Landscape Sketching in Pen and Ink Read online

  Remember first that a line drawing is printed from a plate that is very much like type. The lines stand up on the plate, which is mounted on wood to the height of the type and in a book all is printed together. In newspaper work, however, and in many books, rotary printing is necessary for the sake of speed. This means that moulds are taken from the type and the blocks and the whole thing is printed from a cylinder. When your delicate line sketch is printed by rotary machinery you must picture it being run off a thing like a steam roller at thousands per hour, on a five mile long ribbon of paper. Little wonder, therefore, that isolated dots in the sky will come out like flying frogs, that thin lines will become thick, black lines appear as grey, and careful cross-hatched shading as solid black.

  Let us take a few examples and study them. Both the drawings on page 42 and below were made for reproduction in a newspaper before they were engraved for books. They are no worse for that— as a matter of fact much better, for newspaper work is a great teacher of simplicity and directness of method. Had the birds in the Barcombe drawing been placed in the middle of the sky instead of in their "protected" position between the church steeple and the foliage on the right they would have appeared as a collision between two aeroplanes. In the Salehurst drawing, likewise, any lines or dots in the sky would have been disastrous.

  From "A Detective in Sussex" (Lane)

  SALEHURST, SUSSEX

  (Cavendish)

  THE MILL OF MOUNTNESSING

  In newspaper work or in any rapidly printed page or in work necessarily done on "poor" paper, every feature of a drawing will be altered, except one, and that is the paper. The thin line may become a thick one, as we have seen; black lines may become grey and tones fill up solid; but the white spaces of untouched paper in the drawing will remain the same. Thus a successful sketch is one that is composed of a number of white spaces carefully thought out and arranged.

  In this sketch of the Mill at Mountnessing such success as it retains in reproduction is on account of white paper. The sun is supposed to be low in the sky at a point about half an inch to the left of the St. Andrew's Cross formed by the sails of the windmill. The lines of the design lead away from this space and thus make a star-like pattern on the paper. I do not mean by this that divergent lines are drawn recklessly to make this star pattern. All these lines represent actual things seen, but those shapes that fit into the scheme are dwelt on, and, where they are unimportant, those that contradict it omitted.

  If you will compare this drawing of the mill with the sketch of Rochester Castle on the page opposite you will notice a great difference in treatment. Whereas the mill is a structure that must have a fairly "clean" outline against the sky because it is a piece of mechanism that is working, the ruined keep of Rochester is in a different case. The mill will look a sorry object if its outline is blurred or thickened, but the blunt outline of the castle will be rather improved than otherwise by a little blurring and thickening. Thus the mill is "supported" by lines that take some of the weight of the cylinder as the "attack" of the cylinder is felt, but the castle keep can look after itself and is indeed made more eloquent of ruggedness by its printing defects.

  I am trying to show the road to success in pen and ink, and so I must not shirk pointing out the weak spots as well as the strong points of some of the examples given. This sketch of Rochester Castle was made for a newspaper during the Rochester Pageant in the summer of 1931. It was wanted in a great hurry and a direct drawing had to be done for the engraver within a few hours. It is tolerably successful as far as the castle itself is concerned but there is nothing like sufficient contrast between the work in the buildings at the waterside. These should have been treated with a less broken technique. They are too much like the castle in character. This sketch would have been a more vigorous one had it been drawn in the manner of the old Wealden house in the next picture, Burston in the Weald of Kent.

  This wonderful old place is a Tudor Mansion hidden in a fold in the parish of Hunton. I made this sketch with a view to it being useful to the compilers of The New Domesday Book of Kent. It was first to be published in a newspaper and later as a print, and it presented many difficulties. One general sketch had to suffice to show the rambling place near enough to indicate the half timbering of the back, and yet at such a distance that its position as a farmhouse with its many oast-houses was revealed. Then, to be true to the facts of this Domesday manor, we must show its position on the hillside overlooking the trench of the Weald, a vast prospect bounded by the distant hills that overlook the sea.

  (Cavendish)

  ROCHESTER CASTLE

  How is all this to be shown in one small drawing? It is a problem but not an insoluble one. Remember that more battles have been lost by want of good generalship than by want of bravery. What we must do is to manoeuvre for position.

  Unless the printing of a subject like this is very good there will be difficulty in showing a delicate and complicated distance in contrast to a vigorous foreground. The lines of the distant work will tend to coarseness by inking and pressure if they are in an isolated position on the paper. However, if these distant lines are intersected by strong foreground objects, such as tree trunks cutting across them, their delicacy will be saved. The heavy lines of the tree work will take the weight of the cylinder and thus the fine lines will not be over-inked or over-impressed.

  I walked miles up and down hill and viewed Burston from every conceivable angle before I settled down to the view I have depicted. By getting the oast-houses so that they overtopped the horizon on the left and by using an apple tree to advantage on the right, I protected the delicate distance and thus maintained some of the effect of recession in the vast campagne that Kipling would call "the blue goodness of the Weald." You may think, possibly, that I have over-laboured the point about indifferent printings, and that bitter experience has developed in me what psychologists call a complex. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have often worked for publishers who see to it that the printing they do is quite perfect. However, I recognize that the experience I have obtained in negotiating the difficulties of bad printing have stood me in good stead even when the reproduction is excellent. It is difficult to say why exactly; I suppose it is that dodging difficulties and pitfalls teaches the artist never to draw without thinking. Drawing without thinking has been the downfall of many a clever penman who at last develops a facile technique of which the public soon tires.

  I remember once having a pupil who developed this fatal facility. He found a ready and effective way of expressing tiled roofs and old brick walls. Everything that had any likeness to masonry or venerable architecture came off quite well, but he began to take the easy road of using this technique for trees and grass and clouds, and worse still, for waves of the sea. Anything more painful than the effect of a strong south-westerly wind churning the channel into ridges of bricks and mortar it would be difficult to imagine, and this was just the effect of his sea pieces.

  (Cavendish)

  BURSTON, IN THE WEALD OF KENT

  I cured him by making him think. I had to wean him from this brick and tile technique by strategy. I gave him two pencils, one for drawing all objects made by man—gates, houses, fences, boats, landing stages, and metalled roads; the other for depicting trees, cliffs, hills and dales, and winding shores. The result was almost magical. When he changed from drawing the roof of a house to drawing the trees behind it, he had to change the instrument, and this change was enough to make him think of the changed character of what he was delineating. The joke, as you will have guessed, was that the pencils were really almost exactly the same. I got the idea from a doctor who could not stop a man from bolting his meals and thus developing dyspeptic tendencies. He made up a solution of pure water coloured with a few drops of cochineal, and told his patient to take one teaspoonful at intervals of two minutes during his meals.

  (Cavendish)

  THE ROCHESTER RIVER

  We have now dealt thoroughly with the problems
and difficulties caused by indifferent and rapid printing. Another difficulty presents itself, however, and this is one often made by the editor's decree. Editors of papers seldom know anything about drawings. They literally do not know, as a rule, that drawings are injured by greater reduction in size than the artist anticipated. As long as the block will fit in, everything, they think, is highly satisfactory. To some extent a skilful artist can "hedge" by using such an open type of line work in cross-hatched shadows and dark tones that very considerable reduction will not matter.

  From "Adventures Among Churches" (Faith Press)

  COPMAN THORPE, YORKSHIRE

  For instance, the sketch of the Rochester River was, in the original, about thirteen inches wide. It was to be reduced to seven inches and came out very well. As shown here, however, it is still further reduced to four inches and a quarter, and is quite bright and clear. It could be reduced to two inches wide or even less and be a coherent picture. In like manner, the sketch of Copman Thorpe in the snow could be reduced down to the size of a postage stamp and still show the main points of the picture. Probably the sky would fill up to a solid black. Even in that event the road, the church, the village cross, and the snow-covered trees would be discernible. The original sketch of this subject, like that of Rochester, is thirteen inches in width.

  Judging from the effects we see in book illustrations and other drawings, many artists, and some of these by no means beginners, have great difficulty in representing reflections in water. A most depressing and forlorn aspect is given to a riverside sketch, or a lake scene, if there is an appearance of sodden chopped straw floating about. Many a sketch by Thames side can I recall that is almost masterly in its treatment of architecture and overhanging trees, but this wretched chopped straw will flop about and spoil everything.

  The remedy for this unfortunate state of things is not far to seek. It is necessary for us to get clear in our minds exactly what constitutes a reflection of an object in the water. It is said of Turner that he once spent a whole day throwing stones in a pond in order to study the nature of reflections.

  A reflection is the exact image of a thing as seen from the level of the water. Only in absolutely calm water is this image exact. You have, no doubt, seen river photographs that might be printed either way up with little clue as to what is the reality and what the reflection.

  Various circumstances alter this image: a strong breeze rippling the water may break up its surface so that there is no reflection at all. The reflected image may be broken in places only or it may be entirely distorted in pattern, but always with some broken likeness to the thing reflected.

  No reflection will look right in a picture that does not recognize exactly the shape of the object above it. For instance, in the winter sketch on the Medway, the bridge is reflected in a very broken and exaggerated manner. Roughly speaking, only the vertical facts are reflected and those in rather an elongated way. The rails and footway of the bridge have disappeared and only the piers and sides of the brickwork, and the two figures on the bridge are accounted for at all. Observe, however, that it is exactly underneath these things that horizontal marks make up what can be seen of the image of the bridge. These in still water may be immensely extended, sometimes right down to the feet of the spectator standing on the bank, but all these marks will be exactly underneath the thing reflected. A T-square should be used if necessary to ensure accuracy.

  (Cavendish)

  A WINTER LANDSCAPE ON THE MEDWAY

  Now let us take the group of four trees on the left hand side of the picture and see what we are going to do about their reflections in the water. The fact that the water is moving all the time is not really so great a difficulty as it at first appears. All this movement is within certain very clearly defined zones.

  In order to get these reflections right, I took a tracing of the four trees, and then made an horizontal line in pencil at a point about an eighth of an inch above the line of the water's edge. This is to get the right plane of reflection. If we were to cut away the bank to the trees this would be the reflecting point. Then I turned it upside down and thus carefully outlined the trees in pencil in the water as if they made a perfectly clear and still reflection. Within the pencil boundaries of these reflected tree-trunks, a few broken dashes or wriggling lines, kept always strictly within the boundaries set by the outline, will give the effect of reflection in the slightly rippling and flowing water.

  The other reflection, that of the tree at the water's edge to the left of the bridge, was arrived at in the same way. Two zones of white marks, caused by the wind, break this at two points, but such little reflection of branches as still remains strictly follows the outline of the tree above.

  The most difficult effects in pen and ink, and those generally least successful in published work, are effects of light and dark tone over a large surface. They are also very laborious and it is a temptation to take mechanical short cuts by means of engravers' dotted or line-tones. These are generally unsatisfactory and look mechanical, except in the hands of exponents of line work, who are far beyond needing any tips in a technical work of this kind.

  The night sketch here of Peterborough Cathedral from the gardens of the Bishop's Palace was made for The Church Times, and the original drawing was about seventeen inches in diameter. It was reduced to twelve inches in width and came out well for newspaper printing. The block printed here was engraved not from the original drawing, but from a newspaper cutting, so that you can see that the line work is still as clear as in the original drawing, although reduced to six and a quarter inches in width. This is a big reduction, 17 to 6, far more than desirable, but it establishes the fact that a drawing built up on right lines retains some merit even when abused.

  ("Church Times")

  A NOCTURNE OF PETEBOROUGH CATHEDRAL

  The next drawing, a moonlight of Exeter Cathedral, is another seventeen-inch wide drawing which is here purposely over-reduced. In this case it is knocked down from seventeen to four and a quarter, a frightful abuse of editorial power, yet some eloquence has remained in it. True the sky, now filled up to black in places, clings round the Cathedral in an unpleasant manner, and there is little of the broad moonlight effect left. Yet, because the lights on the building were drawn in a very open manner, there is still some glamour and glitter of silvery light surviving to tell the tale.

  (Cavendish)

  EXETER CATHEDHAL

  (Cavendish)

  TRURO

  In a large drawing like the one of Peterborough, great care must be taken with the choice of pattern for a surface of tone. This sketch, being night, must be toned nearly all over. There are three component parts of the tone work. There is the sky; there are buildings and there is a surface of lawn. The tree is practically solid black, so that texture question does not occur here.

  I should suggest to the craftsman that he should think out the problem something on the lines I am about to indicate, but it is not at all necessary that he should use the same "patterns" as I have found expressive.

  Sky. The sky is of substance and quality, different from everything else in the picture. Some pattern, not too noticeable, should be devised to represent this in contrast to any other pattern in the sketch.

  Buildings. All buildings might well be represented with definite lines following shapes as in roof and in bay of Palace.

  Lawn. Some pattern to express surface: something different from buildings and sky.

  (Lane)

  A SKETCH FROM "THE BOOK OF THE CLYDE"

  The drawing of Truro, on page 57, is another example of work originally drawn for reproduction on a larger scale, but retaining some merit by means of careful planning of light and shade.

  The original sketch was, as in Peterborough, seventeen inches in width, to be reproduced twelve inches wide, and here further reduced to four and a quarter. In this twelve-inch print the shadowed side of the towers, nave and transept of the Cathedral are in open cross-hatched line, but they have fill
ed up to solid black. This possibility was anticipated and the very light and open work of the distance is sufficiently slight, even in this much over-reduced print, not to swamp the Cathedral in lines and heavy tone, and obliterate it. The shadow zones of trees have also become practically black, but this does not alter the general composition of the picture or its clearness.

  And now it is necessary to say something to the sketcher on the difficulties of sky effects and the problem of what to put in and what to leave out. The tendency for him is to put in the sky that he sees at the moment. This is more possible to the painter than to the sketcher in pen and ink. Often heavy clouds and passages of tone will spoil a line sketch. I hear the captious critic exclaim: "Why cannot an artist put in what he sees; why all this modification and alteration?"

  The answer is a very complex one, and I do not know, with all the experience I have had in pen sketching, that I can answer it with any degree of confidence or satisfaction.

  In the first place, there are no lines at all in most of the things we see in a landscape. There are no lines in the sky or upon the shadow-chequered downs or in the sun that goes down in a fume of gold. At the best, lines are often only a convention or an abstraction to show the shape of something or the tendencies of its many surfaces. This limitation is felt mostly in drawing sea and sky by the pen and ink artist who has nothing with which to represent waves and clouds but lines—of which in nature there are none. But take heart. Truth is many-sided. We cannot represent all things with the pen, but we can represent some. We cannot draw a "deceptive illusion" of a cloud, but we can say something of its shape, its buoyancy, its movement, and not a little of its glory.