Saturday, May 31, 2008

Broad Stroke Technique?

Has anyone ever heard of the broad-stroke technique for pencil drawing?

Apparently, it was advocated most famously, by Ernest Watson and Ted Kautzky. I've been trying to find some information online about it, but nothing has come up.

Here's Kautzky's book on watercolor. Look at page 127 to see what I am talking about - that was done with a pencil.

Does anyone know how you get marks like that from a pencil?

6 comments:

Gayle Mason said...

I have a book called 'Drawing with your Artist's Brain' which has a small section on broad stroke. Looking at the author's drawings I would say the lines are achieved by using a chisel point on your pencil. He talks about it being a direct, finish as you go method.

Grangry said...

You could try a carpenter's pencil. That has a very thick, square lead that is easily shaped into a wide chisel point. I think he has also used broad strokes with an eraser there.

Lilly said...

I used to do something similar a long time ago. I used the "Jumbo" pencils that they sometimes give preschoolers. It had a wider lead on it and was easier to chisel.

Kay suggested using a carpenter's pencil. That is a good idea too. The carpenter's pencil is a fairly soft lead since it is used to make dark marks on rough wood.

The other thing that I did with this kind of sketch was that I worked very small. A jumbo pencil working in a 3x5 area worked really well.

Rose Welty said...

Thanks everyone for the ideas!

I will try them. This approach intrigues me because it has a "painterly" aspect to it - something I would very much like to learn about.

I'm sure I'll be sharing the experiments...

Thanks again!

Jeanette Jobson said...

Ditto the above comments. You could probably achieve similar results with liquid graphite or watersoluable graphite pencils.

Johannes said...

I found this blog via google when I was looking for more information about this technique. This technique was popular in the fifties and sixties so there can't be found much information about it on the internet. There is however a dvd from Glen Vilppu which covers this technique. The quality is quite bad since it's a VHS rip, but it's really worth buying http://vilppustore.com/Landscape.htm