Best Coachella Yet

Yes I've been absent for a while and no I haven't done a whole lot of drawing. I've still got one big project in the works, but it's stuck in draft stage until I get off my butt and buy some paper to make the final product. But I've been a bit distracted.

Our condo is finally put back together after the water damage, so that's one distraction down. Birthday madness begins now with my wife's birthday, my own birthday, and mothers day falling on top of each other as usual.

But last weekend's distraction was the the finest. 3 days of heat, music and art. This was our third April visit to Indio for the incomparable Coachella music festival, and our fist since they went to the 3 day format. Our last attendance was cut short by a family medical emergency, so 3 days was a test. But we did it right, rented a house with a few other couples, having leisurely breakfasts/swims in the morning, and soaks in the hot tub at night. Good times.

The concert itself was off the charts. Blown away by several acts, notably Man Man, Sharon Jones and the Dapp Kings, Holy F*ck, Gogol Bordello Portishead, and, winner for most spectacular, Roger Waters.

I didn't really expect much from Waters other than zoning out to some good music. I knew he could still play and I absolutely love Pink Floyd music, but I figured that after 30 or so years, there wasn't much he could pull out to really get me going. How very wrong I was. Long story short: giant inflatable pig with anti-war/anti-Bush slogans that he released into the night sky ("That's my pig"), and a low-flying airplane with WWII-style shark teeth painted on it dropping Obama leaflets. It was an absolutely otherworldly experience and I'm thrilled to have witnessed it.

Others may have had him beat on their overall performance (I was particularly taken by Man Man's outrageously manic set), but Waters' show was the very definition of spectacular.

Anyway, here are photos from the weekend. Many of day 1's photos were taken by my wife, while I took the vast majority of day 2 and 3's shots.

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

Meetings, meetings, and more meetings

Three hours of meetings today. Somewhere in the middle of hour 2 I drew this, one of my coworkers across the table. It was all that was keeping me awake. Sorry about the image quality, I just snapped a shot with my cell hone camera.

Artomat

Remember these? Outlawed in the 80s, cigarette dispensing machines used to be a common sight at every restaurant, convenience store, supermarket, etc.

Well, someone had the bright idea to rescue these stylish relics and repurpose them into something not only legal, but damned clever. Namely, dispensing small, cigarette-carton-sized pieces of art!

Head over to http://www.artomat.org/home.html, find a machine near you, and maybe even submit your own art and make a few $.

Meanwhile, I've got a new piece in the works that I hope to be posting soon.

Water blogged

I haven't felt much like drawing or posting lately. For the last week we've been dealing with major water damage to our condo. We've had to have the entire first story floor pulled up, drywall cut out, and we've been living in our bedroom since last Saturday. It's not fun.

But that's no excuse to drop everything. I've haven't been entirely idle. There's not much inspiring in our bedroom, but I have occasionally pulled the sketch book out and done some exercises. This is a quick sketch of my wife in graphite. Similar to the style of my last post, but with an emphasis on speed. I'm working on getting basic gesture lines and shapes down quickly so I can get better at sketching live subjects. Getting better all the time, to coin a phrase.

Beautiful friend, the end

This is from the final session of my drawing class. We played with chalk pastels. I now love this medium. This drawing here was literally my very first stab at it. I was shocked at how easily I was able to come out with something I liked. Definitely going to have to revisit this and see where I can go.

So my class is now over. I really enjoyed it and I think I really benefited from it. I'd like to see what I do on my own for a bit, but I'm likely to seek out more instruction at some point. I actually wouldn't mind taking more from the same instructor. The consistency would be nice. It's funny, though, I don't like the style of her pieces. But I think that may be a good thing. It'll prevent me from mimicking and rather force me to focus on using the techniques to create my own style. The contrast will do me good.

My wife asked me an interesting question when I showed this to her. "Do you consider any of these sketches 'art', or is it just messing around?" My answer? Who the hell knows. I mean, this is just a crappy newsprint sketch pad, and I'm just sketching things to work on one or two particular techniques, I'm not trying to make any sort of finished product. Plus, most of the source material used during class was magazine ads (this, for example, was for some diet food or fitness water or something), so it's not like these things are particularly meaningful.

That said, I don't think there's a clean line that can be drawn (so to speak) between "art" and "not art". A drawing like this definitely has some artistic value. At the very least, it imparts a certain amount of information about my style and abilities. The sketch pad as a whole is a record of my slow learning process, which has artistic value. There's nothing in there that I spent enough time on to call a completed work, but there are things in there that I will surely reference and that will inform anything I do make from here forward. So in that sense, yes I do consider it "art".

Absence makes the eye grow fonder

It's one of those things you tell yourself over and over, other people tell you over and over, but it's hard to remember. Sometimes when you feel like everything is coming out wrong, you have to step back for a bit and get a fresh look.

I've been struggling with the latest techniques from my drawing class. It's just not coming together for me. I know it's largely a matter of practice, but it's been frustrating in comparison to everything else I've learned, which seemed to sink in pretty well. In last week's class, we were drawing animals from photos using some specific techniques. It was not going well. I hated everything I was doing.

But last night I pulled my sketch pad out to flip through and came across this giraffe here. It was one of the last things I drew in the class, and when I was done, I was sure it was crap. I was completely dissatisfied, and didn't even think it looked anything like a giraffe.

Amazing what a week will do. I was surprised to see it and recognize it as a giraffe. A pretty severely deformed giraffe, but definitely a giraffe. And, more to the point, with some depth to the face, which I thought for sure I had botched entirely. I guess it was just a matter of being fatigued from 2 hours of frustration and just being too close and too focused on what was wrong to see the whole picture.

All that said, I haven't hated everything I've done with what I'm learning. I was pretty pleased with this kangaroo and especially with this elephant. These are two drawings that I could never have made 6 weeks ago.

[sorry about the dark images. These are on cheap newsprint and are too big to get on a scanner, so I had to take a photo]

Emergency Lemon

There's a story behind this one that I'm sure is only amusing to me and the person on the other end of an IM conversation. It involved Trader Joe's, lamb kabob, and a very dry serving of tabbouleh (or tabouli, or tabouleh, or however you want to spell it). Thus, the Emergency Lemon was born.

Personally, I drew the box with the lemon and smiled. I added the reamer and laughed out loud.

Ironically, we had just gone over perspective in my drawing class when I drew this. I even had a debate with the instructor over one-point perspective and the fact that, unless you are looking dead straight on at the subject, there's technically no such thing as one-point perspective and that it's just a convenient shortcut because the actual perspective is hardly discernible in that case. So yes, I'm well aware that the front plane of this box is utterly wrong. And yes, it does bug me.

Mod round 2

More of the same. Just experimenting with shape and color, using one of my favorite doodles as a starting point. This was also my first shot at playing with pastels, a brand new material for me that I clearly need to learn more about.

Rediscovered

You know, I hated this when I made it. I hated it and I forgot about it. But I stumbled across it this morning, and I don't think I hate it anymore. I still don't like it, but I don't hate it.

This started as a pencil drawing. I'm unnaturally obsessed with the ever popular mid-century mod look, and this was my first real crack at putting my spin on it. I scanned the drawing and wanted to get nice clean bold color in it. But I need to figure out how to compensate for the jagged edges inherent to a scanned pencil drawing when filling color.

In which Dude learns to draw

I'm jeopardizing my integrity, risking turning myself into a liar. Dude may soon be able to draw.

I've completed 3 sessions of an 8 part intro drawing class. I don't expect to come out of it as Rembrandt, but I do hope that it'll give me the foundation to actually develop drawing as a skill. Perhaps I'll actually then be able to set out to draw something and successfully draw it, rather than randomly doodle until something kinda looks good.

Week 2 was all about "blind contours". Drawing while looking only at the subject, not at the paper, and never lifting the pencil. The result is, understandably, a mess. But it's not about the result, it's about training the eye and mind to outline shapes and connect that to hand movement. The one shown here was my best effort of the day. These were my initial attempts. I got lost in the details and ended up just going over the same spot on the paper. It'd be nice to be able to say that I started there and progressed until I was doing ones like the main image here, but no. It was pretty up and down for the whole class. Just gotta remind myself that it's not about the product (no matter how much "better" the instructor's example was).

These three were a good effort, I thought (even if the one in the middle looks like something from the old Disney cartoon Gargoyles).