THE MAKING OF A PEN-DRAWING.

It is not to be supposed that because the pen is so handy an instrument, and inks and paper, of sorts, are everywhere, that the making of a pen-drawing is a simple affair of a few uneducated strokes. The less you know of the art, the easier it seems, and they do but show their ignorance who speak of its simplicity. You will want as much power of draughtsmanship, and more, for drawing in this medium than in many others; because the difference between good drawing and bad is more readily seen in line-work than in other methods, and since in these days the standard of the art has been raised so high. You will want not less study in the open air, or with the life-class for figure-work, than the painter gives or should give to his preliminary studies for his art. This drudgery you will have to go through, whether in the schools of the Science and Art Department (which does not recognize this, the livest art of our time), or in the studio and under the care of some artist who receives pupils in the fashion of the atélier system in France. But such studios are rare in England. It seems likely that the student of pen-drawing, who starts with learning draughtsmanship of any sort, must first go through much of the ordinary grind of the schools, and, when he has got some sort of proficiency, turn to and worry out the application of the pen to his already received teaching. No one will teach him pen-drawing as an individual art; of that there is no doubt. Perhaps the best course he could pursue would be to become acquainted with the books illustrated by the foremost men, and study them awhile to see in what manner they work with the pen, and with this knowledge set to work with models, in the same way as a painter would do. Or, if your work is of another branch beside the figure, go to the fields, the hedgerows, and all the glory of the country-side, and work first-hand. The sketch-book is a necessity, and should always be in the student’s pocket for the jotting down of notes and memoranda.

I do not think many pen-draughtsmen are careful enough to make a thorough pencil study as the basis of their pen-drawing, although that is the best way to proceed, and their drawings would be all the better for the practice. It is to this absence of the preliminary pencil-work, this shirking of an undoubted drudgery, that is due the quantity of uninspired, fumbling drawing with the pen that we see nowadays. The omission of a carefully made original pencil-sketch, over which to work in pen and ink, renders commonplace the work of many artists which, if only they were less impatient of toil, would become transfigured. What is so injurious to the man who has learnt his art is fatal to one who is by way of beginning its study. Make, then, a pencil-drawing in outline, using an HB pencil, as carefully as if that only were the end and object of your work. Work lightly with this hard pencil upon the paper or cardboard you have selected, indicating shadows rather than filling them in. It is necessary to make only faint pencil lines, for they will have to be rubbed out eventually, after the pen-drawing has been made over them. If the marks were deep and strong, a great deal of rubbing would have to be done to get them out, and that injures the surface of the paper and greys the black lines of the ink used. On the other hand, if the pencil-marks were not rubbed out, they would very likely photograph and reproduce in the process-block. To a pen-draughtsman of experience the reproduction of his pencil-marks can be made an additional beauty; but the student had much better be, at first, a purist, and make for clean pen-strokes alone on his finished drawing.

It must always be remembered, if you are working for reproduction (and consequent reduction of scale from the drawing to the process-block), that the pen-work you have seen printed in the books and papers and magazines was made on a much larger scale than you see it reproduced in their pages. Very frequently, as in the American magazines, the reduction is to about one quarter scale of the original drawing; but, working for process in England, the drawing should, generally speaking, be from two-thirds to one-half larger than the reproduction. These proportions will, as a rule, give excellent results.

Seeing that your drawing is to be so much larger than the process-block, it follows that the pen-work can, with advantage, be correspondingly vigorous. It would help you better than any description to a notion of what an original drawing should be like, if you could obtain a glance at the originals of any good pen-draughtsmen. But unfortunately, there are few exhibitions in which pen-work has any place.

When your pencil study is completed in an outline giving all details down to the minutest, you can set about the pen-drawing. Often, indeed, if carefully made, the pencil-sketch looks too good to be covered up with ink. If you wish to retain it, it can, if made upon thin paper, be traced upon cardboard with the aid of black carbon paper, or better still (since blue will not photograph) with blue transfer paper, which you can either purchase or make for yourself by taking thin smooth paper and rubbing powdered blue chalk upon one side of it, or scribbling closely upon it with blue pencil. There is another way of tracing the pencil-drawing: by pinning over it a sheet of thin correspondence paper (of the kind called Bank Post) and working upon that straight away.

But, after all, it would, for the sake of retaining something of the freshness of first impressions, be best to sacrifice your pencil study and work away on that.

Now the pen-drawing is begun, care should be taken to draw only clear and perfectly black lines, and not to run these together, but to keep the drawing what the process men call “open.”

If details are put in without regard for the fining down which reduction gives, it is only too likely that the result will show only dirty, meaningless patches where was a great deal of delicate pen-work. Of course, the exact knowledge of how to draw with the pen to get the best results by process cannot properly be taught, but must be learned by experience, after many miscalculations.

It will be found, too, that many things which it would be inadvisable for the beginner to do (especially if he cannot command his own choice of process-engraver) are perfectly legitimate to the practised artist who has studied process work. The student should not be at first encouraged to make experiments in diluted inks or retained pencil-marks, or any of those delightful practices by which one who is thoroughly conversant with photographic processes and pen-drawing varies the monotony of his medium. He should begin by making his drawings as simply as he can, so that they express his subject. And this simplicity, this quality of suggestion, is the true field of pen-work. The best work is reticent and sober, giving the greatest number of essential facts in the fewest strokes. If you can express a fact with sufficient intelligibility in half a dozen pen strokes, it is inartistic and inexpedient to worry it into any number of scratches. This is often done because the public likes to see that there has been plenty of manual labour put into the work it buys. It is greatly impressed with the knowledge that any particular drawing took days to complete, and it respects that drawing accordingly, and has nothing but contempt for a sketch which may have taken only an hour or so, although the first may be artless and overloaded with unnecessary detail, and the second instinct with actuality and suggestion. But if you are drawing a landscape with a pen, that is no reason for putting in an elaborate foreground of grass, carefully working up each square inch. Such a subject can be rendered by a master in a few strokes, and though, possibly, you may never equal the artistry of the master, you can follow his ideals. Another and allied point in pen-and-ink art is its adaptability to what is termed “selection.” You have, say, before you the view or object to be drawn. You do not need to make a drawing in which you shall niggle up every part of it, but you select (the trained eye readily does this) its salient feature and emphasize it and make it fall properly into the composition, leaving aught else either suggested or less thoroughly treated. Here is a pen-drawing made with a very special regard to a selection only of the essential. [The Gatehouse, Moynes Court], is a singular structure near the shore of the Severn estuary, two miles below Chepstow. The singularity of its design, rarely paralleled in England, would give the artist the motive for sketching, and its tapering lines and curious roofs are best preserved in a drawing that deals chiefly in outline, and has but little shading wherewith to confuse the queer profile of these effective towers. This drawing was reproduced by the bitumen process. The lines in the foreground, suggestive of grass, were drawn in pencil. The pen-sketches and studies of the foremost artists which have been made, not for publication, but for practice, but which have sometimes been reproduced, as, for instance, some slight sketches of Charles Keene’s, delight the artist’s eye simply by reason of their suggestive and selective qualities. If you do not delight in these things, but have a desire to (as the untaught public might say) “see them finished,” then it seems likely either that you have not the artistic sense, or else you have not sufficient training; but I should suspect you were in the first category, and should then advise you to leave matters artistic alone.

7¼ × 9. THE GATEHOUSE, MOYNES COURT.

Bitumen process. Drawing showing value of selection.

You should not forget that in drawing for reproduction you are not working like the painter of a picture. The painter’s picture exists for its own sake, not, like a pen or wash drawing, as only the means to an end. The end of these drawings is illustration, and when this is frankly acknowledged, no one has any right to criticize the neatness or untidiness of the means, so long as the end is kept properly in view.

We have not yet arrived at that stage of civilization when black-and-white art shall be appreciated as fully as colour. When we have won to that pinnacle of culture, then perhaps an original drawing in pen or monochrome will be cherished for its own sake; at present we are barbaric more than enough, and bright hues attract us only in lesser degree than our “friend and brother,” Quashee from the Congo. How nearly related we are these preferences may show more readily than the ranter’s impassioned oratory. As a drawing made for reproduction is only a stage on the way to the printed illustration, and is not the cynosure of collectors, it is successful or unsuccessful only in so far as it subserves this purpose. There is really no need for scrupulous neatness in the original; there is no necessity for it to have the appearance of a finished picture or of delicate execution, so only it will wear this appearance when reduced. That curious bugbear of neatness causes want of breadth and vigour, and is the cause of most of the tight and trammelled handling we see. Draughtsmen at the outset of their career are too much afraid of their mediums of white cardboard and ink, and too scrupulous in submitting their original drawings, beautifully cleaned up and trimmed round, to editors who, if they know their business, give no better consideration to them on that account. Mr. Ruskin has written, in his Elements of Drawing, some most misleading things with regard to drawing with the pen. True, his book was written in the ’50’s, before pen-drawing became an art, but it has been repeatedly reprinted even so lately as 1893, and consequently it is still actively dangerous. “Coarse art,” i.e. bold work, says Mr. Ruskin—he is speaking of pen-drawing—“is always bad art.” There you see Mr. Ruskin holding a brief for the British public which admires the ineffable artistry displayed in writing the Lord’s Prayer on a threepenny piece, but deplores the immorality shown in drawings done with a quill pen. The art of a pen-drawing is not to be calculated on a sliding-scale graduated to microscopical fractions of an inch and applied to its individual strokes.

The appearance a drawing will present when reduced may be approximately judged by the use of a “diminishing glass,” that is to say, a concave glass.

Drawings should not be cleaned up with india-rubber, which destroys the surface of paper or cardboard and renders lines rotten; bread should be used, preferably stale bread two days old, crumbled and rubbed over the drawing with the palm of the hand. Mr. Ruskin says that in this way “you waste the good bread, which is wrong;” but you had better use a handful of “the good bread” in this way than injure a good drawing.

The copying of wood engravings or steel prints, not for their subjects, but for their peculiar techniques, is a vicious and inartistic practice. Time used in this way is time wasted, and worse than wasted, because this practice is utterly at variance with the spirit of pen-work.

It is not a proof of artistry or consummate draughtsmanship to be able to draw a straight line or a perfect circle, the absurd legend of Giotto and his circle notwithstanding.

There are many labour-saving tricks in drawing for reproduction, but these have usually little connection with the purely artistic side of illustration. They have been devised chiefly to aid the new race of artist-journalists in drawing for the papers which cater for that well-known desire of the public to see its news illustrated hot and hot. Most of these methods and the larger proportion of the men who practice them are frankly journalistic, but some few draughtsmen have succeeded in resolving this sleight of hand into novel and interesting styles, and their hurried work has achieved a value all its own, scarcely legitimate, but aggressive and clamouring for attention.

One of these tricks in illustration is a method which is largely practised for journalistic illustration in America—drawing in pen and ink upon photographs, which are afterwards bleached out, the outline drawings remaining to be processed. Although not a desirable practice from an artistic point of view, it is advantageously used for news work or upon any occasion in which expedition is essential. The photograph to be treated in this way is printed by the usual silver-print method, with the exception that the paper used is somewhat differently prepared. What is known as “plain salted paper” is used; that is to say, paper prepared without the albumen which gives to ordinary silver-prints their smooth, shiny appearance. The paper is prepared by being soaked in a solution made by the following formula:—

Chlorate of ammonia   100 grains.
Gelatine10" 
Water10 ounces.

The print is made and fixed without toning. It may now be drawn upon with pen and Indian ink. The ink should be perfectly black and fixed. The drawing, if it is to be worth anything artistically, must not aim at anything like the fulness of detail which the photograph possesses. An outline drawing is readily made in this way, and a considerable amount of detail may be achieved. Indeed, the temptation is always to go over the photograph in pen and ink too fully, and only draughtsmen of accomplishment can resist this almost irresistible inducement to do too much. Still, admirable results have been obtained in this way by artists who know and practise the very great virtue of reticence.

When the drawing has been finished it is immersed in a solution of bichlorate of mercury dissolved in alcohol, which removes all traces of the photograph, leaving the drawing showing uninjured upon plain white paper. Omissions from the drawing may now be supplied and corrections made, and it is now ready for being processed. If very serious omissions are noticed, the photograph may be conjured back by immersing the paper in a solution of hyposulphite of soda.

Another and readier way is to draw upon photographs printed on ferro-prussiate paper. This paper may be purchased at any good photographic materials shop, or it can be prepared by brushing a sheet of paper over with a sensitizing solution composed of the two following solutions, A and B, prepared separately and then mixed in equal volumes:—

A Citrate of iron and ammonia  1⅞ ounces.
Water 8"  
B Ferricyanide of potassium 1¼   "  
Water 8"  

The paper must be prepared thus in a dark room and quickly dried. It will remain in good condition for three or four months, and is best preserved in a calcium tube. Prints made upon ferro-prussiate paper are formed in Prussian blue, and are fixed in the simplest way, on being taken from the printing frame, by washing in cold water.

An Indian ink drawing may now be made upon this blue photographic print, and sent for process without the necessity of bleaching, because blue will not reproduce. If, on the other hand, it is desired to see the drawing as black lines upon white paper, the blue print may be bleached out in a few seconds by immersing it in a dish of water in which a small piece of what chemists call carbonate of soda (common washing soda) has been dissolved.

Outline drawings for reproduction by process may be made upon tracing-paper. Most of the rough illustrations and portrait sketches printed in the morning and evening newspapers are tracings made in this way from photographs or from other more elaborate illustrations. Although this is not at all a dignified branch of art, yet some of the little portrait heads that appear from time to time in the St. James’s Gazette, Pall Mall Gazette, and the Westminster Gazette are models of selection and due economy of line, calculated to give all the essentials of portraiture, while having due regard to the exigencies of the newspaper printing press.

The [two outline] [portrait sketches] shown here are reproduced from the St. James’s Gazette. Their thick lines have a tendency to become offensive when subjected to careful book-printing, but appearing as they originally did in the rapidly printed editions of an evening paper, this emphasis of line was exactly suited to the occasion.

Translucent white tracing-paper should be used for tracing purposes, pinned securely through the corners of the photograph or drawing to be copied in this manner on to a drawing-board, so that the tracing may not be shifted while in progress. No pencilling is necessary, but the tracing should be made in ink, straight away. Fixed Indian ink should be used, because when the tracing is finished it will be necessary for process purposes to paste it upon cardboard, and, tracing-paper being so thin, the moisture penetrates, and would smudge a drawing made in soluble inks unless the very greatest care was taken. Old tracing-paper which has turned a yellow colour should on no account be used, and tracing-cloth is rarely available, because, although beautifully transparent, it is generally too greasy for pure line-work.

Pen-drawings which are to be made and reproduced for the newspaper press at the utmost speed are made upon lithographic transfer paper in lithographic ink, a stubborn and difficult material of a fatty nature. Drawings made in this way are not photographed, but transferred direct to the zinc plate, and etched in a very short space of time. No reduction in scale is possible, and the original drawing is inevitably destroyed in the process of transferring.