sketches

This sketch is the ninety-third in a 365-day challenge to draw a picture a day, every day, for a year…

Day ninety-three: Paging through a book about the woodcut in 15th-century Europe, I browsed upon one of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem from c. 1440-1445 with traces of faded color. The mule caught my eye. In the original the beast looks kind of grumpy. I love the simplicity of early European woodcuts that predate the use of cross-hatching. Interplay between the artist’s pen and the wood cutter’s knife creates a unique style of curves and angles. On a whim, I used Corel’s “woodcut” trick to see what would happen,  hoping that it would look like my drawing had actually been carved into a block. Contrarily, the computer program took a much more modern approach, I think, by translating the 15th-century lines into forms that might be preferred by an early 20th-century Expressionist.