Archive for September, 2016

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Snapchat in the Garden of Good and Evil

September 25, 2016

Next up in the “big head people with different backgrounds” series…

(I need to find a shorter way to describe these things.)

This one is my brother. I won’t identify which one (I have three) because the bro in question was horrified by this representation of him. And to be fair, it truly is a horrible representation.

But hey, I’ve been saying all along that the person I’m looking at is merely a jumping off point. From there I blow up their head and distort their features. Sometimes it’s intentional. Sometimes it’s not.

When he saw the initial pencil sketch he said, “Where are my muscles?”

Then he said, “I guess I’d better shave.”

snapchat-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil

Anyhow… I did the sketch one night while he and I (and some other fam) were having dinner outside. He’d been snapchatting all day, which is why he is staring at his phone.

SIDE NOTE: I am going to take this opportunity to rant about something that’s been getting on my nerves lately.

There are a lot of cranky old curmudgeons (aka COCs) who like to make stupid jokes about millennials (I’m looking at you WWDTM) and gripe about how they are a bunch of lazy entitled brats who just stare at their phones and take selfies all all day.

Well, I have three things to say to you COCs:

  1. Oh shut up! Do you realize that people have been making the old “this new generation is sooo lazy” complaint since BIBLICAL TIMES? Really, they have. Here is just one of many articles quoting angry old fuddy duddies who’ve been saying the same damn thing since 20 BC.
  2. I happen to think Millennials are pretty freaking impressive. Most of the ones I know are very smart and open-minded. And they’re doing a lot of cool, creative, ambitious work. Meanwhile, a big chunk of the Gen X-ers and Boomers I know seem to be spending quite a lot of their free time watching Netflix, posting selfies, and complaining about Millennials. (Contrary to popular opinion, oldsters post a lot of selfies too).
  3. As someone who likes to sketch strangers in public, I find it VERY convenient that so many of them are staring at their phones nowadays. Not only are they keeping still, they are completely unaware that I’m staring at them. The smartphone phenomenon has led to a huge reduction in awkward, “Are you drawing me?” encounters.

END OF SIDE NOTE/RANT

So back to the drawing. When coming up with ideas for the background, I tried to think of stuff that my bro was into. One of the first things that came to mind was Doctor Who.

And what is the best Doctor Who episode of all? The weeping angels, of course!

weepingangel

So I added a weeping angel type statue to the background.

Then that statue made me think about the book/movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which I always thought was the best title ever. I saw that movie in the theater entirely because of the awesome title, and because I loved the creepy cool poster.

(BTW, the movie was disappointing. Very boring IMHO. Maybe the book is better.)

midnightinthegarden

The poster has this statue of a sad girl in the middle of a swampy overgrown graveyard. So I added in my own swampy background, with the same sort of alternating rays of dark and light cutting diagonally across.

My biggest regret here is that I jumped the gun and colored in my brother before figuring out what I was going to do with the background.

If I had known I was going to do the whole creepy-swampy-statue thing, I would not have used such bright colors in the foreground. I would have tried to integrate him into the setting more, like I did with the Frankenstein drawing.

Too bad I can’t hop into a TARDIS and go fix it.

Ah well. A not-so-great drawing is still a hundred times better than a non-existent one. Plus, I had a lot of fun coming up with the setting for this one.

Even though I have regrets about each of my drawings, I usually have things I am secretly proud of too. Whether it’s a happy accident, something I learned while working on it, or just a nice memory attached to it, I’m always glad I have the drawing in the end.

The thing I secretly like about this one is the smartphone in the statue’s hand. I know it’s corny, but when I came up with that idea I was pretty darn pleased with myself. It’s that one little detail that turns this picture into a story.

Failing forward!

Posted in Nature, People & Places, Settings & Scenery, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Monsters are Real

September 18, 2016

I like monsters. Especially the old Universal Monsters. The Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Vincent Price stuff from the 30’s and 40’s. I particularly love the posters. Like this and this. Whenever I see one of those old sci fi horror posters my heart kinda skips a beat.

I wish I enjoyed actually watching the movies. They’re fun, but (IMHO) they never quite live up to the promise of the poster. And yes I do realize that any movie made almost 100 years ago is not going to have the pacing a 2016 audience is used to, but still… in the Bride of Frankenstein the Bride doesn’t even show up until the last five minutes of the movie! If you call the movie BRIDE of Frankenstein then I think you owe it to the audience to give the bride a little more screen time.

Anyhow, when I see those old posters they get my imagination going. Pretty much every play I have ever written has a monster in it somewhere. Sometimes other people will suggest that I do this as a metaphor for how people can be monsters, but if that’s true it’s a subconscious thing. Metaphors are for people smarter than me.

Okay enough with the random ramble about monsters. I’ve posted recently about how I’ve been doing these distorted pencil sketches of people wherever I can, and then after a little time and brainstorming, I will ink it and add some kind of background setting. Here’s my latest drawing like that.

monsters-are-real

I sketched this guy at Space 55 one night, and then a few days later when looking back at it I realized that the shadows under his eyes, the hollowed out cheeks, and the long neck made him look a little mad scientisty.

So I decided to put him in a Frankenstein-type laboratory. I google image searched “Frankenstein comic strips” or something like that, to generate some ideas for simple things I could put in the background that would suggest a lab. The background that I came up with is a mishmash of about 3 or 4 of those.

That’s right, I’m a thief.

By the way, if you haven’t read the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon run–don’t zombie walk–to your local library and get it.

Initially I wanted to do a really limited palette on this. I was planning to go monochromatic blue. But then for some reason I didn’t think that would work, so I expanded the palette to cool colors. I’m glad I did. I like how that blue works against the green.

When I look at this drawing I notice that my ellipses are off, the shadow under Frankie’s operating table is going the wrong way, the machine on the right could have been drawn a lot cleaner, and the window ledge is at totally the wrong angle. That’s annoying because when I was inking it I consciously tried NOT to do these very things.

But after all these years, it might be time to embrace the fact that mistakes, flaws and deformities are just a part of my style. My drawings are clunky and awkward, kinda like me. Maybe I should go with it.

monsters-are-real-and-ghosts-are-real-too

 

Posted in Color, People & Places | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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OP

September 7, 2016

I love drawing statues and sculptures. Mostly because of the obvious reason: they don’t move. But I also love the challenge of trying to make them actually look like a statue. I rarely succeed at this challenge. Correction: I never succeed at this challenge. Every time I try to draw a sculpture of a person, it just ends up looking like a person, not a sculpture of one.

Here is one of those times when I failed. This is a drawing of a bronze sculpture at the Phoenix Art Museum. The PAM is one of my favorite places to take my sketchbook. The special exhibits are great, but the permanent collection is where I like to draw. And even though I been in there a million times, I always seem to find something that I never appreciated before. That’s what happened with this sculpture – Apache by Malvina Hoffman.

I went to the museum last spring with my husband Richard and my friend Laurie to see the Michelangelo exhibit. Afterwards we headed over to the permanent collection, and they wandered off while I sketched. I had just finished drawing this other sculpture which came out okay-ish, when Richard and Laurie came back and said they found something they thought I would love. Then they led me over to Apache.

They were right. I probably spent about an hour on this one. Maybe more, maybe less. I really don’t know, because it was one of those magical times when you lose all sense of time and place and just get lost in the thing you’re creating. It was almost like going underwater. Everything outside of me, the statue, and my sketchbook became blurry and muffled.

Apache PAM

When I finished it was like coming up for air. I remember looking around and thinking “Oh look, it’s the real world.” Then I looked at my drawing, as if for the first time, and thought “Oh hey, that’s really good.”

Or at least, really good for me. And that’s all I care about anymore. Doing the best drawing that I can do. Not trying to compare myself to other artist and then hate myself when I fall short.

My drawing still doesn’t look like a sculpture, but I like how the expression on his face came out. It’s actually a little different from the one on the OP*. I think my guy has a more suspicious look on his face than Malvina Hoffman’s does. He kinda looks like he’s giving someone the side eye. I guess it’s because of that dark line that goes up the slope of his nose and into his eyebrow.

I found Richard and Laurie in the museum cafe and showed them my drawing. They seemed genuinely impressed, which made me happy. Then they let me eat their leftover omelettes, which made me REALLY happy.

When we went on this museum visit I was in the middle of a very long period of creative frustration. Actually more like despair. A big writing project that I was (and still am) working on was not coming together, despite months (okay, years) of work that I’d been putting into it. And because of it, a low level bummer cloud had been hovering over my head for a while. Spending a few hours at the museum, hanging with two wonderful people, seeing lots of great art, and creating something myself–something that–

A) I was happy with

-and-

B) was actually complete

…was surprisingly soul-filling. It really lifted spirits that day. I think that’s why I love this drawing so much. Whenever I look at it, I am reminded of a really happy day in the middle of a pretty tough time.

Also, I just love using black and white conte on grey-toned paper. I really should do that more.

 

*OP – Original Piece

Posted in Gray Sketchook, Museums and Exhibits, Objects | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »