Having miraculously brought our Southern California sun with us to Edinburgh in October, we took full advantage. A warm sunny climb of Arthur's seat was just the thing. Some time to admire the view, taking care not to be tumbled off the rocks by the stiff breeze.
Then off to Duddingston
to satisfy our appetite with a pint, a Sunday roast, and a haggis.
Verifiable "Aha!" moment here. The details of this drawing are starting to come together. I went through several iterations of that column before my drawing instructor gave me a tip that tied it all together.
I'm less enamored with how the additions seen here turned out. It's on the right track but not really capturing what I want. My instructor has tried to steer me in another direction, but I haven't liked that either. I might have to revisit those though because I'm getting too lost in the details.
Bonus points if anyone can identify the house I'm drawing.
I've started working on a drawing from one of my favorite photographs. This is one small detail and I'm pretty happy with the results so far. It's just a draft, but it's coming along well.
I've learned a lot doing this drawing and have surprised myself. I selected it as a stretch goal, figuring I'd pick an element or two to work on and not really turn it into a finished piece. Now I'm certain that I'll be able to create something I'm happy with.
Click on the doors to see the state of the rest of the draft and then try to guess what I spent my last drawing lesson focusing on.
Actually, that's not really true. While I did learn the wood texture technique I'm trying here, I actually spent the bulk of the lesson on my first attempt at the drawing as a whole. Again, surprised at how well it went.
What better way to indicate my sudden desire to draw more regularly than to spend an evening not drawing! I'm thinking creatively already.
I haven't been entirely neglecting the pencil at least. I learned a lot drawing this.
Still in the draft stage, but I've made progress on my latest attempt at art.
I'm unnaturally obsessed with Douglas Hofstadter and his philosophy of the mind. Also a fan of Rene Magritte. This piece has been bouncing around my head in some form or another for a long time.
This is rough draft #2. I like it but don't love it. Colors are wrong, spacing is wrong, and yes I'm aware of the misspelling. But it gets the idea across.
For some reason, when I stepped away from it (and specifically, once I took this photo and scaled it down), it struck me that it looks like a book cover. I accidentally stumbled into that odd subset of graphical qualities that most book covers seem to fit into.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Third in my college doodle series. Yes, it has a solution. No, I don't have it solved anywhere. Yes, it took me forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
