree Lovers

Living conditions have deteriorated badly in most cities in India. Air and noise pollution levels have risen tremendously, as has the volume of traffic. Simultaneously these cities have also become extremely pedestrian unfriendly. In this respect some of the cities that come to mind are Chennai, where I live, and Bangalore, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Coimbatore, and Hyderabad, all cities that I am very familiar with. And, I understand from my friends who are as familiar with other cities in India as I am with these, that it is the same sad story with most cities in India.

Mysore is however one city that seems to have retained its charm. I have been visiting it, though not frequently, over the last fifty plus years. Of course it too has grown and changed during this time, but unlike other cities it has not yet become an unbearably noisy and  crowded concrete jungle. Though traffic has increased, many parts of the city are still very walkable, and the pollution level is definitely very much lower than that of other cities. And, although many old buildings have been replaced by bland new ones, this city still retains many fine old garden houses that give Mysore its special character. My wife Nithi and I therefore were very happy  to spend a lot of time wandering around on foot. 

The people of Mysore seem to hold parks and plant life in special regard. There were several parks close to the hotel where we were staying. One of these parks had a very interesting gateway. On the last day of our stay I decided to go and photograph it so that I could sketch it later. I then noticed several groups of people gathered together within the park, performing rituals near various plants and trees. I continued walking past this particular park and everywhere that I went, in all the parks in  that area, there were people of all ages coming in to pay their respects to the trees and plants. I had not seen this happen before in any of the other cities. Maybe this is something unique to the people of Mysore and that perhaps explains why Mysore alone, among all Indian cities, is bucking the trend and preserving some of its charm.