Progress

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.

Architexture

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.

Use-Reference

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.

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.

Couldn't have been a nicer day

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?!

A series is born

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.