Disclaimer: This segment is an Encore Presentation KING 5's Evening.
Jim Woodring is on to something big.
"It's a whole new ballgame," Woodring said. "No one's ever been able to see a pen drawing like this, as far as I know, because these things are utterly new."
You could say the Vashon Island artist is expanding the world of pen and ink. He's definitely expanding the pen. Woodring's instrument of choice is a five-foot-long dip pen.
"The handle's about 7 pounds,' Woodring said. "It's not hard to use. It's just very, very slow."
And very, very slowly, the artist created a series of ten drawings, now on display along with that giant pen, at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.
Even the title of this surreal exhibit is appropriately oversized. It's called "The Pig Went Down to the Harbor at Sunrise and Wept."
Woodring said, "The phrase popped into my head while I was working on the first one of these."
The artist had to develop a whole new approach to create these super-sized images.
"Worked up a style of drawing that would allow the pen to do what it did best. You control it the same way you control a regular pen. It's exactly like a regular pen," said Woodring.
Even the little accidents are big, including jumbo-sized ink drops.
"They're attractive and I had to resist the temptation to fake some," Woodring said.
Now that Jim Woodring has made his major mark on the world of pen and ink, he can't wait to see where it leads.
"I'm going to push this into new territory. But I'm hoping that somebody else will take this pen or one like it and do their own drawings with it," Woodring said. "I''m dying to see what other people would do with that thing."
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