Dude Can't Draw

Best Coachella Yet

2008-05-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-15T16:33:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-24T09:34:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-19T08:47:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-12T08:40:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

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).

My Google Footprint

2008-01-28T11:54:00.001-08:00

I use a visitor tracking site called "StatCounter" to keep track of the endless throngs of people who show up here. Among the info I get is how each visitor managed to navigate to the blog. Did you find my blogger profile? Did you click the link in my signature on a message board I post on? Did you go straight from a bookmark? Yes, I know who you are and where you've come from.

But my favorite entries in the log are always the ones that clicked through a Google search. It shows me exactly what they were searching for that brought up the blog, and which entry was brought up. These are the searches currently in the log:

How to draw nicer
Draw the statu [sic] of liberty
johnen vasquez
inspiration for a pool side story
Drawing from photographs a copyright infringement
vodie
draw like johnen
how to draw a pool side
draw good enough for college [my favorite so far]
drawing odd characters
step by step how to draw birthday things
types of line regarding drawing
draw paper birthday
how to draw like johnen
how to draw many dudes

My, I imagine that all of those people doing "how to draw" searches were pretty disappointed in their Google results. And at this rate, I'm going to attract the whole of the Jhonen Vasquez fan base. [here's where I admit spelling his name wrong...twice. Thank God for the edit button]

I wonder how much this post is going to throw Google off.

Couldn't have been a nicer day

2008-01-16T14:24:00.001-08:00

Flashing back for a moment to our October vacation, this photo was my favorite of the countless I took of the Statue of Liberty. Hard not to take a good shot, of course.

I'm also particularly fond of this one. I love the somewhat disorienting mix of scales, between the massive base of the statue, the comparatively minuscule people, and the distant but huge city. Makes a nice statement, no?

And of course I had to play with the telephoto lens. Can you believe the color of the sky that day?!

Bent Objects

2008-01-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

Can't take credit for this one. The blog Bent Objects has been turning out these brilliant littel vignettes for quite a while. They just got a BoingBoing mention, so I guess I'm late to the game in linking them, but in the spirit of sharing things that make me smile, thought I'd put this out there. I really dig the way this guy thinks. His stuff is brilliant and works on so many levels.

A series is born

2008-01-09T23:22:00.000-08:00

Ever since I finished my first mixed-media piece I've been contemplating trying my hand at it again.

That first one came from nothing more than a desire to have something colorful and graphic on the wall. If I were to try again, I wanted it to come from a place of a little more meaning and be a little more thought out. I had doubts that I'd be able to come up with a vision and execute it.

I'm pretty pleased with the results. It's not precisely what I set out to accomplish, however the final result came about very organically and satisfied my overall intent. I won't go into great detail about the inspiration, other than to point out that my vast fan base of regular readers might recognize the base image and I'll mention that I've titled it "Windy City". It's not meant to be particularly literal, but for me it all has a connection.

I'm encouraged. I may continue to delve into this format.

Lost

2008-01-07T11:21:00.001-08:00

Third in my college doodle series. Yes, it has a solution. No, I don't have it solved anywhere. Yes, it took me forever.

Pieces of Beat

2007-12-27T16:42:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-17T14:40:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-06T17:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-25T22:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-21T23:02:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

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...