Shout Out

I just need to post a big thank you to the site Great Wall. A while ago I had a custom giclee print made to hang at home. First of all, the price was right, the service was excellent, and the quality of the print was amazing.

That would have been more than enough to recommend them. But they've gone above and beyond. Several months ago, while we were dealing with the water damage in our condo, the hanging hardware on that print failed. It fell off the wall and incurred some minor damage. It was a small scrape and a dent to the bottom edge of the frame. It was really unfortunate. But the damage was slight, hardly noticeable even knowing it was there. So I figured I'd rehang it. So I emailed Great Wall asking for advice on an alternate hanging solution.

I did not expect the response. They apologized for the mounting hardware failure and said that if I just took a photo of the damage they'd send me a replacement print! How awesome is that? They even had no issue with the fact that it then took me 3 months to actually get around to taking the photo of the damage(we went out of town right after I got the response and it had totally slipped my mind).

So if you're looking to get prints of anything, or happen to need a huge wall mural from somewhere that's going to treat you right, Great Wall is a great place to start.

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.

Biogrty Lives

I'm at a loss. I should be celebrating the hope filled victory for the best presidential candidate this country has seen in decades. Instead I have to come to grips wit the fact that hatred and lies have motivated half of the citizens of California to vote to strip fellow human beings of their dignity.

No on 8 - Equal Rights

Apropos of nothing other than the fact that the election is less than a week away and constantly on my mind, I can't help but say something. It's unfathomable to me that Prop 8 stands a reasonable chance of passing in California. More infuriating are the lies and fear mongering that are being used to support it. If it were simply being supported by people who believe same sex marriage should not be recognized, that would be one thing (though I'd still have my disagreement with them). But it's being supported by people who believe it will somehow lessen their own marriage. Or lead to gay marriage classes in schools. Or force their church to allow gay sex orgies on the pulpit. Or whatever other nonsense their lie-spewing church leaders have fed them.

Freedom is freedom. Other people's relationships have nothing to do with my own. My marriage to my wife is no more diluted by two men marrying than it is by the countless loveless traditional marriages that end in divorce. It is unseemly that there is even the possibility of writing discrimination into our state constitution.

I can't wait until this election is over, it's not good for my blood pressure.

Tuesdays with drawing

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.

An Experiment: Day 1 - The Control

Once you've learned how to see, you see things that you don't even know you're seeing.

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.

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).

My Google Footprint

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

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.