Hey everybody, take a look at this. It’s a nifty travel palette that packs up small, provides two nice water holders and it fits over your leg so you don’t have to hold it when you paint. It’s part of an Indiegogo campaign so I pledged to get one. It’s worth a look. There are a bunch of photos, including a series of their prototype.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/portable-painter-painting-travel#/
While our Museum of Civilization doesn’t have much to offer a sketcher this winter, it is pretty much the only game in town so a group of us were there, trying to take stock of sketching subjects for winter.
I’ve decided that I will sketch a bunch of the Inuit soapstone carvings because 1) they are available and 2) they offer lots of compound curves and soft edges to challenge my drawing skill. Hopefully I’ll get better at them but until then, here are a couple that I did on Thursday. Stillman & Birn Alpha (5.5×8.5) softcover.
This is an Inuit hunter, hiding behind a hide-covered shield, trying to sneak up on a seal.
This one speaks volumes about the rigors of living in the extreme north. This woman, wearing a parka and gloves is shown giving birth. That’s tough work if ever I’ve seen it.
From the title of this post you might be wondering if I’ve gone mad. You might be asking “What does Designing Creatures & Characters have to do with being a street sketcher in Quebec City?” Truth is, I bought this book because of the words at the bottom of the cover, Marc Taro Holmes. I’m a big fan. I love his art and because he’s so giving of his time and expertise online, if he’d illustrate the Quebec phone book I’d buy one, and I never call anyone any more.
This book is about how to become a concept artist, working in an animation studio. I know nothing of that world and I figured I’d get this book, flip through it, enjoy the pictures and put it on a shelf. But I found myself reading it, cover-to-cover, gleaning little bits and bobs while learning how character development works in the minds of people with imagination. Wish I had some (grin).
What I have to confess is that I’m not in a position to review this book. It’s beautiful but beyond that, I’m out of my depth. The book is divided into four sections: Ideation, Anatomy, Animation, and Illustration. Each section presents information about its subject and then there are nine projects for the reader to accomplish. It might be to develop a set of fishes inhabiting the sea in a video fishing game or development of a group of possibilities for a warlord character. One project is the development of a crew of a pirate ship.
Each of the major sections builds on its predecessors and eventually you are at a point where you have fully-rendered characters, drawings showing detailed construction information, and drawings showing how the character moves and any special features of said character. It’s all pretty cool.
To be honest, I got the most from the Ideation section. This section is closest to what I do. It’s sketching and in this case, it’s sketching in the form of brainstorming ideas, dumping as many as you can on the page so they can be visualized and evaluated. This was where I surprised myself because I found myself scribbling copies of some of those sketches and I had a ball doing them. I even started adding stuff to those sketches, or removing things. To be sure, I would have been laughed out of any concept director’s office but it was fun nevertheless.
I’m not a fan of digital rendering as it all looks the same to me so when the book ventured further into a concept artist’s process, the book sort of lost me. All I could do was look at the pictures because I have no idea how to digitally render a cube, let alone complex creatures. I wish I could say more about this book but, quoting Clint Eastwood, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” What I can say is that IT’S A MARC TARO HOLMES BOOK and I love it.
I’ve talked about how hard it is for me to transition from street sketcher to indoor sketcher every winter and that saga continues. I’m starting to think, though, that my situation this year is a bit different. I say this because the depth of my ‘doldrums,’ as I’ve called them are far deeper than normal and I believe the reason is that I’m also at a point where I want to shift gears a bit, take it up a notch, move outside my comfort zone, or whatever euphemism fits.
As the summer has worn on I’ve also started thinking about watercolors beyond using them like crayons and I want to learn how how those brush things work. I’ve been so concentrated on learning to draw that I’ve completely ignored color, viewing it as an after-the-fact thing. I also want to extend/expand my visual brain, improving my visual memory, textures vocabulary, ability to see half-tones, etc. This stuff is hard and requires at a shift in my activity. Couple this with the outdoor->indoor shift that’s taking place at this time of year and my poor, very old brain, is just a bit confused, maybe even intimidated. Getting it to act seems hard right now.
I talked a bit with my buddy Yvan and he suggested that I get up in the morning and do “something simple.” He’s also been telling me forever that I should draw from imagination, not by drawing dragons but by drawing things I’ve seen, or at least representative of things I’ve seen. He suggests this will change the way I see the things I draw even when I’m on location. Since he’s rarely been wrong when it comes to things “art,” I think he’s right about this as well.
Note the wrinkles as the photocopy paper rebelled against the quick swipes of watercolor
And so, this morning, I got up, grabbed a piece of photocopy paper (does this mean I haven’t completely bought into the idea?) and I did a quick drawing of a lamppost coming out of a pile of sunflowers that I saw on Ile d’Orleans this summer. I’m sure it’s not completely accurate but I think it’s close to the real thing. Most of all, I felt a process I’ve never felt before, a questioning of how big/small things were, how one thing related to another and I think this is the stuff Yvan was talking about.
I sipped some coffee and thought some about what I’d just done, which in turned caused me to grab another sheet of photocopy paper and I started doing really quick sketches of the lamp using a bunch of different pens. No attempt was made to be accurate as mostly I was thinking about how each pen felt and what kind of line did it make. I include it here just to document this journey, not that it is anything worthy of looking at.
Winter may not be such a bad thing for me at this point. I’m going to try to set up a “studio,” which for me amounts to having some sort of uncluttered surface and I’m going to experiment, draw from memory, and maybe even train my visual memory. I’m starting to get excited by the prospects.
Oh…while I’m writing, here’s a quick sketch I did from Marc Taro Holmes new book on being a concept artist. Marc’s version is much better (grin). I hope to talk about this book soon.
[Note: I wrote this last week and forgot to push the “publish” button. Here it is, albeit it’s a bit of old news]
Once a year I have a very humbling sketching experience. Actually, I have a lot of those but this annual event is particularly impactful. A group of us go to the local École de Cirque, a circus school in an old church, to sketch the circus students while they practice. Quite separate from sketching, it’s a very exciting time because the main hall is full of trampolines, trapezes, and open areas where these very talented people practice their trade. If nothing else it informs your brain that hard work is the road to being “talented.”
Done with Lamy ink, melted with a waterbrush. These were ‘warm ups’ done before we actually entererd the hall.
For me to begin sketching at the École de Cirque is hard for two reasons. The first is that I’m simply mesmerized by what is before me. There was a juggler who was balancing a ring on his head while juggling several other rings, passing smaller ones through the ring on his head as he juggled. He was amazing.
The other reason I have a hard time is that it’s just soooooo hard. I’m not good at sketching people anyway, but I can hold my own when sketching people who are sitting or standing and I even have a good chance at capturing people wandering around in a shopping center. In all these cases, though, I have points of reference. Feet on the ground, heads above feet… at least that. But in the case of circus performers I don’t even have that and I get very confused, very quickly.
I switched to a Duke 209 (fude pen) and waterproof ink. I struggle with fude pens but wanted to give them another try. Color was added after the fact and in somewhat haphazard fashion I confess.
There’s another thing and I wonder if I’m the only one who struggles with this. I can’t convince my brain that I actually have time to sketch these people. My brain seems to decide that if I can’t do the sketch in 10-15 seconds, I can’t do a sketch, which is untrue, even with the performers moving around so much. But my brain directs me to give up completely on size and proportion estimation and to just start scribbling – the end result being people that look like space aliens or melted people. I’m sharing some of these with you as an example of poor sketches that were a lot of fun to do. Too often I think fun and product get tied too closely together by many. They have nothing to do with one another.
Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover (5.5×8.5) sketchbook was used for all these sketches. I really love this format for doing this sort of sketching.
Somehow, during the page above I decided that a divide and conquer strategy was in order, or maybe I was just fascinated how the well-muscled athletes provided a great opportunity to do “life drawing” while muscles were being exercised. That turned out to be a lot of fun.
In the end, I had a bunch of sketchbook pages and memories. Memories of how amazing these people were; memories of how hard it was for me to draw them, and memories of how much fun sketching is even if it’s not going as well as I’d like. I thought it only fitting for me to share these pages with you. I hope all of you are saying “I can do better than that” (grin)