Some More Daily Doodles

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I thought I’d post some more of my daily doodling, mostly because my doodles from the past couple days have been different than those I posted in my last blog.  Rather than scan these I just took photos of the pages.  Hope that’s ok.

Sometimes I just start doodling and this typically means a labyrinth of pipes and containers.  This little one, done in my scribble book is no exception.

There’s a white, porcelain cookie jar in our kitchen and I did a quick scribble of it in the same sketchbook.

I got to do a few people sketches yesterday.  These were done in a 5×8 sketchbook using a fine Micron pen.

I’m a big fan of France, aka “Wagonized” and I was watching one of her ballpoint pen videos.  While she did a very nice drawing I did this tiny prairie dog in my scribble book using a purple ballpoint pen.  I’ve got to pay more attention to ballpoints.  They sure are handy and CHEAP.

We’ve remained above freezing for the past 24 hours.  This may not seem like much but for us it’s significant.  Some finches showed up at my feeder today too.  Spring is definitely in the air.

Preparing For A Season Of Street Sketching

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It’s -10C outside my window at the moment and the sidewalks here are full of ice, very lumpy ice.  But weather reports suggest that melting should commence in earnest starting tomorrow.  My daughter tells me that Montreal sidewalks are free of ice so that’s a hopeful sign.  Anyways, very soon I’ll be joining those of you who are currently scurrying about your cities drawing cherry blossoms and crocuses (grin).

I’ve been involved in learning to paint, or attempting to and because of that I haven’t been drawing much.  I decided that I should get some pointy sticks out and start pushing them about to see if I still can.  Also, in the recent past I made a comment about not posting my casual sketches and someone asked me why not and encouraged me to do so.

In answer to the first question I just don’t want my practice to feel like I’m “producing content.”  I confess that I sometimes think all the posting to the internet may be one of the worst things that has happened to artists though I confess to being addicted to look at sketches produced by others.  Those views cause me to keep a lot of what I do off the internet.  It’s also time consuming to scan/post every sketch I do.  In short, I’m lazy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alvin Mark posts a lot of great vlogs on his YouTube channel and he was doing a sketchbook tour.  I took that as an opportunity to quickly sketch some of the people he had sketched on the Singapore trains.

 

While sitting in my studio/office I just started drawing stuff, using ballpoint pens.  The red pen was giving me a lot of trouble and I made a mess of the scissors trying to chase the intermittent lines it was creating/

Here’s a page from the small scribble book I carry everywhere.

 

Last and probably least, I was enjoying a snack and quickly moved this stub of a pencil around until the page resembled something.

I’ve found that my time hiding from COVID and making messes with oil paints have left my pointy stick skills rusty.  I’m hoping to get lots of miles done this summer.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s better To Paint Trees

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“Everytime I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.” — John Singer Sargent

If the guy who is considered one of the best portrait painters of all time said this, what chance do I have when painting a portrait.  I’ve never painted a portrait before.  I’m also not very good at painting anything (grin).

These days I always find myself doing something I’ve never done before so why should this be any different?  Some call it getting “out of your comfort zone.”   Have you noticed, though, people who say that are always talking about what someone ELSE should do (grin).  Anyway, I got it into my head that I wanted to paint a portrait of my daughter.  Initially I was going to do it in oils but at the last minute decided to do a watercolor portrait.

There’s another piece of advice people give to wanna-be portrait painters.  Get a good photo, with high contrast and with lighting that creates a distinct light and shade division of the face.  Called Rembrandt lighting (named after the paints no doubt) this is supposed to make it easier to define the face on a two-dimensional surface.

So, what do I do?  Well, when I was having a conversation with my daughter, using Google DUO, I did a bunch of screen grabs of her.  Most were fuzzy because she was moving or blah because she just staring at her own phone.  But one screenshot caught her with a smile.  Unfortunately, most of the hair on the right side of her face was out of frame and my face, appearing in a little window, covered up the top left of her hair/forehead.  The DUO symbol rested squarely on top of her right eye.  So….as I did the underdrawing I had to reconstruct a bunch of my rather poor photo reference.

Undaunted by these facts and lack of artistic skill, I went to work, quickly learning that I still have a lot of problems mixing watercolors when the desired result is subtle value changes when working with light tones.  I also learned that I have no idea how to paint hair that actually looks like hair.  Oh well, here is the result.  My daughter is so nice.  In spite of it all, she’s still talking to me.

Can I Do Painterly?

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I’ve been doing a bunch of “starts” in an attempt to get better at starting an oil painting.  I’ve tried all the basic approaches (eg – with & without a sketch, with/without underpainting) and I think this has been a positive exercise.  It doesn’t, however lead to things I can post as nothing ever gets finished.

Since I haven’t posted in a while, I took one of those starts and decided to complete it in a “painterly style,” whatever that is.  Though I’m not very successful at it, my tendency is to produce a more illustrative product.  It’s against my nature to purposely try to paint/draw something that’s less than a complete representation of the subject.  Never do I try to include brush strokes and such in the finished result.  But, against my nature I’ve tried to do so here.

It’s certainly less “real” than most of what I’ve done and it’s also true that brush strokes are part of the result.  So this is my attempt at “painterly.”  I don’t think this works well for a single fruit painting (6×6) but I can see myself doing a bowl of fruit this way.  To me, though, the result just looks out of focus (grin).

Doing The 100 People Challenge

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This week many people are drawing, or trying to draw, 100 people in five days.  Run every year by Marc Taro Holmes and Liz Steel, this is a popular annual event.  It’s no small coincidence that the two people leading this charge are two of the fastest sketchers I’ve seen and a pair that place a VERY high premium on sketching quickly.  I don’t say that as a negative, just a fact.

I still remember the first time someone suggested that I draw people on the move.  I was sketching with a couple people, both my betters, and they said, “Let’s go downtown and draw pedestrians waiting for the light to change.  I didn’t see my face at the time, but I’m sure my expression was “Are you nuts?”  The thought of drawing a person, a whole person, as 15-20 seconds was so far beyond my comprehension that I knew it was a joke.  And it was a joke… when I tried it that first time.

Sadly, the people who do this stuff regularly think it’s normal and so they don’t talk much about how people who don’t find it normal can do it.  I thought, rather than just another rally cry for the event, I’d mention a couple solutions that some use to do this.  I should preface this with the important fact.  All of these approaches are done by people who, if they have the time, can draw very detailed people.  There’s an old adage that if you can’t draw something slowly, you can’t draw it fast.  I think that’s true.

I’m going to describe “capturing” a character with the full knowledge that the results aren’t going to hang in the Louvre anytime soon (grin).  You’ve got to be ok with that before you launch into the 100 People Challenge.

Draw the bare minimum

The first thing you have to understand is that you’re not doing Sargent-level portraiture.  You don’t have time.  Many add two things together to accomplish the task.  They draw their people very small and do little more than draw lines for legs and arms with a round ball for a head.  I’d call this the stickman approach except that most grab for drawing something a bit more complete, where the arms and legs are positioned, bent appropriately, and so you can easily see what the character was doing.  This is a really good approach if you’re happy with these simple results.

Loosy Goosy approach

Artists throw around the term “loose” a lot.  With no solid defnition of the word it’s said that we should all be this, so we’re not “tight.”  My guess is that a lot of the great artists of our past would take issue with this but that’s how the modern world rolls.

Anyway, a lot of artists, realizing that there’s little time for drawing leg and arm musculature accurately in the few seconds they have simply abandon the idea entirely, drawing arms and legs heading off in the right direction but not necessarily with proper geometry.  They keep everything “loose” and are ok with that, no matter how “tight” they might do their next studio portrait.

Sweat the small stuff later approach

This takes on different forms depending upon the artist.  Some will draw an action line defining the subject’s orientation and then add only a few points defining joints, clothing boundaries, etc.  Some will go over these drawings with more ink later, correcting errors.  Others will do a complete contour of the subject while thinking about how color will help them complete the figure.

Still others will do a continuous, or nearly so, pencil sketch, all the time thinking of what they’re going to do with color to bring the character to life.  There is no one better at doing this approach than Marc Holmes.  He is so adept with both pencil and brush that it’s a joy to watch him draw characters.

All of these approaches require that you’re planning on working on your drawings later, probably at home.  The hard thing for many is drawing while thinking color, light and shade, etc. placing lines to indicate shadow borders, etc.

Make sure you’re drawing someone who will stay put for a couple minutes (grin)

The master of this approach is Alvin Mark.  His targets are people eating, people on buses, people on trains, anywhere that people stop.  His ability to draw precise contour drawings of people, reflecting not only their personality but their weight and its balance, is uncanny.  But he chooses his targets wisely.

So, these are some of the ways that people accomplish the task.  What I haven’t said is that it’s a LOT of fun and the more you do of it the easier it becomes.  I’m still not good at it and may never be.  I’m the slowest sketcher on the planet and so my “skills” aren’t amenable to quick sketching.  When sketching people I guess I’m closer to a “loosy goosy” sketcher than anything else.  I’ll let you decide.  These are the sketches I did yesterday, during the first day of the event.