"Amethyst Sundown", Pen and Ink
8" X 10" Drawing Paper

This is a progression of photographs taken at intervals of about 2 hours as this drawing of a purple sunset develops. Carl says this is a fun project of "dot to dots". Carl did a quick pencil sketch from a reference photo of a sunset that caught his attention. Then he set out with 24 Pentel(tm) Color Pens to see what he could create. Carl started his art career doing pen and ink drawings and he's always enjoyed working with ink. Carl's ink work often centers around a technique called stippling - the process of creating an image out of lots and lots of little dots. Recently when Carl purchased the set of color pens he wondered how a dot matrix system like is found on an LCD computer screen might work on paper. Put another way - could you blend a series of dots of say red and yellow and tease the eye into thinking it was seeing orange.

Before starting this project, Carl created a pallet using each of the 24 pens starting with a solid blotch of ink followed by increasingly spaced dots to fade out the color. In this process Carl discovered that the ink pens create entirely different colors on paper than what their body color depicts. While playing with color mixes to see what the results looked like Carl was surprised to learn that the pen colors were all quite dark - too dark to create the color values needed in an art project drawing. So Carl's bent to use a stippling technique was not only a preference, but a necessity. Another thing Carl found as he worked with the pens is that the stippled color values were quite different from the solid ink color values. All of this is to say that without a pallet of the pen colors on paper... stippled out... Carl's drawing would have failed right out of the gate.

As it is, this short project (Carl's going fishing in a couple of weeks so he's too distracted to begin a large scale painting project) will be a fun experimental endeavor from which Carl hopes to learn a lot.

This project was colored solely with
a 24 pen set of Pentel(tm) Color Pens

This project is an original drawing Carl made based on a reference image of a purple sunset.

Copyright(c) , 2004 Carl E. Gluck. All rights reserved.