Field Notes Sweet Tooth: A Sketchbook?

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Larry Marshall

I confess that I’ve been a subscriber to Field Notes, a series of small (3×5) collectible notebooks, for the past year. These are handy notepads but mostly they come with paper that’s too light for sketching, at least with fountain pens, and they generally come with pesky lines or grids on their pages.

A while back, though, they did one of their quarterly releases that included 70# white paper. It did have a light grid but it could be easily ignored and proved to be a useful sketchbook at least for those of us who like the convenience of having a small, light sketchbook with us at all times. And Field Notes have done it again… sort of.

This time they’re released a set of three colorful notebooks (Easter colors??) with a couple significant twists on their typical approach. This time, the 70# paper is BLANK… just like we like it. And it’s RED, BLUE and YELLOW… which we like…err…uhm… I’ll let you be the judge.

When I received mine I was very unhappy. Who the heck needs paper with these ridiculous colors. I threw them on the debris field and this my desk and didn’t even open them.

Then Tina Koyama “experimented.” She’s much smarter than I am and saw the potential. You can see her results here, and here. The results were undeniable; I had to try them.

Like Tina, I started with the red one. I took it with me when I went to meet some people to attend a small art exhibition. I stood outside and in spite of the cold decided that I should try to draw a lamp on red paper. This was not a great idea because my hands quickly became frozen and I was struggling to get the white Uniball pen to write in the cold. Nevertheless, I had started my adventure down the small red road.

That night I sat at my desk with a photo of a street lamp on my laptop. I only spent a few minutes on it but the red paper made it a lot of fun.

The next night I was watching TV with my wife and as I’m prone to do, I got a bit bored not doing at least one other thing while watching the glass teat. So, after checking my Instagram feed, becoming frustrated with vitriole on Twitter, and checking in to see what the Blue Jays are doing in spring training, I got my red Field Notes, my Platinum 3776 and I grabbed the glass container that holds my watercolor water on my desk. Watching TV became more fun as I drew that container.

I’m a guy who loves drawing lines more than anything else. I’m drawn to watercolors mostly cuz everyone else is, proving that I’m as much of a lemming as anyone else. But the red paper releases me from the thought of adding color so I can just enjoy drawing with my fountain pens. It won’t be the only sketching I do as I’m not sure how well it fits into my urban sketching passion, but for sitting around the house drawing, it’s pretty sweet… or is that sweet tooth?

I did give the approach a try while I was at the museum and drew this interesting flask. It’s a flask which was traditionally filled with perfume. Egyptians gave these to each other as part of a New Years celebration. This was fun and may show me the way to incorporate the toned paper into a location session as this only too me a few minutes between my normal sketching.

I was more doubtful about the other two colors but, again, Tina led the way. This morning I decided I should try the blue book so I could post a result in this blog post. I decided a fire hydrant might be nice and as I’d just filled a Pilot Metropolitan with Nooder’s Red-Black I started drawing. Not good…really bad, in fact. Noodlers Red-Black is supposed to be “water-resistant.” It is not… not even a little bit. I touched the drawing with a small brush with the idea of pulling a bit of shading from the lines and those lines just exploded. Thank goodness I was drawing a red thing because I was in chase my tail mode trying to clean up the mess. I wasn’t very successful and smarter people would probably not post this sketch. Here it is. Not the fault of the Field Notes but it’s a great example why I don’t use Noodler’s “water-resistant” inks.

And so I had to try again so I could provide something…anything in the blue book that looked ok. I did this quick architecture/landscape sketch from my limited imagination. Hope you like it.

Museum Sketching Fatigue

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Larry Marshall

As the internet brings me sketches of cherry blossoms, crocuses popping out of the ground, and various pronouncements of spring, we’re bracing for a foot of snow tonight. Spring will come to Quebec but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m going to live long enough to see it.

We were back at the museum again, a place I’m really tiring of this year. In the past the exhibits have been very interesting and full of variety but the main exhibit this winter has been Egyptian Magic and, well, there are only so many times one can sketch another stone statue of a mummy or the favorite Egyptian god, Bes. To make matters worse the exhibit is very dark. You can’t even see many of the display items it’s so dark and after a while it becomes downright depressing.

Stillman & BIrn Delta (8x10) softcover, Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & BIrn Delta (8×10) softcover, Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

Yvan and I sketched this guy because he was outside the exhibit and there was decent light. It’s not a real artifact, however, as you can buy one at the museum store 🙂

Stillman & Birn Delta (8×10) softcover, Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

After that I decided to go to the Australian aboriginal exhibit. It’s mostly tapestries and such but I found these guys fun. Meet Mimih, who is something of a jokester god. They’re tall (8-feet or so), thin and they hide in the cracks between the rocks in Arnhem land. It took forever to put all those dots on him with a Uniball white pen but at least there was light in the room.

The snow is starting. Maybe I should trade in my sketchbook for a snowboard (grin).

They Say It’s Spring

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Larry Marshall

They say that this is the first day of spring. It must be true but from where I stand, it doesn’t seem like it. It’s currently -15C outside. It looks like mother nature is going to tease us with a warm up this week, though, and we may actually get above freezing so there is hope.

During our Thursday sketchers gathering at the museum last week, I got in the mood to challenge my abilities to draw stuff and I chose subjects that weren’t all that photogenic but that I thought might be difficult for my brain to get my hand to move in the right direction.

Stillman & BIrn Delta (8x10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

Stillman & BIrn Delta (8×10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

I started with this headrest. I saw it as a challenge because it was both handmade from wood and also centuries old. Thus, in addition to having odd, curved surfaces, it was also somewhat asymmetric and the top was a bit askew. It was a fun subject.

There’s a new exhibit all about nanotechnology and they’re got a series of microscopes, showing their development history. I chose this early, somewhat simple microscope as an ellipse/alignment challenge. It worked out ok but I really should have drawn it larger and taken more time with it. Baby steps.

Stillman & Birn Delta (8×10), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon Black

The Value Of Warming Up As A Sketcher

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Larry Marshall

I’ve heard many times that sketchers should warm up. I suppose there’s a number of ways to do it. You could draw circles, do a bunch of hatching, maybe draw some thumbnails, or do a few quicksketches. I’ll be honest, I don’t do it. Too lazy I guess.

As part of my March “biding my time til spring” regime, I went to one of the malls with the idea of drawing people. These were quick sketches, of course, as people in malls are on the move. They might stop for a minute but that’s a “long pose” in mall time. What I noticed was that as I quick sketched people, my sketches got better (subjective assessment). Maybe it was the McDonalds coffee but I have to think that it may have been due to becoming warmed up. I’ll let you decide:

Page one:

This page definitely suffers from proportion problems, lots of errant lines, etc. I don’t judge them too harshly as each figure took no more than 20-30 seconds, but…

Page 2:

These seem a bit better but that guy in the middle really looks weird. He was very tall so maybe I just got carried away.

Page 3:

This is the third page I did and, in my opinion, they’re not bad at all. Maybe I was warmed up. Maybe I was just lucky. I still find that drawing people so quickly is really tough. There’s no time for assessing much of anything. I just keep the pen moving. What do you think? Do you warm up?

Chapel Sketching Again

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Larry Marshall

Winter persists and so does this sketcher. I met Yvan at the chapel associated with the Musée d’Amerique Francophone. It’s warm and there are lots of woodcarvings and fixtures to challenge a sketcher.

I drew this large light fixture and found it quite fun. As it turned out, there was to be a concert that afternoon and people were starting to arrive. Yvan and I decided to sit in the back of the room and sketch people as they arrived. That was fun and added to the enjoyment of the day.

I then got the wild idea to sketch a set of statues that were part of the immense alter at the front of the room. It was too far away to really see so I thought I might have some success by drawing the dark shadows and that maybe this would give me some guidance. This was the result. I might have learned something today. In any case, I was one day closer to spring.