One of my favorite artists, Ben Toleman, pen and ink

I love pen and ink drawings. There's just something magic about them, don't you think?
And my favorite pen and ink artist has to be Mr. Ben Toleman. There's a  link to his blog over on the right and I encourage you to check out his work. I first became aware of him a couple years ago I think it was, when I saw a video of him drawing.
It is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. I showed it to my little grandson over Christmas when I was visiting to encourage and inspire him in his budding artwork.
I'd like to show you what art is when it's magic.
Hope you enjoy these videos.

I hope you enjoyed these as much as I did. Amazing artist isn't he?

"It's Getting Dark" another new graphite drawing!

Ok, I really like this little drawing. She reminds my of one of my little sisters, back when we were just kids.
This is done on a nice hot press water color paper, it's 5x7".

I just listed her on ETSY and you can check her out here.
I have several more pictures I'm working on too and will post about them soon as they're done.

"It Fell with a Sound Like Screaming" New graphite Drawing p.a.turner

I finally finished this graphite piece last night and wanted to put it up to show you.
It's called "It Fell with a Sound Like Screaming"

Sometimes I'm not sure what to think of these particular drawings. They are so very different from my other pictures. One reason being they come about backwards. LOL
I start with a blank paper covered with graphite powder and "find" the picture that's in there. LOL
Mr. Nelson calls them "undrawings". I think that is a good way to describe them.
When I start one, there's no telling what will come out.
They create themselves as I go along with my gooey eraser looking for them.
Be sure to click on the image so you can see it close up. It's really quite detailed actually.
I'll write more about the process and all maybe later if anyone is interested in hearing about it, I just wanted to show you what one looks like.

A Word about Graphite Crayons!

I love it!
Recently, we made a trip to town to see Mr. Nelson at the gallery (here's Nelson's blog, go pester him and make him post!) and Becky at Artopia. I bought one of these graphite crayons at Becky's suggestion and took it home and fell in love with it! You draw with it and it is water soluble and so I can use the paint brush to make washes and soften lines and all that good arty stuff.
Here's a picture, you can get them at Dick Blick but if you are in the Johnson City area, do yourself a favor and go see Becky and Christine at Artopia!

Anyway, when we got home I couldn't wait to try it and had some of that textured acrylic painting paper, (also bought at Artopia) and went to work playing with the crayon.
Here's what I drew.

A little graphite doom for ya.
The sky background was just lightly hatched in and when water was added I got a nice gray wash there.
The hair on the front figure and other darker areas were drawn more heavily and when water was added it got nice and dark and almost paintlike. I love it.
Now the crayon is a fattie and will have to be sharpened I think. I don't know if Becky has a sharpener for it but if not I can use a pocket knife to sharpen it.
Oh, and here's one where I used the crayon to outline areas and then went back in with watercolor pencils and added color.

I called this one "Particles Penetrate the Bunkers". Thinking of all those folks out there hoping their bunkers will protect them from the doom.
Both pieces were sprayed with workable fixatif I got from...you guessed it! Artopia! And it really brings out the colors and helps protect your work from smudging and evil art ruining stuff like that. I highly recommend it!
Anyway, hope you all have had a nice weekend so far. I'll be back again with updates about more new work.

New Work in 2012

Sorry for not posting more on this blog but I've been pretty tied up with the End of Empire News blog for the past year. This year, I hope to be able to post more here about the new work I'm doing and the big show later this year at Nelson's Gallery in Johnson City.
I'll keep you posted on that as time goes by and it takes shape,  but for now I wanted to show you the new things I've been doing and putting up in my shop on Etsy.

Here recently, I've been working a lot with pen and colored inks. I love the way they look and the colors are like jewels! They take a bit of time to do actually, not nearly as fast as acrylic paintings but, I like the different look, kind of like a storybook illustration I think.
Here's one I did recently, see what you think. It's not listed for sale anywhere yet but I may put it on Etsy  later.

This is called, "They can't get in, and You can't get out"
It pretty much sums up what fear can do to a person.
It's a bit of self exploration really. See the person's shadow on the ground to the right? Notice how small and confining the world becomes when trapped inside your own fears?
I like this little drawing a lot actually.