Family Tree

After spending most of yesterday erasing any last traces of green from my apartment walls, I couldn't bear to pick up another paint brush today (even for the noble cause of printmaking). Instead, I finally sat down with my little bottle of blue ink and worked on the first pen and ink drawing (we're taking old school dipping-metal-nib-in-inkwell drawing) I've done in a long time.


It took me a little while to remember some of the techniques and to come to terms with the fact that ink drawings sometimes take on a life of their own. Despite a few little mistakes (or 'liberties' as they will now be known), the end result wasn't too bad.

The subject of the drawing requires a little back story. A number of years ago my paternal grandmother gathered together all of the photos she could find of both sides of my dad's family and made an album for each of her grandchildren. Also included in the album was a document detailing the history of my father's family in Canada back, oh, about eight or nine generations. Amazing, right?

A few days ago I pulled out the album and realized that (naturally) it is overflowing with amazing old black and white photos. My ink drawing tonight is based on a woman from one of those photos and I think she's destined to be the first in a long line of family-inspired sketches.


This drawing also makes me very happy because it finally gave me a reason to pull out the letterpress prints I made at Snap & Tumble's Letterpress Curiosity Workshop. I'm determined to put every last print I made at the workshop to some good creative use because it would be criminal to waste such beautiful paper. Unfortunately, the blue inks aren't a perfect match, so I might switch over to black ink for my next experiment.