Archive for the ‘People & Places’ Category
Lincoln
January 28, 2013With that Lincoln movie up for an Oscar this year, it got me thinking about all the sketches I’ve done of Lincoln over the years. He was kind of an odd looking guy with that long gaunt face and weird beard, which makes him very fun to draw. Lucky for me, there seems to be more statues of him around than anyone else in history. So whenever I come across one, I sketch it.
Disneyland art gallery, 2011
Mount Rushmore, 2003
Lincoln Memorial, 2009
Lincoln Memorial, 2nd attempt, 2009
Mount Rushmore, 2012
A park in Portland, 2004
Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Disneyland, 2012 (I did this one in the dark)
Sitters
January 16, 2013
Quality
January 16, 2013This is my grandmother-in-law. A wonderful woman with some great stories. I did this last summer in Buffalo. At the time of this drawing I was trying to focus on varying the line quality.
A friend, a brother, some strangers, and a duck.
January 11, 2013These sketches don’t share any sort of theme or anything. Just some random stuff from the past month or so…
Here is my friend Jess at her baby shower (obviously). Since I am neither a mother, nor motherly, I made sure to bring my sketchbook so that I would have something to do while all the other women were talking about boppies and rompers and whatever the hell baby parents are into these days. Of course I totally forgot that a sketchbook is basically a kid magnet. Shortly after beginning this sketch I looked up to find a whole crowd of little girls sitting around watching me. The most common question they asked: “Are you drawing?”
Here we have Richard in a waiting room. If you want to know why he is nervous, the answer is that he is always nervous. I like this drawing because I actually managed to pull off that whole across the page thing. Richard likes it because I gave him cool hair.
Here we have Scrooge McDuck. I copied this from the cover of an old comic book I found. Kind of a nostalgic thing for me. I first learned to draw by copying Disney characters out of comic books.
Next up is a guy from a play reading that I went to a couple weeks ago. With this guy I was trying to focus on the wrinkles in his clothing, and in doing so I forgot to pay attention to the angles on his glasses. I see now that I’ve drawn them askew.
Here is another gal from that same reading.
This woman was also from that reading. When I did this one I was trying to capture her posture in the chair, and also her Chuck Taylors. I kinda blew the proportions. Her head is too big.
Here is a quick gesture of a couple eating together at a restaurant in Sedona. I thought it was kind of weird how close they were sitting together. They must have been a newly in love couple.
This is what my little brother Tanner would look like if he had an enormous chin. I don’t know what’s up with the chin. I think I was sitting at a weird angle or something. Yeah that’s it. The angle. Nothing to do with my lack of ability. Anyway, I remember a long time ago, like 10+ years ago, I was doing a sketch of my family one night when we were out to dinner, and I ran out of room before I got a chance to draw Tanner. So basically I had drawn a family portrait sans Tanner. When he looked at it and saw that he’d been excluded it made him cry (he was like 7 at the time). I felt horrible. So now I try to draw that kid whenever I get a chance. (You’d think by now I’d get his chin right.)
Sloppy Sketches
December 1, 2012
Harry and the Potters
August 1, 2012
Today (July 31st) is the birthday of JK Rowling and Harry Potter. Therefore it seems like the right day to post this sketch. This was from the Harry and the Potters concert at the library last week. The band is made up of two geeky yet adorable brothers who put on glasses and Gryffindor ties and travel the country singing songs about Harry Potter. I’ve been luck enough to see them twice now. They put on a fun show.
Who’s Scruffy Looking?
July 15, 2012On the flight home from Buffalo I got trapped in the window seat, with Richard in the middle and a somewhat portly fellow in the aisle. Given this obstacle, as well as the wonderful hospitality of the Southwest Airlines flight crew and their “No standing in the aisle!” rule, I never attempted to leave my seat. Also there were several (I’m talking dozens) of crying babies on the plane, so it truly was the skyway to hell.
To distract myself from this excruciating insanity I did what I always do…got out my sketchbook and started drawing Richard. And since I had a lot of time and no place to go, I gave it way more attention than I normally would and really tried to focus on capturing what was actually there, versus what I thought was there.
The biggest challenge was that section that goes from his chin to his neck. My natural instinct would be to make that more of a horizontal angle, which is what I did at first. But as I studied and restudied it I realized that the chin/neck thing actually angled downward, and at a much greater degree than I would have thought. At least, that’s how it appeared in that moment from where I was sitting.
I really struggled with this because drawing it the way I truly saw it made him appear, well, kinda fat. I went back and forth a dozen times, sketching and erasing, sketching and erasing. By drawing it the way I thought it was, it came out looking more like Richard. By drawing what I saw, he came out looking fat. In the end I went with the downward angle version because the whole point of the exercise was to draw what I saw, and dammit that’s what I saw.
As you can see, this was done at the end of our vacation, when he hadn’t shaved for several days.
I sketched the whole thing out in pencil first and then went over it in ink, adding details and using pens of various thickness. Richard watched as I put the finishing touches on the hair–which is one of the things I have the most trouble with. As I continued to add more swoops, and curls, and hatch marks, he warned me to stop before I went too far.
“Otherwise the entire focus will be on the hair,” he said.
I think Richard may have learned a few things by osmosis.
A Few Random Sketches
July 4, 2012Last year my friends, my husband, and myself took a quick trip to LA for the weekend. We went there specifically to see a couple of art exhibits, yet my best sketch from the whole trip is from this burger joint. That was a damn good burger. If I could go back in time I would have made that burger about four times bigger and really spent some time on the details. But then again, if I had done that it would have gotten cold before I could eat it. There are some sacrifices that I just won’t make for my art.
This is a stuffed dog that my brother won and then gave to me when we were at the Santa Monica Pier back in 2007. Notice I say “won and then gave me”, and not “won for me”. My bro has an addiction when it comes to carnival games. His desire to win stuffed animals borders on obsessive. But when it’s all over he doesn’t really want the poor creatures. In this case I was the lucky recipient of this floppy little dog. Ain’t he cute? We named him Thestral after the creatures from Harry Potter books 5-7.
I did this one at Royal Taj, a little Indian restaurant in Tempe. I guess it’s a teapot or something. It is definitely not a magic lamp because I rubbed it and no genies came out.
Pub Sketching
June 8, 2012I’m not big into music. I mean, I like it and all, but I don’t seem to appreciate it as much as everyone else does.
That said, about eight years ago I was walking back from Octoberfest and there was this band playing and they were so awesome that I stopped to watch. The next thing I knew, two hours had gone by and I hadn’t even realized it.
The band is called Traveler and they play all kinds of music inspired by the music of other countries. Gypsy, Celtic, Middle Eastern…stuff like that. When they play outdoors there are usually some belly dancers around. The lead singer, Scott Jeffers, plays the fiddle like nobody’s business, and sometimes he plays other some other cool-looking, instruments too.
The other night we caught them playing at the Dubliner and I did my best to document the experience…
I sketched these out in pencil first, then went back over with a pen. Then I used a couple different grey markers for a quick and dirty wash effect.
I always have a tough time drawing musicians because instruments are pretty intricate looking and if the person moves, even just a little bit, the angle of the instrument completely changes, so I either have to start over, or just fake it.
These guys are especially tough to draw because they have a lot of energy and they move around a lot. I was happy I managed to get anything down at all.
After I got home, I decided to add some color in order to better capture the mood of the evening. So I scanned a couple in and painted them with Corel…
See those fancy stars in the background? I spent a lot of time trying to create something like that in Photoshop. Then, after failing miserably, I discovered that Painter actually has a brush called “sparkly stars” or something like that, which created the exact effect I was looking for.
After I painted this second one, I started to think that it might actually make a better composition if I cropped the lead singer out and left just the guitar players.
Does that bass player look cool as hell or what? I had a lot fun trying to capture his chill posture and the serious expression on his face. I also spent a lot of time on the position of his hands.
Anyway, I still can’t decide which version looks better. But check it out! You can make polls on this blog. Please take my poll and vote for the one you think looks best.
sketchbookfactory 