I don’t know whether to give the credit to this period of isolation, or not, but I am being surprisingly productive at the moment. Today I finished a couple of additional pen and ink drawings for inclusion in my Wassail series. It is interesting to see the immediate impact they have had on the whole, provoking a re-ordering of the later part of the set with the result that the group as a whole has an added coherence.
The experience was interesting from another point of view. Although I am aware in general of the impact that results from small differences in the materials one uses, that lesson was really driven home over the past two days. Using a different ruler in order to draw the frames around the drawings was an immediately evident mistake. The new one somehow abutted onto the pen in quite a different way, so that ink got onto the ruler and resulted in smudges on the paper. I changed inks (from Chinese to Indian) to my immediate benefit. Most remarkable, however, was the difference resulting from a different pen nib. For some reason that still escapes me the first one I used became damaged. I thought that I had selected an identical replacement from my box, but it handled very differently from the first one, so that any variation in the pace at which it moved across the paper produced instantly a notable difference in the thickness of the line. At one point I had to abandon a drawing and start again because these small differences in the tools I was using resulted in disaster. Back on track again I did manage to finish the job to my satisfaction, but it has been a remarkably interesting lesson.