Graphite,
or pencil work, or just plain drawing, has something challenging and attractive to me, and so I return to it now and then. Learning to shade and translate the real, three-dimensional colorful world into a flattened, two dimensional grey representation in a photo-realistic manner, for some reason, works for me. Some others can just see a fully developed image in their mind and then execute that into a painting that looks like a photograph and that amazes me. I do draw from photographs, but I also add or subtract some parts of some of the images, as you can see in "Quest." Some, like the "Dancing Rose," were just quick sketches that got refined and were more like studies in curves and shading than a representation of anything real.
What you'll see on the top of this page are some of the drawings and prints I did while I was enrolled at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA in the early 1990's, so they aren't recent, A few years went by after I got out of Cabrillo and most of the drawing I did for a long time was house plans, sketches that were more architectural, or for bronze work and not really worth looking at, Time - too little of it, and we only find out the real value of it when there is so little of it left. The pictures on the lower part of this page are more recent, meaning from about 2015 to 2020. For the most part I like how they came out so I am sharing them here.
The drawings are all graphite, other than "Young Love," which is colored pencil. The prints are all Intaglio prints, which are created by scribing, engraving, or acid etching a metal plate, usually zinc, but preferably copper, scraping ink into the incised areas, and cleaning it off the raised areas, and then laying a sheet of paper on it and running it through a press so the ink transfers to the paper, producing a print. The paper is embossed in the process, being slightly raised in the places where the press forced it down into the recessed areas - where the ink was. In the beginning, though, they were all just graphite drawings and so they are here as well.
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