8″ x 10″ graphite on bristol smooth. I generally prefer to work from life rather than from photographs, but there’s no way I could have done this from life: I’ve been working on this off-and-on since mid-November.
Another dancer sketch. Something of a theme going here I guess…
Just another quick sketch of a dancer… This one is from a photograph in a coffee table book about the 20th century.
I’m not happy about the amount of time I’ve spent in 2010 doing everything except making “art”. I went to the art institute today looking for a little inspiration. Amazing how quickly you can lose a few hours in a place like that. This is a sketch of a small sculpture I saw while I was there. I didn’t get her name (apologies to the original artist), but I liked the way she looked.
Another athlete courtesy of Sports Illustrated. In this case, Donovan McNabb doing what he does best: scramble out of trouble.
This sketch started out as just a study of his arm and hand, but I thought I needed to give the disembodied arm a little bit of context; so I sketched out the rest of his body. Maybe if I do enough drawings of individual parts, I’ll be able to put them together into a cohesive whole someday. This method was good enough for students during The Renaissance; it should work for me. Right?
In keeping with my goal to draw more people, I decided to draw this pic of Roger Federer from a recent Sports Illustrated. This was my 2nd sketch, and the one I am happiest with.
This is what the rest of the page looks like:
Sketched from a photo on Stock.xchange. The drawing is out of proportion and crooked, which I attribute to the couple of glasses of wine I drank before pulling out my sketchbook; but if you squint and look away quickly, it might fool your eye just a little.
Oh well, learn from your mistakes and move on, right?
Just a quickie sketch of the train under our Christmas tree. In another couple of days it’ll be gone until next year.
My preliminary goals for 2010 are:
Well, goodbye 2009. You were a good year (artistically speaking). I feel like I did get a little bit better, and I had a heck of a good time. I can’t wait to see what your baby brother brings.
After my experience drawing someone in constant motion, I moved on to a more stationary subject. Again, the likeness is not quite there, but at least I am starting to gain a little confidence.
And for those of you wondering, those glowing orbs above my subject are Christmas ornaments hanging on the tree behind his chair.
This is my nephew. He’s doing what most kids his age do on Christmas morning – playing video games.
It’s not a very good likeness, but I was more interested in capturing the shape of his body. Even that was more difficult than I expected; turns out, he’s a very active gamer. Don’t let anyone tell you playing video games isn’t exercise. He didn’t stop moving the for more than a few seconds at a time. Maybe next time, I should just snap a photo and draw from that.
Drawn while waiting to get my own hair cut. This one was particularly tricky because the barber never stopped moving from one side of the chair to the other.
I finished my work a little earlier than some of the others, so I drew a classmate while I waited for the critique to start. I’m still not 100% comfortable drawing people, but I’m getting there.
A 1-minute pencil study for a barn that will be going into a larger finished work.
A 15-minute sketch from my trip to Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.
Actually, this is the building next to the Main Street Laundry in a little town called Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.
I sat on the sidewalk and drew this building while, apparently, half the town sat inside the diner across the street and watched me. Eventually somebody came out and yelled, “What you drawing?” I answered him, and he replied, “Mavis thought you were doing homework. I said that a strange place to be doin’ homework!”
Funny how people have no compunction about asking what you’re doing if they think you’re drawing. If I had been fixing a lawn mower or balancing books on my head, I’ll bet nobody would have said a word to me.
These pictures of a cat toy were done for my drawing class.
The top one is a pencil drawing and was a study in composition. We spent a good hour or more sketching out different compositions until we found one we liked. I liked this one because it is just plain silly… looks to me like the scene of a crime. There is a cat out there somewhere hiding from the authorities.
The bottom picture was a pen study in shading and line quality. The gist of the exercise, as far as I can tell, was to demonstrate how lines can be made to simulate shading from a distance.
Our condo has a small area at the front of the living room that is not exactly part of the living room, but neither is it a separate room. The floor plans referred to it as a den. I suppose with an open floor plan, you can call any area anything you want; but I get a kick out of showing guests “the den”.
This was a 30-minute sketch: 4B pencil in my sketchbook. Just trying to capture the light/shadow from the lamp.
This is my beat-up old cubs hat. I bought it at the first game I’d ever seen at Wrigley Field, and I’ve worn it hundreds of times since. It’s probably time to replace it — some of the wrinkles are permanent. But, like an old pair of slippers, a good hat feels better the more worn-out it gets.
This sketch is black and white because, quite frankly, I’m a little tired and too lazy to pull out the paints. Besides, I wanted to see whether the new sketchbook I have would handle pencil. I didn’t do any blending, but I think the paper in this sketchbook would have taken it fairly well.
My work schedule is finally starting to get somewhat back to normal. So I hope that means I can get back to a regular drawing schedule. I’m not committing myself to anything, though, because the onset of summer means that my evenings and weekends are filled with bike rides, concerts, baseball games, vacations, and family visits. I know many of these things are great fodder for drawing, but I am going to have to break some old habits in order to fit that in.
This is my entry for EDM #116 – Draw Something Green.
I’ve been buried by a mountain of work lately, and my sketching output has suffered a corresponding flattening. So it was nice to visit with family this past weekend and get away from things for a while (I don’t know how much they want me talking about them, so I’ll just say that they’re wonderful people, and leave it at that).
Despite an action-packed weekend, I did manage to carve out a few minutes to sketch the table in the sunroom. The birdhouse caught my eye from the breakfast table, so I dusted off the sketchbook and drew for a while.
My work schedule will continue to be hectic for the next week or two, so don’t expect much output between now and then. But I’ll do my best.
This morning I learned about carbon pencils when I stumbled upon the Extraordinary Pencil blog. I was impressed with how black the artist was able to get her darks — something that I’ve struggled with ever since I picked up my pencils last fall. So I stopped off at the art store and picked up a small set.
Let me tell you, those pencils are DARK! They blend really well with a stump, and they mix pretty well with pencil. But they do not erase well at all. And if you push too hard when shading with the graphite, the carbon won’t lay on top of it. So if you use these, you want to use standard graphite to map out the shapes and then use the carbon judiciously.
Anyway, on to the self-critique…
The last time I tried to draw something in a glass container (see my picture of a shell), it was an unmitigated disaster. This attempt is a little better. In part, I think, because the carbon pencils allow me to capture much better contrast; and in part, because I have a little more experience now.
The lighting was straight top-down, so I didn’t have a lot of the really sharp highlights one might expect of a glass container. I should consider this a little more when doing more formal still life work.
My elipses are a little off. And the bottom of the vase took on a funny shape because I was too heavy-handed with the graphite before trying to come in with some carbon to lay down a shadow along the bottom edge.
This was challenging because of the amount of attention I had to pay to light and shadow, instead of just shape and shading. What started out as an experiment with a new kind of pencil ended in an hour-long sketch that was a bit of stretch for my puny attention span. In any event, good practice all around.
This is a friendly little tavern on the corner near my home. I stopped to sketch it on my way home from work this evening, because the weather was simply beautiful and my back was not bothering me too much.
I’ve got a few perspective problems with this that I’ll have to watch out for in the future.
I love the shape of this building for some reason. Maybe it’s the knocked-off corner; maybe it’s the awning… whatever it is, I just love looking at it, and I hope I can one day truly capture just how inviting I think it is.
Holy cow! I can’t believe I let myself take two whole weeks off. I must be mindful of this. I definitely needed a break, as I was starting to feel like making art (OK, maybe not “art”, but whatever…) was a bit of a chore; but two weeks is a bit much. I haven’t been completely slacking — I ordered new watercolors and have been busy working out how to mix reasonable grays and washes, but nothing that resembles actual artwork.
This is my pencil sharpener. I like it because it holds all of the shavings in its own little container instead of letting them fall all over the dining room table; though, it does have a tendency to clog. Part-way through the drawing, I realized I probably should have picked a different subject, because I needed to sharpen my pencils before I finished (duh).
More than anything, this was a paper test. I’ve read a lot of posts by pencil artists who go on and on about the benefits of Bristol paper for drawing, and I wanted to test it out.
I stopped at the local art store a while back and picked up some Artist Trading Card packs of Bristol Smooth and Bristol Vellum. These little packs are great because you get a good sample for just a couple dollars, instead of dropping a tenner on a pad that you may wind up hating.
This drawing was done on the smooth paper.
I like the smooth surface for its ability to blend, but I was less than satisfied with its ability to grab the graphite and pull out really dark darks. I used really soft pencils; all the way up to 8B, but the darks are still pretty light. I’m hoping the vellum finish does a better job. If not, I may need to start integrating charcoal — I’d rather not, due to the mess and the fingers-on-chalkboard feeling I get when using charcoal. On the upside, I love the thickness of the paper. It is substantial and it makes you feel like you are producing something worth sharing (as opposed to my sketchbook, which feels–well–sketchbooky).
I thought my sketching was coming along nicely. I was gaining some confidence. I was thinking, Hey, this is getting easier all the time! And then TODAY happened.
I’ve been a fan of racing for a long time. Cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, lawnmowers… you name it. If it’s got an engine, I’ll watch to see who can drive it fastest. And I marvel at the artists who capture these vehicles on paper. So I thought I’d try to capture one of my favorite stock cars. I thought it would be fun to get out my new colored pencils and try them out.
About halfway through it though, I realized that I really didn’t like how the drawing was progressing. Frustrated, I decided to put away the colored pencils and go back to basics: black and white. Without color to worry about, I reasoned, I can just focus on getting the lines and the shading right.
Less complexity… should be easier to get something decent, right? Well, not tonight.
I closed up the sketchbook and went off to surf the web. Of course, I wound up looking at the work of some brilliant sketch artists online, and that only served to create further angst about my bad sketch day.
I didn’t want to go to bed without having created something that I could be happy about. And I decided that maybe today was just not a good day to draw from a photograph. I should draw something from life. I usually have more success with drawing from life anyway.
I’ve been thinking about draw our spinning cycle for a while, and tonight seemed like the perfect night to tackle it. It’s a simple shape, really… just a couple of straight, flat bars connected at an oblique angle, and a big circle at the bottom. Well, wouldn’t you know that I couldn’t even get the bars to cross straight?!
I used to run. A lot. And one thing you learn when you run that much is that running every day is actually counterproductive. The rest days are as important as the running days. I’ve been on a ‘draw every day’ kick recently, and I’m beginning to wonder if a rest day might be helpful.
On the other hand, I certainly see the merit of periods of quantity over quality. The act of pushing through the days when you’re just not at your best; the days when all you can think of is, “who am I kidding? I’m no artist”; the days when you consider chucking it all and returning to the couch to watch reruns of The Office because at least you can’t fail at that… that’s got to have some merit, right?
I considered not posting these sketches. I am honestly embarrassed to show them in public. And yet, they are what they are. A reflection of a less than perfect day. We all have days like this — at least, I hope I’m not the only one. And I want this blog to reflect the reality of what I’m learning.
I know that I’m going to have ups and downs. If I don’t share the downs, I believe it will somehow diminish the triumph of the ups. So I post even the things that don’t work out quite the way I’d like them to.