Pieces of Beat

This is rubbish. Oh, there are individual bits I like, but I was trying to capture a moment and a feeling and it failed miserably. Even knowing what I was trying to recreate, I can't see it in here.

Whoopee.

Regarding Shape and Line

Nothing earth shattering here. Although I'd be curious as to people's reaction to this one. What they think it evokes. This is somewhat of an experiment. I've taken a specific image and generalized it in hopes of invoking some part of its impact without being literal.

Poolside Inspiration

3 days in Palm Springs does wonders. Drew this in October on what's become an annual getaway over Columbus Day weekend. Three days of a tight-knit group of friends, secluded in a rented house (for used to be a small hotel, but that's no longer available. Sad story...) with nothing to do but eat, drink, swim, and create. Heaven.

Can't say that this represents any particular piece of the backyard's landscape, but it's got elements of the foliage back there.

Into the archives

Sometimes I forget that I have a whole stash of drawings to, well, draw from.

Dating from ca. 1997/1998, this followed the completion of the doodle seen in this post. In creating this, I made a conscious effort to create negative space, though I did my best to NOT consciously direct the overall composition of the whole. It was an exercise in tedium and took me months' worth of lecture hours to get this far. I developed a sense of wanting to balance the size of the individual boxes as well as the size and spacing of the negative space. Like I said, I was trying not to direct the end product, but I definitely would decide things like, "I've done too many small open areas, time to leave a big one," or, "That last set of boxes was too regular, I should start adding a bunch of weird shaped ones."

I think I had the goal of filling the whole page. And I don't think I chose to stop where I stopped, I think I just ran out of school year and never picked it up again.

The full size image is pretty large, any smaller and the detail started to go away.

The old country

I'm not being very productive on the drawing front. Two weeks of travel, plus I've picked up an instructive drawing book. So I guess I am drawing, but they're drawing exercises, not my own stuff.

Visited Chicago and New York, took over 1000 photos. This one is a particular favorite, taken with my 55-200mm lens, it's a ginkgo tree at the home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, Il. I did a lot of experimenting with depth-of-field while on the trip and this one came out particularly nice, wouldn't you agree.

Oh hell, I just rememberd I do have a finished drawing I should post. And maybe I'll track my progress through the instructional book here as well.

Over done

I loved this at first, I'm less in love with it now that I'm revisiting it.

Pleased with the Untitled legs piece earlier, I've been considering doing a series of similar mixed-media pieces, exploring digital image manipulation combined with hand drawing. That first one started as a photo, became an abstract digital canvas, and was finished with a digitally altered scan of hand drawn sketches. Each piece had its own reason and purpose and came together to a nice whole.

The process here was entirely backwards and I think the results speak to that. This time I started with the hand drawn sketch, with which I am very pleased. I should have just left it at that, and when I get a chance I'll likely revisit it as a standalone image.

I like the digital additions in theory, but I realze now that I was too conscious of the overall end result, so rather than creating a piece of background that had its own artistic reason, I was trying to fit it into a false constraint of "a piece" and ended up with something...canned. I look at it and see graphic filters, not a complete image. Meh.

Fun Guy

I don't know if it's simply the increased amount of drawing I've been doing, the confidence that posting it publicly has given me, or the results of the artist's program I alluded to in a previous post, but it's getting harder to stay true the the name of this blog. I keep ending up with drawings I actually like, which is a whole new experience for me. So if you're here for the self-deprecation, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint as it's being replaced by self-confidence at an alarming rate.

But enough of that, on to the latest entry. I'll be bold and say that this one's a triumph. Six years. That's how long I've been trying to get this one down on paper. After six years it is, of course, radically different than I first pictured it. But after countless doodles and aborted attempts at making something of it, it's exactly what it needs to be.

And for the first time it's something that carries some personal meaning beyond being aesthetically pleasing to me. I probably shouldn't be too specific about what that meaning is, thought the post title does give a clue as to what spurred the original vision. Yeah, "vision", I'll stick with that word. Definitely something I saw in my mind's eye that's stuck with me. The final product is more interpretive of that vision than representational, but it gets the point across.

Color was vitally important. I spent a lot of time pinning down exactly which to use and how. And I couldn't be happier with the results. Finally having this down on paper, concrete is a big relief to me.

Vodie's

Today I invoke my right as blogger to deviate off-message at will. I've acquired a new toy in a fit of indulgence. I'm quickly learning how little I know about photography. Oh, I understand the principles involved, but knowing what knobs there are to turn isn't the same as knowing how to turn them. But I'm slowly getting the idea, and I will be forever in debt to the inventors of digital photography for the freedom to take many thousands of bad pictures without worry.

Today's entry is a test shot for an idea I'm cultivating. I don't particularly like this shot, as I drove away I saw a much more interesting angle I could have gotten it from. I'll have to return and take some more.

I see this sign every day on my drive home. I bemoan the loss of commercial sign individuality. Miles of fluorescent block letters and neon cursive against brown/beige/terracotta colored stucco is all I ever see. So I'm on a mission to find and document as many interesting signs around Orange County as I can. My initial focus is on old ones like this guy, but I'm open to including contemporary examples, though I may be too biased and jaded to consider any new ones interesting enough to include.

Next update will likely be back to drawing. I've got something to post, I just need a title.

p.s. Ugh, scaling this thing and saving it in a web-friendly size completely ruined the image. I clearly need to find a less lossy method of prepping a photo to post.

Unproducts

Nope, still not doing this regularly, am I. Which is ridiculous because I damn well am still drawing. I mean, I've got to do something during meetings.

This post's got a little bit of everything. Cartoon animals that have stuck in my head from "how to draw" books of my childhood, odd characters, geometric doodles, and even a study for what eventually went into the image from my last post. These are all in a spiral notebook (thus the odd dark black things next to my alien friend there...and yes, that is a fro pick. Don't ask) from work, done as I said in meetings as I try not to nod off. The angular doodle top middle had me giggling when I scanned it as it wasn't until after I scanned it and saw it blown up on the monitor that I registered the odd sideways gnome dude at the top. Heh.

Anyway, by way of preview of a future post, here is a bit of brain dropping. Despite its simplicity, t's got a lot of personal meaning that I'll get into eventually, and after a long...long time in the works I actually spewed out a completed piece based around it last night. That's two completed pieces in a rather short period, a subject also for a future post. See, two things hanging over me, maybe that'll prompt a return to regular updates.

Maybe.

Triumphant Return

So, returning to blogging and posting this may be a mistake, setting myself up for a fall. I'd like to make myself use this blog regularly as a place to work on my process for exploring my still-novel-to-me need for creative outlet. Rather, use it to FIND a process as I currently have none. And posting what is a finished piece, and in my eyes a high watermark, certainly stands a chance of setting my own expectations too high. I can't let myself only post "good" stuff, "finished" stuff, "pointful" stuff if this is going to do anything for me.

That said, this is a project that I started many months ago and let sit unfinished with no idea what "finished" might look like for a long time. Meanwhile I've recently started working with some friends to focus on this creative urge, with the help of a sort of self-help book for artists. The book and the author are as nutty as my skeptical side imagined they might be going in, but I'm doing my best to look past the surface issues I have with the author's views on the world and the mind and trust that there is value to the exercises she lays out, relying more on sounding off the group of friends for analysis and status checks rather than what the author writes.

Making it much easier to do so is the fact that it's paid almost instant dividends. Case in point, the untitled image I've posted. A combination of photography, hand sketch, and digital manipulation, it started with a need for art on our walls. Wandering the likes of Z Gallery or Urban Outfitters, I found myself drawn to canvas prints of colorful, graphic images. In a surprising bit of inspiration, I actually felt like I could create something myself that I would dig. I did some research and found that it's pretty darn affordable to get a giclee print on canvas of anything you like. So I went for it.

I'll spare anyone reading this the details of how I made it, how it sat for months and how the finishing touches suddenly became very easy. The most interesting process note is that 8 months ago when I walked away from it, I considered it nearly done, just in need of finding the right tweaks to "really" complete it, but nothing I tried really satisfied me. When I went back to it, I went straight for a major shift, and the end result fell into place almost immediately. Both frustrating and encouraging. Frustrating to realize the inevitability of getting stuck in those "forest for the trees" situations, encouraging that the reason I could never get the small tweaks to satisfy me was because I was likely aware on some level that it wouldn't be complete without a much larger change.

The piece itself has little meaning. It's a graphic piece, done purely for my aesthetic enjoyment. I think it's going to look good on canvas on our wall. Now all I have to do is make a decision about the many giclee printing options...

Copyright infringement here we come!

Excuse excuse excuse, blah blah, terrible blogger, blah, excuse, blah blah.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's see if I can't spit this post and get back on track with regular updates.

With this post, I'm introducing a second sub genre of my drawing "abilities", copying. If you own the Little Mermaid VHS (the one with the penis spire on the castle), you might be familiar with this still. I believe it's on the back cover. I loved the movie, memorized the soundtrack, so sure, why not copy the art.

And the amazing part, to me at least, is that I did this freehand. No tracing, no measuring. Just the original art on the case as reference. A close inspection of the image reveals an erased attempt at the head, but other than that I did this in pretty much one shot.

But even this one talent was fickle. Thrilled with how well Sebastian came out, I moved on to a couple of the supporting cast pictured on the case. This guy and his buddy were another pair of successes, but that second one is already showing signs of me losing focus. And my next effort (or, rather, the best effort on the next character after I erased a few initial tries) resulted in this not so flattering rendition of Flounder. Without the original to compare to it may not be obvious, but I just couldn't manage to get it right without adding a few ounces to his waistline. It's bad enough that he's the roundest flatfish ever, but I just kept making him pudgier than he already is. And it got worse. What I didn't scan were a later, fatter, attempt of Flounder, a fat version of that first trumpeter, and a Bart Simpson that was just...well, it wouldn't have even passed muster at the sh*tty Korean animation sweatshop that butchered the Simpson's pilot episode.

At some point I'll get those scanned as well. I also have a handful of other copied drawings from different points. There's one that I haven't seen in probably a decade. If I'm lucky it's preserved in a book or folder buried in a closet somewhere. If not, oh well.

Bah, I'm still not satisfied with this entry, but it's been nearly a month, so I'm just going to pull the trigger. Next up, if I'm feeling brave, I'm going to start posting some more recent content, perhaps even, gasp, create something new.

Crisis averted.

I found it! I found it!

A week of mild anxiety is now behind me. A second, more thorough, search of the closet-of-boxes has unearthed my beloved sketch book. I knew it had to be somewhere within the confines of our home, but that didn't make me any less unhappy about not being able to find it. Perhaps, now that half the contents of the boxes are strewn around the guest room, this will motivate me to finish unpacking all my crap, 7 months after the move.

Now that I am once again in possession of the seminal collection of my pieces, I can really get to the meat of this blogging project. And I'm going to start with what I think is my favorite one, and the first entry into one of the sub genres of my attempts at drawing - doodles gone mad.

Every so often, I'll start a doodle that becomes self perpetuating. It'll start with some shape, usually. A circle, a square, an amorphous blob. Then I'll repeat it, maybe next to it maybe larger and enclosing the first one. And then I'll continue to repeat it, adding variations. It's no longer a circle, instead it's an oval, or a squished oval, or the old standby amorphous blob. Before I know it, I've imposed some loose set of "rules" on it. "It's gotta be an enclosed shape, not crossing any of the others on the page. There should be a minimum and a maximum space allowed between each one. One shape may enclose another." Etc.

99% of the time, I end up with some stupid doodle that hangs around for a while and eventually gets tossed. But on occasion I'll step back from it and it strikes me as interesting enough to keep. This one was exemplary. Mind you, I was paying little to no attention to the overall shape of this thing. I was actually probably thinking I would eventually fill the whole page. But I got to this point and it just felt done. I really wish I could take more credit for it, but, as you may have gathered, I can't really draw. So the best I can hope for is the lucky happenstance of a doodle with an interesting structure ending up in an equally interesting overall form.

Sorry for the large full size image on this one, but I think it deserves the detail.

Painting in Motion

http://rinpaeshidan.jp/works/index.html

If I may sidetrack for a moment to a topic other than, well, me, and update the mission statement for this experiment. I can't draw, but other people can. Draw, paint, sculpt, and generally art (I'm declaring art a verb). This is the first of what are sure to be many links to artistic projects that pique my interest. The kinds of things I wish I could doing if dude could draw.

I particularly enjoy "PUZZLE", though I haven't watched them all yet.

On the verge of tragedy

I can't find my sketch pad, the one with some of my favorite drawings. I haven't seen it since the move. Last night I tore through the closet and opened every single box. I excavated the box with all the stuff that was on the same shelf as the sketch book in the old place and it's not there. I'm going to be pretty damned upset if it doesn't turn up.

In the mean time, here's a disturbing little creature for you. Lord knows what prompted this. Note my trademark terrible shading and deformed hands. Poor thing's got a thumb on his left hand where his pinkie should be. Never mind the wrist-mounted digit on the right. Yikes.

You'll hear from my lawyes, Jhonen Vasquez

Flash forward what I presume was several weeks. Armed with scores of fool-proof Mark Kistler techniques for instant 3-d effect at my disposal (foreshortening in action!), there was no stopping me. Every book cover I owned was scrawled with snaking stacks of lopsided 3-d tables, 3 dimensional shapes lit from all directions, oblique houses littered with extra doors and windows. I'm sure I went through reams of paper.

This is the most spectacular surviving artifact of that era. I can't remember for certain, but I'm presuming the house was my starting point since I doubt I've ever gone from drawing something curvy to drawing something so orthogonal on a large doodle. Always from straight lines to chaos.

Next step would definitely have been the roof appendages. A couple rings around the corners and we're off. This ones got everything! Concave, convex, rocket power!

I don't know. I think I like this one.

Sloppy birthday

I was going to start this party off with a selection from a pad of random drawings that span some time between elementary school and Jr. High. Some of them I actually like, believe it or not. It does happen. But when I went to find it, I discovered that it apparently never got unpacked after we moved.

In searching, I uncovered a treasure trove. In 5th grade, a classmate's parent came in for several weeks to give some basic drawing lessons. Actually, in violation of several laws I'm sure, she photocopied lessons from a book (specifically, a book by Mark Kistler, whose PBS show I've since seen) and went through them with us. It was great fun.

But, as you might have guessed by now, I suck. Which I didn't really mind. The things we were drawing were simple enough that even bad results were still results. But even then I could tell I was bad. With step-by-step instructions in front of me, and all the drawing paper I could ever need...well, ladies and gentleman, what you see is my best most earnest attempt at a birthday cake (Click here or on the pic for full size suckitude).

Some might tell me to not be so hard on myself. I was, afterall, only 11. And hey, it's not even all that bad, it's got style and flare. As to the latter, that's not style and flare. That implies intent. I certainly did not intend for my cake to have been baked by a retarded monkey, nor could I hope to reproduce said style and flare if I tried. Which brings me back to the former point namely that I just drew this. Right now, in the middle of composing this post. And yes, I tried. I tried hard.

I even whipped out the actual Mark Kistler birthday cake lesson, and came up with this gem. Didn't even bother decorating that one! 18 years later and look at my progression! And sadly, these kinds of rudimentary 3-d things are my favorite thing to doodle. So it's not like I haven't had practice over those 18 years.

So there you have it. Thanks for visiting. This one sketch pad I found is good for a dozen more posts at least, that's before I even find my favorite one. And I promise, I'll post the stuff I like too, I don't intend this to be all about me beating myself up. I'm really over the fact that I can't draw worth crap, but it hasn't stopped me from trying!

Is it lame to call this "First Post"?

Hello and welcome. I'll try to keep this brief, which you'll learn, if you stick around, is highly out of character for me.

This blog serves no particular purpose other than to amuse me. I certainly hope that by extension it amuses someone else too.

As you might have gleaned by now, I can't draw. Now, I'm not fishing for pity here. I really couldn't care less that I can't draw. I accepted that fact long ago. But if I'm going to be posting this stuff, I'm doing so with full disclosure. You've been warned.

A word on the format and content, I expect this to be a mixed bag. I'm sure I'll start off by dredging up the handful of drawings from my elementary school and jr. high days that I've kept around. Those are very dear to me, they're a good cross section of my drawing disabilities. But I also plan to post some new stuff, maybe even challenge myself to increase my drawing output. I'll probably end up posting a photo here and there, an art form I'm much more suited to, though I'll have to be careful not to get lazy and let this slip into being a photo blog. But mostly I'll be posting a photo or scan of something I've drawn and talking about it. That's it, nothing fancy.

All that said, it's not as if I hate everything I draw. Like a million monkeys a million typewriters, or perhaps like one monkey on a million typewriters, or even a million monkeys on one typewriter, something accidentally comes out pretty okay. And if I keep up the postings, you might actually see that at one time I was down right adequate at copying drawings (not tracing, but looking at and copying freehand). But by and large, I have very little conscious control over how one of my drawings comes out.

Thanks for visiting, and...you've been warned.

And see what I mean about brevity?