A Literary Raven ~ Art Blog
The Literary Raven
Original Artwork in Pastel
First attempt, for many years, at rekindling an old love - art - and hopefully the first of a new collection of artistic, literature-inspired products.
Read more about the journey of this 'stately raven' in the blog below or shop our 'Raven Range' now
Ode to the practicing perfectionist: First Draft on Beginning Art!
I’ve added a contents because I could waffle for Ireland so hopefully this will help you navigate!
Contents:
The Practicing Perfectionist Top to bottom
Art vs Reproduction Don’t Blow!
Why I Choose Chalk
It’s called a tortillon
Life-size doesn’t translate to the macro!
Forgiving Mistakes
Edgy Decisions
Raven – The Process
Successes and Failures Photographing your Art
So, what did I learn
A Poe -etic Inspiration
Pastel paper is dimpled
What’s Next?
Video Photo Slideshow of 'the stages' of the Raven
It is my ardent hope to one day be a ‘practicing perfectionist’ but so far these two words seem oxymoronic to me!
See, the burden of the perfectionist in attempting art is, for every stroke, every line to be perfect the first time. There is so much self-induced pressure to not make a mistake, pressure which only heightens the further into a successful project you get, that it is WORK to ‘work’ under such conditions and completely counterproductive to the goal of the perfectionist – perfection!
You can’t learn without mistakes or without practice. Trying to produce a piece of fine art on your first try is as ludicrous as becoming fluent in a foreign language by sheer force of will and yet…! And yet…! 36 years of life and although I understand the logic, I still can’t break the compulsion.
It is with this flawed mentality that I began ‘the raven’, the first artwork I’d attempted in about 5 years. I’d never been an artist. I’d done a couple of short leisure courses in art because I liked the idea of becoming an artist and the gratification, the ‘buzz’ you get when you create something you’re proud of. Even then, of the very few pieces I’ve managed to finish that might fall into this category, the accomplishment felt hollow.
I’m all too aware that my artwork is reproductive rather than original, that occasionally it can be technically proficient but without soul, meaning or heart. Someone may look at my art and say, ‘Wow, she can draw’ but they can’t read anything in my style as it is all borrowed. I suppose most artists ‘borrow’ from life and attempt to communicate what they see onto canvas but my efforts are often too literal and not additive; I see and try to translate like a scanner with a photograph and like a scanner the result is a facsimile and any emotion that is conveyed by it is a hangover from the impression of the real thing.
And by the way, I believe that ANYONE can draw the way I draw IF you’re willing to be a perfectionist and spend hours over each brush stroke or pencil line (in case you haven’t guessed, I’m not saying that this is a good thing and personally, I’m striving to be freer and more expressive in my art!).
It’s like learning cursive in school (they probably don’t even do that now-a-days). Anyone, if they have patience and devote the time to painstakingly copying the curves and points of the example letters of the alphabet unto the line below, can write in joined up and I apply the same technique to my art. It is just sometimes harder to bend the medium to reproduce the intricates and many canvases and colours of nature.
Having said ALL THAT, I have found that as an ‘artist’ I have still had to make choices which have influenced a finished piece in a way that makes it unique and MINE but these have been happy accidents, forced rather than free. For example, with the raven, I really wanted to convey the oily smoothness of the feathers and that’s why I choose chalk pastel wedges and pencils as I’d experimented with them once or twice before and found that they lie on the surface of the page, if thick enough, in a way that could bleed into solid colour even if many strokes or different shades were applied. Working with pastels is, for me, like mixing your paints on the page rather than a palette. You can achieve a smoothness, like painting without brushes, as if you’d simply drizzled some liquid onto the page and watched it slowly spread out and flatten but with pastels, of course, you can control the edges of that flow.
Life-size doesn’t translate to the macro!
Another example, and it took me a shamefully long time to realise this, was the thinnest pencil edge will never be as thin as mother nature can command (and pastels aren’t that thin anyway even when using the pencils – you can sharpen them until they form the smallest point possible but it’s still chalk so as soon as you apply pressure it crumbles or quickly softens into a stub – it’s not a ‘hard’ medium).
Imagine a single tiny feather, even that feather is made up of dozens of miniscule little quills protruding from the central vein and I finally cottoned on to the fact that, although my raven portrait was life-size, there was no way I could squeeze as much detail into the drawing as was on the actual bird! It was ‘real’ but needfully pixelated! I just couldn’t squeeze that much information into each square millimetre! But I tried! As I said, this took me a ridiculously long time to appreciate and so, yes, I tried and to me that’s a notable mistake in this piece as I became so focused on being accurate to the original photograph and fitting in every feather that I ran out of space and had to smush things together. This resulted in the feathers sporting strange angles as I was copying the ‘correct’ angles of some but then having to leave others out, so the beautiful feathery flow in nature became more jarring on the page.
What I should have done was to be loyal to the general shape and composition of how the feathers unlocked and lay, tried to convey ‘feathers’ rather than ‘those feathers’ but I had no practice in this because I’m a perfectionist and we don’t practice!
The piece isn’t even finished as I sit here writing this. I’ve spent around 20 hours on it so far. The bird is pretty much done, minus a claw or two, and the first book is mostly rendered – that was a good decision as working with pastels is dusty and messy and I realised the hours I’d spend getting the detail into the tiny stick legs would be ruined when I tried to apply larger blocks of colour around them and against their footery1 edges (Ha! Pun unintended!) so I laid down the broad strokes of the first book first and came back to the claws!
But I thought I’d set down some thoughts so others, or just myself, could learn from my successes and failures while I was in the mood as my writing is cursed with that same perfectionist gene that turns art into chore and creation into replication! Perfectionism, due to its pressure and effort often turns into procrastination so I’m writing while the inspiration stirs me!
1. Proper pastel paper is dimpled. The friction this creates is what allows the page to pick up and cling to the chalk (I would guess) so it’s necessary but also produces an effect. To counter this at first I was applying several layers, brushing off the unsticking excess each time, with the theory that each layer was sticking to the one below it so eventually the paper bumps would be filled in and smoothed out. However, I found you can also smooth the coverage by really smudging the chalk into the page but that this is hard to do for small areas. Furthermore, you might also want to keep the effect – the hard-back books I have at home have a similar uneven texture, so a light or lesser application of the chalks allowed this bevelling to remain.
Mostly I didn’t like it and tried to get rid of it. It was too uniform, like tiny mesh netting, and places where I’d pressed harder or had to mix more colours together on the page to get the desired hue, lost this bevelling anyway so there was inconsistency – I thought it better to let it show through or not show through, not both. I did leave a little on the head as the feathers on the head were even smaller, impossible to separate, so the grooves left speckling that was similar, in part, to the small variations in the feathers.
2.
Work from top to bottom or
side to side as it’s a feature of the medium that chalk smudges, it’s rather
the whole point, and I needed to rest my palm on the page to control my strokes,
especially when working in such detail, so I realised pretty quickly I’d be
smudging what I’d spent hours perfecting.
I tried covering bits I’d drawn with kitchen roll or plain paper and
resting my hand on that but even then I thought that a little of the chalk was
removed in the process, so direction of work is something to be mindful of.
3. I’ve been a bit worried about the health effect of inhaling chalk dust. Falling down that particular Google rabbit hole is a terrifying and frustrating experience; one site threatens all sorts of potential harm whereas others cite studies (which I listened to more) that found that the exposure would have to be far greater to do permanent damage although precautions, where possible, were advised. I find my mouth gets very dry when I’m working with chalk which shows it’s in the atmosphere and my breathing does become more laboured after a few hours but my chronic back pain usually means I have to stop long before then anyway. The main bit of advice seems to be, DON’T BLOW the excess chalk off the page – tap it (easier if you’re working vertically).
I really struggled with not blowing as it’s instinctive and more effective, so I started using a feather to brush some excess off but even a feather leaves light smudges. I do think in my case not as much dust was being generated as I primarily used pastel pencils, they’re not as dusty as the wedges and not as much chalk is being transferred with each stroke.
4.
My smudger (I don’t know what the official name
is) is an invaluable tool (Post EDIT – it’s called a
tortillon)! I have a set of detailers which are like brushes made of
silicone allowing you to smudge or remove thin lines of pastel using their
edges or points – more useful if you’re not already working with pencils – but I
also have these things that look like paper pencils, they’re made of densely
packed paper shaped into a point and I mainly use them to mix/smudge small
areas of pastel when my finger would be too big. They do tend to remove a little as well but
I’ve found with pastels, as I kind of mentioned before, the work is done on the
page, you lay down some block colour or some lines but then it’s your
detailers, smudgers and pencils that manipulate the chalk.
5.
I’ve found pastels to be quite forgiving. I’m always too heavy handed (you can really
see this if you hold the raven up to the light. Some lines are literally scored
into the page. Although in my defence, it was rather difficult to differentiate
between shades of black, so in the places I’d pressed hardest I’d run
out of ‘blackness’ and was attempting more density for more definition!) but in
most cases if you make a mistake you can blot out a layer of pastel (I
just use blu-tack for this) and even if you have too many layers the top
layers don’t have to mix with those below so, to a certain extent, you can
correct it, like writing on top of Tip-ex! (Really showing my age!)
So, as to how I actually go about ‘art’:
I started the raven by drawing an inched grid onto a piece of acetate and onto my paper. I used this as a guide for sketching the outline of the raven from my photograph onto my work page. Pro Tip – don’t lean too hard – you’re going to want to rub the grid out later! By the way, this raven is from a photograph taken at the Tower of London – you know the whole London, raven, myth thing? – if ravens leave the Tower, the Crown and Britain will fall!
An aside – don’t attempt art when you’re really tried as you’ll overwork it and just get frustrated or do something stupid like copy the gold tag on the raven’s leg in the photograph into your artwork when your raven is supposed to be a “Ghastly, grim and ancient raven” representing grief, loss and Poe-esque Gothicism! Oops! Still there’s a lot of symbolism in a gold band so I improvised! To be honest I was just so relieved to be using a colour other than black that I got carried away! *Facepalm*
Ok, then I worked from
top to bottom. As I’ve said, I lay down
a base colour first, sometimes several base colours that I smudge together to
form a new shade. I’ll use my wedges for
this if the space is big enough. I’ll
add a few layers and smooth out the paper’s dimples and then add light or shade
– you’re probably not supposed to but I do tend to just mix varied amounts of
black or white to form these gradients – and then use pencils or tools such as
my shapers or smudger (hang on until I Google what you call these… they’re
tortillons! No wonder I couldn’t remember the name!) my tortillon to add
detail! For some reason I’ve found you can fashion a sharper point on the white
pencils and I bought a set of woodless charcoal pencils by Boldmere for darker
edges.
I’ve found that the drawing will evolve on its own and you’ll develop your own technique as you go along – of course normal sensible people will experiment and PRACTICE in a freer less time consuming way than the painstaking perfectionist and so will learn so much more than I have in this first attempt. Like any medium, subtly changing pressure, using a softer edge, changing your mark-making or colour mixing etc will all have slightly different effects that may be useful at different times, for example, the focus in the beak was sublimating a smooth, almost shiny finish, whereas stippling worked on his crest and more definite lines and flicks for a few escaping feather quills.
I’ve got to the satisfying stage of erasing the pencil grid. Struggling with ‘rubber marks’ as there’s a lot more residual dust clinging to parts of the page you haven’t officially touched than you realise. I think I’ll go with encouraging a light smudged dusting rather than trying to erase it all as that’s leaving harsh edges especially close to the raven where you can’t rub out that precisely. I think if I wanted a background for the raven I should’ve laid down some buffering between the background and the edges of the raven first as again it will be hard not to smudge the work I’ve already done but I wanted both! I intend to take a photo of the finished raven without a background and then add a background – the words of Poe. Something I don’t know, and could be helpful here, is whether you can draw on top of fixative.
Again, because pastels smudge so easily I think I’m going to have to ‘fix’ the chalk in place. I can’t advise on this as I haven’t done it yet but I can tell you that I’m dreading it as everything I’ve read suggests that it changes your work – usually it darkens the pastels and even causes a little bleeding/smudging itself. Again, this would be a good time to be a practicer rather than a perfectionist as I think applying the fixative with minimal damage is a skill in itself and also depends on the brand. I went for Winsor and Newton based on reviews but can’t comment on it yet (might edit this after I’ve used it). I’ll also have a few points on photographing your art after I’ve tried it but I’ve a bit of experience with photography so intend to:
a.) Photograph my art in natural light if possible (not in direct sunlight though)
b.) Use a tripod and timer
c.) Mount the art onto a vertical, flat surface so it’s not distorted by angle or uneven light
d.) Photograph against a light background (probably my off-white living room walls-rented flat everything’s off-white!) hoping this will help the colour balance.
e.) Take several bracketed photos
f.) I think it’s probably best to take the photos before using fixative and certainly before framing – glass, or that IKEA plastic stuff, is too reflective to achieve a clear image
g.) Take my time (I’m not good at this – I know you’d think I would be considering how long it takes me to do art but no, I rush certain things then mess them up) and make sure I have all the shots I need before altering or fixing the raven
Video Photo Slideshow of 'the stages' of the Raven
Ok, so if you’ve stuck with me thus far, you’re awesome – I know I’m a waffler! I hope that some of this insight will be interesting and/or helpful. What of course I haven’t yet said was that the inspiration for this piece was grounded in my love for Edgar Allan Poe. ‘Well, d’uh!’ you say, but yeah, that’s the thing – it’s amazing to me that the image of a raven has become so synonymous with ‘that poem’ that it carries its own built-in connotations for the viewer. I don’t have to create meaning in my art as the subject incorporates its own built-in lore.
I like that it breeds a unification but also a diversification; that it has a collective meaning but also provokes individual reaction and memory. i.e. You don’t need to make a raven ominous, you just need to draw a raven. That absence of additive, which I mentioned earlier, that I so hate in my work, works in this context because in this context I don’t want to direct anyone towards a particular understanding or experience. I don’t want to get in the way of what Poe’s ‘Raven’ is to you. Whether it’s a harbinger, a prankster, a fevered dream, a comfort, a phobia, a symbol or just a bird.
I can tell you a little of why I love ‘The Raven’ and it’s not because of its abstract yet resonant handling of universal and potent experiences and emotions, although obviously there is that, but I love language; I love how some words when put together in certain sequences suggest to you how they’re said; how pronouncing those words produces sounds and associations beyond their separate parts. It’s something I struggle with as a would-be actor because sometimes the syntax is just so satisfying to say in a particular cadence or rhythm that I indulge the affect rather than the naturalism. Although sometimes I would argue that it’s actually quite naturalistic to do so!
I’m
hoping to do an audio reading of ‘The Raven’ so you’ll see hear what I
mean. I can already guess, and apologise,
that it will be cringingly dramatic but it’s just for me for fun so, in this
anyway, I will be free with my (performance) art!
Thanks so much for reading. Comments/questions are welcome.
This Raven will eventually be available for purchase. At the moment I’m planning on testing the waters on sites like Redbubble where you can get the image on all sorts of gifts and clothing and I’m also pricing up Giclee printing to see if I can afford it (probably not!). I’ll add links as they become available.
This will hopefully be the first of a set of artwork but this WILL take me a long time!
Also, there will be spin-offs from this including my audio recording and possibly a dramatic reading or even a post-lockdown performance – I’ve had this collage of related ideas in mind for literally YEARS so this drawing is just the first step, hopefully! Watch this space!
Thanks again
Signed,
EDIT: As mentioned at the top of the page, this artwork is now available on a wide variety of products from topical face masks to shower curtains and everything in between. I have 3 slightly different designs on site (not only a perfectionist but incredible indecisive) and am ridiculously proud to finally have ONE whole piece of art completed, hopefully just the first step in a longer journey.
The store is hosted via Redbubble, not ideal for struggling artists but a good place to start and I do receive a small commission from sales. I’m still getting over the novelty factor of seeing my design on socks, water bottles, notebooks, mini-skirts, throw blankets (Oh I love the throw blanket – snuggle up under a comforting raven while reading your favourite horror author!) etc
The art took 25hours to complete, the photography, editing, tech wars and Redbubble branding and finagling, probably about double that time!
So you can head over now to: ESIK Creates on Redbubble
Site Tip: When you land on my shop page you’ll only see the 3 designs in the list on one product but each design is on 60 + different products – you’ll see a small link underneath each design which says ‘Shop all products’ – click on this to see the FULL RANGE. Hope you enjoy the browse and so many thanks for checking out my small, local business. X
1 Footnote on 'Footery' - it's an Ulster Scots word meaning 'complicated or awkward to do or use'.
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