Envelope to the issue 8 of the book-newspaper "Alcohols"

Envelope 8. Date - June 1, 2006. It is made of wrapping paper - a letter to or from prison.

The addressee, very suitable for the gloomy issue, is Oleg Pashchenko, then the art director of the Lebedev Studio, now a preacher of higher meanings in design at the Higher School of Economics. Oleg and I have been friends since the days of Alcools.

I am enclosing the second part of the theoretical discussion about the illustration (the first part is in the seventh envelope).

About tools

Twenty years ago, I came up with a game called "technique reduction". Pen instead of engraving, watercolor on wood instead of tempera, candy wrappers instead of gilding, pencil instead of etching. What for? At that time, many were hiding behind technology, but I wanted the density in the pictures to be felt no matter how they were made. In addition, simple techniques allow you to express emotions more directly.

Mandelstam said that he was the only one in Russia who worked from the voice - that is, he did not write poetry, but composed while speaking. “We will only understand from the voice ...” - after all, poems live aloud. If I ever wanted to imitate anyone, it was Mandelstam: I began to draw sketches that immediately became originals.
Gradually, the habit came to draw a la prima in one line. It's like hunting: hit - your game, missed - sit without lunch. Of course, professional calligraphy classes also help a lot not to make mistakes in movements, and at the same time teach you to save strokes.

By the time I started drawing "Alcohols", I had already reached such impudence that I began to draw everything in pencil, even commissioned calligraphy for Esquire. Or, if you want something black, colored and even, I turn to Illustrator, where I take, again, N-tool. Of course, I did not change the tool for my own work.

Pencil in Alcools depicts: linocut (in the spirit of Dufy from the Bestiary), pen, lithography, sometimes a dry brush. This is if you take a line with a thickness of 0.7 and increase ten times. Surrogate? Yep, that's why I like it. No extra moves. The picture, thought up, immediately passes into the drawing hand.

The same goes for portraits. No sketches. Didn't work, started a new one. Of course, I learn from my mistakes, and I will not lead the wrong line a second time. But anyway, you can't tell the paper Save As, so you have to repeat all the successful moves outright, without Undo and Revert to Saved. I try to use the eraser to a minimum - you can’t erase much on 80 gram paper. The goal of these efforts is a living, solid, meaningful, single line. similarity? - it should be similar to his poems.

In Illustrator, of course, you can't draw like that. Vacom compared to Rothring 0.7 is like a cleaver next to an eye scalpel. You have to drive several times one stroke at a time, removing extra points. But I came up with an excuse not to be bored: the hand does not draw, but dances, makes round after round, gradually approaching an invisible ideal trajectory. The main thing is to stop in time, when the thing seems a little more raw. She is not raw, but alive.