On drawing

I draw much better in pen than in pencil. Always have. I think the option of erasure puts too much pressure on me; since I tend to perfectionism, the option of erasure means that surely the drawing can eventually be honed to perfection! This never happens. My pencil drawings, at least to me, often look vaguely painful, and when I look upon them thoughts of dead horses prance through my head.

On the other hand, the pen presupposes a lack of perfection. With that supposition, I seem to be able to proceed with more ease, evidently because a.) Why aim for the impossible? and b.) A drawing finished to reasonable satisfaction with the handicap of unerasability is more of a triumph. Case in point, I’m particularly pleased with the drawing in the icon–which was produced yesterday in lieu of adequate Stat notes–and I could never have done it in pencil because I’d have freaked out about it.

The fact that I’ve been starting to shade my pen drawings lately instead of just leaving them as line drawings also causes me to reflect that I can really just do pen drawings as a complete art form. I’ve usually tended to stick to line drawings because the pencil-followed-by-inking was not something I could get behind--and don’t get me started on inking pens, I prefer the variability in line boldness that a run-of-the-mill ballpoint can provide--, and therefore never believed I could produce finished work. I may have been quite mistaken and underestimating myself.