Thinking about Drawing

I’m spending a lot more time recently drawing a book, and I’ve been doing some warmup drawings to get me moving in the morning. What I’m trying to do is limber my mind up a bit before I get to the ultra-high-stakes task of making drawings that might look good in a book one day.

I decided to record a video of me drawing a tiger¹. First, here’s the finished tiger;

The whole video is 11 minutes long, but most of that was me fussing about looking for the right ink, or finding and plugging in a hairdryer to dry the ink more quickly. I’ll get into technical stuff later², although I will point out the delightful and elegant hand-crafted pen that I’m drawing with and encourage you to buy one for yourself.

Here’s the first edit I did, where I took out all the faffing about and just showed the ‘good stuff’; the pen on paper moments. I also sped it up to double speed³.

Added up, the whole ‘pen on paper’ duration, the drawing took about 2 minutes. To me, this looks like a 2 minute drawing. If I spent any longer on it, I think it would look worse. This is about as simple as I think I can make this drawing. For a quick warmup I was pretty happy with it.

This got me thinking about what actually goes into making a drawing like this, so I edited a second version of the same video, this time showing the inverse; all the time I spent hesitating, humming and ahhing about where each line should go. I find this a lot more interesting than the first video. Focussing on the lines I actually made is kind of redundant - the lines are there as proof of what I did, so showing how they got made I don’t find particularly interesting. The moments before the lines got made though, I found those really revealing.

Editing this way showed that I spent a third of my drawing time hovering over the page, making little exploratory motions with the pen or brush, deciding where a line should start and end. I don’t tend to be aware of this while I’m actually drawing, I think a lot of it is fairly normal to me at this point. I sketched out the rough shape of the tiger beforehand, and even tried a couple of different colours to see what might look good, so I had a rough idea of what I was aiming for. I even looked at some pictures of tigers to try to remember what shape their head was (triangle with rectangle, boomerang nose, ears x2) and where the stripes were.

You can see my trying out some alternative front leg positions. I enjoy this kind of problem-solving drawing. I didn’t use this sketch on the lightbox or do any other underdrawing or anything like that, just as quick practice and to figure out the rough shape of the drawing.

I’ve seen people in the comments⁴ get all bent out of shape about whether using a lightbox or doing preparatory drawings constitutes ‘cheating’ somehow, like getting it right first try is the only mark of the true artist. This is clearly nonsense. The aim is to get the picture right eventually, not immediately.

So anyway, I then proceeded to get it right on my first second try⁵.

These videos started to do ‘some numbers’⁶ on the socials so I decided to take a look at the state of the stats. My Gawd don’t look at the stats. The first video has about 8k views a few days in with average watch time of 17 seconds. The second (the hesitations video) was watched 4.5k times in the same period for an average of 12 seconds. This means that most people didn’t even hang about long enough to see my dot that tiger’s eyes in and give him a soul.
These are small numbers in the grand scheme of things and I generally don’t care about that kind of stuff. I’ve had stuff go viral before and while I like the uptick in sales, it generally equates to a relatively stressful experience. It has helped me solidify the feelings I’ve been having about social media in general though, which is ‘well this whole thing still sucks’. Its becoming harder and harder to break through the noise, it really feels like we used to have our own little plots of land on the internet and could invite people in to visit and would visit other people’s places, but now we all go to the same mega-stadiums and hope that the crowd cam focusses in on us out for a moment. Bring back little plots of land, he says, firing off a thousand word email right into substack’s own problematic⁷ stadium.

So here’s the technical stuff that I used:
I did the drawing with a Blade Pen, which I designed and made myself. You can buy one!⁸
I used Rohrer & Klingner ‘lotte’ sketch ink. I’ve written about it before, it’s basically perfect and I love it.
I drew on Khadi paper. It’s a really toothy, textural paper that can be a little unpredictable to work on, which I really enjoy.
I dried my inks and colours using a hairdryer⁹.
For colour, I used Brusho Colourcraft powdered ink. This stuff is VERY vibrant, very colourful and if you get it on your skin, you can’t wash it off, you have to wait for that skin to die and fall off.
I recorded the video with a little IPEVO V4K camera on a stick. It’s really handy, real small, has a nice solid stand and ‘just works’. I love it.
I recorded into OBS on my laptop and edited in adobe¹⁰ premiere.
I wrote the music myself and recorded it into GarageBand on the Mac.

So that’s the story of the drawing of a tiger. Well, it isn’t really, it’s the story of the stuff that happens behind the drawing, which turns out is actually a lot more interesting to me than a quick drawing of a tiger.

Until next time!¹¹

1. because tigers are cool.

2. because I know all you art-perverts want to know what paper this is soooo baaaaad

3. because all the art-perverts on the socials need their fix QUICK

4. ughhh I know I know.

5. SLAM DUNK! The Crowd Goes WILD!

6. These days ‘doing numbers’ means that on instagram and Bluesky a few people liked or commented.

7. yes I know and yes I will probably do something about it, but no I haven’t mustered up the mental capacity to actually do anything about it.

8. Please buy one! We are very much in the low tide of running a pen business at the moment.

9. I know that this is generally frowned upon, and a hairdryer can cause ink to run across the page in unexpected and unpleasant ways, but I’ve been doing this a long time and if you think I don’t know how to make that hairdryer sing then you are crazy. High heat, low flow, tactical angles and knowing when to hit it and when to quit it.

10. Maybe I’ve said this before, but the sooner I can escape Adobe’s gravitational pull the happier I will be.

11. Which will be in a matter of days not months, I promise.