Author Archives: Larry Marshall

It’s All About The Miles – Line Miles That Is

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Everyone instinctively knows that if you’re going to get good at anything you need to practice.  It seems harder for people to believe that artists aren’t born, they’re made, through lots of practice.  And in spite of knowing that “practice makes perfect”, we chafe against the notion that if we’re ever going to get better, we have to draw, and draw, and draw.

This is no more evident than in the endless attacks on Malcolm Gladwell’s so-called “10,000 hour rule.”  The number came from a single study he cites and how many practice hours accomplished violinists had done.  Since he wrote about this, he’s been taken to task for not making the point that it wasn’t simply “practice” and that the type of practice also plays a role.  Others have gone further and built a straw man, saying “Just because you practice 10,000 doesn’t mean you’re going to be an expert.”  They knock this straw man down in various ways (we can’t all be Picasso, so there) and feel they’ve made some sort of point.

Lots of overly-smug articles have been written to “put down” Gladwell’s commentary, but Gladwell wasn’t selling a number and he wasn’t claiming that everyone could become an expert at whatever they wanted.  He was saying was two things.  The first is that experts are made, not born.  The notion that people are born with special talents for music, art, or astrophysics just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.  Even the Mozart, the stereotypic wunderkind  didn’t write much worth listening to until he’d been writing for a decade.  We all know that it takes practice to improve so we sort of know this but just won’t let go of the notion that some people don’t come out of the womb with watercolor dripping onto their onesy in just the right places.  That this idea is silly was the point he was making.

The second thing Gladwell was talking about in this section of his Outliers book was that we, as a society, want to judge too soon.  If it takes a long time for someone to become expert in anything, shouldn’t we be more patient in evaluating the skills being perfected?  I was told around the age of 10-12 that I had no talent for art.  I believed them.  They were the teacher afterall.  On the streets people say to me all the time, “I wish I had your talent,” and when I can engage them in conversation I often hear that they’d tried to draw but “just didn’t have the talent for it.”   These people are evaluating way too soon.  As my buddy Yvan is fond of saying “the first 2000 sketches are the hardest.”

These opening remarks are becoming quite long so I’ll wind them up with this.  I’ve been drawing for five years.  I talk with other artists who are surprised that I’ve improved so much in such a short time.  I think my progress is painfully slow and sometimes frustrating.

But once in a while I see why our views are different when they proudly tell me that they draw at least once or twice a week.  I don’t draw every day but I’m sure I must draw at least 350 days a year.  Twice a week would be about 100 days a year.   Maybe years isn’t the right number from which to judge an artist’s experience.

The encouraging thing that comes from this is that anyone can speed up how quickly they improve simply by drawing more.  I think the way to do this is to stop thinking that everything you draw need be of something significant.  Baseball players spend time in the weight room not to hit home runs, but SO they can hit home runs.  Improving your art by drawing a crumpled piece of paper is the same thing as the weight room, only funner.

This year, I’ve posted 354 sketches in blog posts.  Nothing I do rivals DaVinci, but these are mostly what I consider “good” by my standards.  Below, well below, these in quality are several times that many small, generally quick sketches done in the name of training my visual cortex to interpret what I see and translate it to movements of my pen.  Here are some of those sketches that I’ve done the week leading up to Christmas.

Shopping Center:  This time of year malls should be avoided at all costs.  But it’s hard and when I found myself there and took out my small sketchbook, a Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover, and quickly drew the mass of people in front of me.  Great practice in capturing moving masses, staying loose and flexible in how you interpret what’s going on.

Coffee shop:  I went in to grab a coffee when I was early for a meeting and I drew this guy, or at least his head, as I sipped my Americano.

Instagram, Facebook, & Blogs:  I constantly find myself drawing stuff I see on social media.  Liz Steel was talking about doing thumbnails, I think, and there was a photo of this scene in her post.  I wondered what I could do if I drew it small (5×7) and very quickly.  It was an interesting experiment and once again let me know I wasn’t Liz Steel (grin).

Train Station:  We all have ‘stuff to do’ that puts us in places where we have to wait.  Chantal and I went to the train station to pick up our daughter who was coming home for the holidays.  We arrived five minutes before her train.  Sketchbook out again.

Health Services:  Waiting rooms used to be boring.  No more.  Jodie wanted to see her doctor while she was home so I sat in the waiting room and sketched.  Lots of people sketching, but I even sketched a coat that had been dumped on one of the seats.  Great practice and goodness knows, I need it.

TV scribbles:  Now we’re going to dip down to the bottom of the barrel.  When I watch movies or TV I draw.  I might set something on a table, draw something in the room, or maybe draw something I saw during a commercial.  It doesn’t matter as I’m just exploring, trying to learn how to put marks together.  I do this in cheap sketchbooks with no rhyme or reason for what’s on a page.  I’m a bit embarrassed to show these to you but here goes.

As you can see, there’s a reason I don’t put this stuff on my blog, but the process is both fun and very important to my learning process.  I’m putting in line miles.  Whether I need 10,000 hours or 100,000 to get “good” I do not know, or care.  What I do know is that I’m several miles closer to that goal.

If you’re hunting for a New Years resolution, you could pick a worse one than to decide to draw a little bit every day and to stop worrying about the results.  By the way, here’s a photo of the inside pocket of my winter coat.  It literally takes me a few seconds to be drawing.  Contents: Stillman & Birn softcover sketchbook, Platinum 3776, Pentel gray brush pen, mechanical pencil, Duke 209.  Pens do vary from time to time.

I hope someone is motivated to draw more by this post.  I hope I’ve provided a few laughs with these scribble sketches.  AND I hope you all have a happy and prosperous 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Trip To The Museum Before Christmas

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With my daughter coming home for Christmas, and Chantal getting a few days off, I won’t be doing any location sketching for a while.  But I did go with the gang to the museum for a pre-holiday sketching session.  They wanted to sketch some of the folk art nativity scene that is now in place there.  If nothing else, it demonstrates imagination on the part of its creator.  Have you ever seen a flying cow-fish?

I decided to sketch a wooden carving of a fusilier in another part of the museum.  It is fairly large, almost telephone pole diameter and quite black, as though it had been creosote treated.  In spite of this, it suffers from severe cracking in places.  Nevertheless, it’s an impressive carving, far more impressive than my sketch of it I’m afraid.  I got caught between wanting to include detail and the fact that the entire left side was in deep shadow, almost black.  Like every sketch, though, it was fun to do which is why I do them.

Stillman & Birn Beta (8×10) softcover, Platinum Carbon ink, Platinum 3776 pen

When I finished I headed up to the nativity scene and found everyone busy drawing.  They were talking about getting coffee, though, so I just sat down and waited for them.  The thing is, I can’t sit for very long without getting out a sketchbook and I did this quick sketch of Lisette, busy sketching some wooden guy (I think, but I was too far away to know for sure) in a large glass case.

Stillman & Birn Alpha (8.5×5.5) softcover

 

I’ll probably put together some sort of post during the holidays but I’m not sure what.  I willl be spending lots of time eating and sketching, though, so there will probably be something to post.  In the meantime, and since it’s December 23rd,

Happy Festivas

A Quick Trip Across The River

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We made a quick sketching trip across the St. Lawrence River, back to Maison Alphonse-Dejardins last week.  With the holidays rushing towards us I entirely forgot to write about it so here’s the abridged version.

We went.  We were there.  We had fun.  I drew a cabinet hanging on the kitchen wall, mostly because of all the goodies hanging from it.  I shot this photo of sketch and cabinet as I waited for the first bit of paint to dry.  Once dry, I added more color and this was the result.  I mucked up the shadows but nobody’s perfect 🙂  Done in a Stillman & Birn Beta (8×10) softcover.  I’ve fallen in love with these sketchbooks.   Same great paper as my hardcover books but at almost half the weight.

I thought I’d throw in this small sketch I did of one of the lights in the house.  I did it quickly a few weeks ago while waiting for others to finish up.

It was great to get out sketching on location again, in spite of the snow and the cold.  I suspect I’ll be returning to Maison Alphonse-Dejardins this winter.

Leaf-tailed Geckos In Quebec

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In the nanotechnology exhibit of our museum rests a glass box and inside is a stick and a small plant – a terrarium of sorts.  It’s raison d’etre is to house two of the oddest creatures – leaf-tailed geckos.

They’re only six inches long.  They have none of the flair of the whiptail lizards I used to chase when I lived in Arizona and none of the venom of the gila monsters I avoided.  No, if you walked by these guys in a forest you wouldn’t even see them and quite often that’s the situation in our museum as well.  I’d been waiting for today.

You see, the reason they’re in our nanotechnology exhibit is that they have nano-hairs on their feet.  These are hairs so fine that they can cling to glass, those hairs ‘sticking’ to glass molecules using Vanderwaal forces, the forces that hold molecules together.  And finally, today, one of these lizards was sticking to the glass out where I could see and draw him.

The view I had was a top view and I wanted to capture both its shape and the fact that when they do this they are squashed down flat to the glass.  They remind me of how Wile E. Coyote looks after the Roadrunner dropped an anvil on him.  They are really flat.  In the end it doesn’t make much of a sketch but I walked away quite satisfied that I’d accomplished the task.

Mistakes: The Best Learning Opportunity

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I have caught more than a little criticism when I’ve said things in internet groups that are less than flattering about my own sketches.  Mostly those comments come in the form of ‘don’t be hard on yourself’ and ‘there are no mistakes in art.’  I often wonder if these comments don’t say more about the people writing them than about me.  It’s always seemed to me that the best opportunities for learning come from when I’ve made a mistake.  If I don’t acknowledge my mistakes, I can’t learn from them.  One thing is clear, I NEVER learn anything from my successes.  They are but a reflection of what I already know.  It’s the mistakes that expose what I don’t know or things I’ve yet to master.

Maison Alphonse-DejardinsI study my mistakes often (I’m comfortable enough with myself that this doesn’t bother me) and I thought I’d share one such analysis.  This sort of thing doesn’t see the light of day very often, though, in this case I did post the sketch as documentation of a sketching session I did with Yvan at Maison Alphonse-Dejardins.

When doing a sketch like this I would normally draw, very lightly in pencil, a series of cubes to locate and proportion the two cabinets and the table.  I didn’t do that in this instance.  I just “went for it” as some would advocate.  Not bad advice but when the drawing becomes more complex, it’s far better to start with a bit of scaffolding for two reasons.  The first is that it lets you compare that scaffolding to what you’re looking at and allows you to correct it before continuing.  Second, once the scaffolding is in place, you can stop worrying about proportions/locations and just have fun drawing.

My approach started with “Simple enough, I’ll just draw the high and low angles of the scene and proceed from there.”  With those two lines in place and a horizon line, I felt everything else would fall into place.  You can see that decision reflected in the red horizon line and the two blue angle lines that frame the scene.

This is where things went haywire.  Notice the two  green lines.  I drew the left-most line first.  I’d let my vanishing point wander left quite a bit.  Then, wanting to nail down the table edge, I drew that line.  Notice that my brain pulled it back towards the proper vanishing point somewhat but as I drew it I’m sure I was looking at the countertop line and “saw” the relationship between them and my brain struck a compromise, trying to accommodate the proper vanishing point as well as the relationship between table and countertop.

In my opinion, THIS is the sort of frustration that comes from not doing preliminary scaffolding. You’re constantly chasing your last error, trying to accommodate it into the drawing and one thing is certain, two wrongs don’t make a right in sketching.

Notice that when I drew the doors on the lower cabinet (orange line) my brain had returned to the vanishing point and while these look the worst when it comes to alignment to the rest, they are actually more accurately drawn.

So, what did I learn?  First, the power of early scaffolding (or blocking in if that’s the terminology you prefer) is invaluable.  I actually know that but I guess I needed a reminder.  Sadly, this step is so under-reported when people teach sketching that I didn’t learn it until I’d been sketching for a couple years and it seems that too often I revert back to my pre-scaffolding days, generally with the results you see above.

The other thing I learned is that while my brain tries to accommodate for an error, even without my knowledge, it doesn’t do a very good job of it.  In this post-analysis, I’m not sure what could have been done at this stage as long pen lines are hard to move, so maybe I should forgive it for not finding a solution.

In the end, by actually thinking about what I did wrong, no emotional trauma occurred but I did learn something.  Maybe this will reinforce my brain to insist on locating objects and getting their proportions correct, BEFORE I start drawing rather than trying to fix errors as they occur.  Hope this short analysis has been helpful to some.