🎨 BOGOMIL'S DUCK HUNTING MASK

BOGOMIL'S DUCK HUNTING MASK

The Drawing, Details and Drawing Methods

graphite on mat board, 2012
31 cm x 41 cm - 12.2 inches x 16.1 inches

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DETAILS

My Studio(s) in Vienna
This one was done the year after I permanently moved to Vienna from Canada in 2011. At that time I still had a studio in the Palais Palffy in Vienna (and one of my studio neighbors was Prof. Ernst Fuchs) - but a couple of years later, I had moved to the Kunstquartier Wien in Meidling: a large place, 4 floors with about 80 artists working in different disciplines.

There is Method in my Madness!
This particular drawing, like many others, was done on mat board. I am quite brutal when I draw, and light papers just don't stand up. Also, mat board has a great surface for drawing, it takes graphite very well and the rendering is rich from the soft black darkness of B9 to the hard silvery line of H5 pencils. A lot of the areas are darkened with a soft graphite stick and scumbled. I then work from dark to light using various different erasers: kneaded erasers to pick up textures, pencil erasers to pull out lines, electric erasers (they work similar to a Dremel tool) and different hardnesses of eraser tips - hard to get these days, the ones I use are typewriter erasers. Other tricks I use is to engrave fine lines with a stylus - I use a scribe and also a inkless ballpoint tip, and also very hard pencils. If you check the chainmail for example, I used a printers burin to emboss a thin neck chain before darkening the area. This you would not be able to do well on just regular drawing paper, though I did have some success with this method drawing on 300g etching paper. To lighten some areas again I use the kneaded eraser. You can drag it over the surface, or you can gently dip off certain areas. You just need to knead the eraser after every pass. It can hold quite a bit of graphite before becoming useless.
While I use various stumps, for some soft blending it is better to use a stiff brush. Not used in this drawing, but you can also make a template out of paper, rub it with graphite and then drag the graphite onto your surface with the brush. This is somewhat similar to using a template for air brushing.

I hope this was somewhat instructive - it takes a lot of practice and experimentation. I cannot just follow a formula, I always have to try out something new, otherwise I get bored, and boredom kills creativity. In one of my future posts, I will discuss working with charcoal. Every medium is different and you would use different approaches with charcoal than with graphite; similar in some ways, but also very different. Some of the techniques I use with pencils do not work with charcoal, and vice versa.

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Check it out on my website, you find links for prints and related merchandise:
https://www.artofthemystic.com/bogomils-duckhunting-mask.html

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