for a while lately, whenever i look at my art supplies (of which i have many, since i inherited all my mother's old oils, watercolors, and pastels...), i get drawn toward my japanese calligraphy brushes and inks. so i set it all up. the thing about japanese calligraphy is you don't usually redo a stroke. so it's all about practice, practice, practice and then you decide to finally do one on "real" paper and hope it goes well. for last night's session, i just used scrap paper. i started with characters. then i moved onto figures. here are my attempts at making whippets:
the bottom one is my favorite. i think i tried to do about a dozen whippets and these were the best ones.
this was a short study of color gradients using water mixed with ink. it was HARD. it looks so easy when the masters do it...
the main exercise all master calligraphers do first is to write "ichi"--"one." this is one of the "ones" i did last night. it was out of several. this is my favorite.then i saw i had lots of ink. and when you make the ink, you wanna use it, because it's actually pretty labor intensive to rub that ink stick in the ink stone. so i thought, hey, i've never done self portraits in ink! so here are some i did:
self portrait 1: pretty simple.
self portrait 2.
self portrait 3: as a dyke, i have many many many many drawings of my own hand. this is the first time i've tried it with a brush. it looks pudgy, but the pudginess is pretty idiomatic.
self portrait 4: a surprisingly accurate version of my body. the head, well. sometimes i get heavy-handed. yes. this is really close to what my body actually looks like. (i'm a hairy boy.)
self-portrait 5: this is one of those japanese school children drills where i drew my face using hiragana characters. it's called "henohenomoheji." they say that one always tends to draw "henohenomoheji" to look like oneself. how'd i do?(the scrap paper i used was actually old scripts from that play i was in. [insert silly emoticon here])
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