✏️ Pencil Skills ✏️ Part 4 ✏️
Four Unexpected Ways to Draw with a Pencil
Hello, DrawTogether artists who pass for regular people. So glad you (we!) are here.
It’s a fiery summer here in the states. A LOT is happening, and not a lot is easy. The name of the game is taking it slow. Remember when we feel rushed or in a panic, in almost every circumstance the best thing we can do is resist hurrying. Instead, take a breath, check in with our bodies, register our feelings, and create some space to move forward a little more slowly. That way our next steps will be more sure. Our pencil lines more confident and strong.
And remember: No such thing as an art emergency. Ever.
Related, it’s felt really good to slow down and focus on one medium with you all the past few weeks. The GUT usually goes where my interest takes me each week, and while that’s never boring, it can sometimes feel a little disjointed. This deep dive we took into pencils has been an opportunity to go deep and explore a single medium many of us take for granted. Hopefully you’ve learned tried something new, played around with it yourself, and discovered a new way to use that ever-present tool it your art box. If you haven’t yet, I guarantee you will this week.
Because this week, we are….
Experimenting with Graphite
In this final installment of “The Pencil Pusher” (I just came up with that), I’m going to show you a few new, unexpected, super fun and creative ways to use graphite. The practices may or may not involve pencils, per se. But you should be able to complete them all with a graphite pencil. We’re going to learn Erasure, Frottage, and the simple but totally impressive Single Stick Shade. Also, bonus: Graphite Carving! Let’s get into it.
Erasure
More than just a phenomenal 80s pop band and a book included in NYT’s 100 best books, erasure is a drawing technique that’s subtractive as opposed to additive. Meaning, instead of adding more and more material to create a darker tone and value, you remove material and to create lighter tones.
Just like different kinds of pencils make different styles of graphite marks, different erasers produce different eraser marks. Here, I tried a little experiment:
You can see how different eraser create different kinds of marks. The art gum and plastic seem to be the strongest at removing graphite from the paper, and the kneaded eraser (lower left) picks up the least amount of graphite and kind of smudges it around.
A way better example is below. This drawing done with charcoal, but the artist uses erasure much like we could with graphite.
See how the artist has gone back in and and created light areas and highlights with the eraser? What kind of eraser do you think he used?
Sometimes the best way to build something is by taking things away. Subtract to add. Create space.
One last example:
Correct. Nothing’s there. That’s the point.
This early drawing by Robert Rauschenberg is “Erased De Kooning.” It is just what it says it is. Rauschenberg took a drawing by De Kooning and erased the whole thing. Then the painter Jasper Johns (fun fact: JJ was also Rauschenberg’s lover) framed the drawing in gold and added a title plate in a formal, French style, giving it some funny, real gravitas. This is a great example of the expansive nature of art, and of conceptual art, and ways that we can push ideas, material, and form in our own work. A drawing doesn’t even have to be a drawing to be a drawing.
Or does it? What do you think?
Frottage
Get your minds out of the GUTters, GUTsters!! The word Frottage has two meanings. For our purposes, we are sticking with the artistic definition.
Frottage is a drawing technique in which you rub a material (like graphite) over an object placed underneath the paper, resulting in a texture or design on the paper’s surface. It’s like the art version of the century old practice of rubbing, as people often do with gravestones.
Here is my young friend Maya (DT kid and GUT member in training) and me using graphite and paper to make some frottage drawings in the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.
Maya and I spent a few hours “collecting” letters and numbers, words and designs. It was a wonderful way to get hands-on with a subject, and experience mark making in a new, immediate way. It was also a great way to experience a place, or site, in a new way. The practice really brought the cemetery to life. So to speak.
As in all art, what makes it art vs a documentation is the artist’s intention. Same with frottage and rubbings. Since Maya and I went to make art, I’m calling our work frottage.
Originally created by artist Max Ernst in the early 20th century, the art practice of Frottage was originally a surrealist or automatic drawing technique. Some more on Ernst’s work from the Tate:
Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested strange images to him. From 1925 he captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil. The results suggest mysterious forests peopled with bird-like creatures and Ernst published a collection of these drawings in 1926 titled Histoire Naturelle (natural history).
If you’re anything like me, this of gives you a million ideas? In addition to the traditional gravestone rubbings, we can use frottage to capture and create ANY texture. Essentially, frottage is a way to document a surface directly from the surface itself. Like the artwork below, created with kid artists Billie Jean and Delilah.
And if you really want to go wild, you can always follow these kid artist’s lead and experiment with frottaging a less static surface. Case in point: a dog named Blue.
And below is the result. Personally, I think Billie Jean and Delilah’s masterpiece rivals Rauschenberg’s “Erased De Kooning” in both content and concept.
Tell me you don’t want to run out into the world and start frottaging immediately! (Artistic definition, GUT peeps!!)