Remember those old credit card commercials that would list out the cost of different things and then in the end there was the one thing that was “priceless”?
A while back we took a trip to SF with the fam and a series of debacles made it seem like we were never going to get on the plane. When we finally did get on I did this drawing to commemorate the moment.
This is my husband MC-ing the annual staff awards ceremony at work. (Yes we work at the same place.) He was so cute and charming that I had to do a sketch to commemorate the moment.
The fellow in the background is dressed up like the sun. He was the one actually handing out the awards. But in this picture he sort of looks like a happy bodyguard.
Wow, has it really been almost 2 years since I have updated this blog?
Yes. Yes it has.
Yikes. I really dropped the ball here. And while I am inclined to berate myself over this, I have started to come to understand that maybe this is just part of who I am and how I work. I have a ton of interests, all of which I am passionate about. And I have ADD.
As it turns out, my interests have peaks seasons. The fall is for running and writing plays. The winter is for freaking out that whatever play I am working on sucks, writing more intensely, and then producing the play. The spring is for hiking and recovering from the writing/producing of said play. The summer is for drawing and indoor climbing. And somewhere between there’s improv, and zumba, and podcasts, and reading, and projects with friends.
There are also periods of time peppered throughout the year where I just watch a lot of Netflix, indulge in things more than I should, and try not to hate myself.
I used to get really frustrated with myself for not doing X hobby everyday. I mean, that’s the first piece of advice you give to anyone aspiring to do anything. If you want to write, write every day. If you want to be an artist, draw every day. If you want to be successful at anything, do it everyday.
Then I read an article about how Steve Nash works out in the off season. It said he plays lots of soccer and tennis, spends a lot of time in the weight room, does a lot of skateboarding, but not much basketball. I was so surprised. I would have assumed that a professional basketball player does it for several hours a day, even in the off season.
Now I think I get it. Staying creative and physically active is important to me. If I go too long without doing either of these things I get really bummed out. But like any human, I have a hard time getting motivated, even when it’s stuff I love to do and that I know is good for me. And I get bored easily (probably cuz of the ADD) so if I do the same type of stuff all year I will eventually lose interest and stop, and then things go south. Changing it up every few months keeps everything exciting and new, and helps me stay motivated.
Anyhow, all of this is to say that the reason I haven’t been here for a while is because I’ve been doing other stuff, most of it good, and I guess it just wasn’t sketchblog season.
The only bummer is that some exciting (for me) stuff has happened with my drawings the past couple years and I wish I’d been documenting those discoveries as they unfolded. But I’m going to try and do that now. I’m going to start posting my work from the past couple years and write about what I learned while I did them.
For now, here’s a picture of some of the sketchbooks I’ve been working in lately. I like to make my own covers for my sketchbooks using postcards, magazine pics, brochure pics, or whatever else I can find. I usually do this after the book is full, or close to full.
When possible I like to put something on the cover that in some way represents what’s inside the book. The one with the Stranger Things cover is full of stuff I did for a Halloween-themed drawing challenge I did last year. The one with the painting of the renaissance-looking guy is full of these weird caricatures I’ve been doing of old master portraits. I’ll be posting about those projects in more detail later.
Stay tuned.
My annual tannenbaum drawing. Every year I try to make it look different from previous years, and yet every year they all look about the same. I tried to be a little looser and sketchier this year, but… all my stuff is loose and sketchy. Maybe next year I will try to be more precise.
I did put the Minnie’s in front so that’s new.
This one is in colored pencil.
Here’s another big head dude with a background drawing…
I did the initial sketch at a show at Space 55. Then I took my sketchbook along on a camping trip to Flagstaff and added the background while we were sitting around the fire.
Ghost Riders in the Sky was playing on Pandora. I never really appreciated that song before, but it set the mood perfectly.
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.”
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:
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!
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.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
So I’ve been doing this new thing lately where I sketch some rando while I am out and about. I make their heads big and distort their features, so by the time I’m done, it doesn’t really look like them, but whatever.
Usually this happens at Space 55 (a totally cool little black box theatre in downtown Phoenix that I help operate) because it’s a good place to find someone who is sitting relatively still. Generally it’s an audience member or a performer. Lately they’ve all been guys, but that’s been situational, not intentional.
I just do the initial pencil sketch at first. I don’t spend time on inking or coloring because I want to sketch as many different people as I can while I am out in the world.
Then later, at home or wherever, I will go over it with pen and add more detail.
Then I leave it alone for a while and just let it roll around in my subconsciousness.
After a few days I will add a background and colors and try to turn it into what someone who doesn’t draw would call “finished”. The background may or may not have anything to do with the person. It might have more to do with stuff I’ve been thinking about, things I’ve been interested in or learned about recently.
Or I might start with something I know about the person, which is often very little because usually it’s a stranger, and then use that detail as a jumping off point to get the ideas going. I try not to be too deep about it. I’m not into putting hidden meanings into my stuff, I just try to hit upon an idea that is interesting to me that I would be excited to work on.
Here’s one that I did recently.
I did the original sketch a couple weeks ago. This fellow came to see a show at Space 55 and arrived early. After he bought his ticket I told him the house wasn’t open yet but that he was welcome to hang out in the lobby. He said that he would go outside and look for Pokemon until the show started. This was a day or two after PokemonGo came out and it was just starting to blow up.
Side note: I don’t play Pokemon, but I am totally PRO-kemon. As with anything that becomes super popular, there’s a mob of people jumping up to say that it’s nerdy, that it’s a waste of time, and to point out all the negative stories associated with it. And in the case of the negative stories, there are things we should definitely be aware of. Obviously you shouldn’t play it while driving, or go into dangerous places alone, or sacred spaces, or private property, and all that other stuff that should be common sense.
But I’ve also seen how it brings people together. People are going outside and getting exercise, and making new friends, and exploring their neighborhoods, and I think that’s great. I wish the positive stories were getting a little more attention.
One super cool thing that I have seen over and over is parents and kids playing it together and becoming closer because of it. When I was a kid my parents did not play video games with me. (My grandma did, but she is exceptionally cool.)
Okay, end of side note. Back to drawing.
So later that night, during the show, I spotted the Pokemon guy in the audience. It was really hot that night, and the poor guy was clearly suffering. That’s when I did the sketch of him, complete with sweat drops.
Then I let a part of my brain chew on it for a while. I thought about Pokemon. I thought about how hot it was. I thought about how fucking hot it is in Phoenix and how the summer drags on and on and feels so goddamn endless and depressing. And then I thought about that painting Persistence of Memory by Dali, which always reminds me of the the Arizona desert, and the bleakness of Phoenix in the summer.
And that’s how I wound up with a Dali-inspired background, with melted Pokeballs instead of clocks, and a distorted Pikachu instead of whatever the hell that creature is in the Dali painting. I also went for a Monument Valley-esque landscape in the distance to make it more specifically AZ.
So there you have it: Persistence of Pikachu.
Wherever that guy is, I hope he’s recovered from that night, and reached at least level 20.
A couple weeks ago I went to Estes Park, Colorado with my husband and his awesome family. Estes Park—which is within minutes of the RMNP—is basically paradise. The place we stayed—a bunch of cabins at the edge of town called Idlewilde—is a paradise within paradise. The Big Thompson river raged right outside our porch. Snow covered mountains continually took my breath away. And beautiful wildlife roamed the town freely, undisturbed by dorky humans gawking at them.
The average high while we were there was 60 degrees, which happens to be one of my favorite degrees. (And half what we are experiencing right now in Phx).
A couple days before the trip, I hit up AZ Art Supply for some new pens. I probably didn’t need knew pens, I could have scavenged my art supply drawers and made due with what I have. But I guess it’s like buying a new dress for an upcoming wedding. I could wear one of my old ones and I probably wouldn’t look much different too everyone else. But in a new dress I would feel better and newer, and subconsciously I would be more excited to attend the event. With new pens I would be more excited to draw.
Or so I thought.
But as frequently happens, my soul’s desire to be creative went head-to-head with my body’s need to be active. This seems to be one of the major struggles of my life. And I admit, in the universe of struggles, this is NOT something to complain about. It’s definitely preferable to say, having to choose between feeding your family vs putting a roof over their head. Or going to work vs going to Urgent Care.
Hiking vs drawing is not exactly a Sophie’s Choice situation. It’s a wanting my cake and eating it too situation. But I will say that for me, being active and being creative are both necessary components to my mental health. I am at my best when I do both. I am in trouble when I do neither. And when I have to pick between either/or… well, I’ll be fine, but it’s just hard to know which way to go.
Anyhow, when I got to paradise and saw all that beautiful nature, I was torn between sitting down to capture it on paper, or walking in and becoming a part of it. In the end, the mountains called, and I had to go. I know that John Muir would understand. Michael Petry probably would not. 😉
So here’s how a typical day went. Wake up, drink coffee, and head into the RMNP for a challenging hike. Return to cabin, scoop up Richard, and head back out for a shorter, more leisurely hike. Return to cabin to shower, nap, and read. Take lawn chairs out to sit by the Big Thompson river. Spend the evening hanging outside with the rest of the family, eating dinner, drinking beer, occasionally running back into the cabin to check basketball scores, and maybe taking a nighttime walk up the road to the YMCA of the Rockies to look for deer and elk.
Pretty damn great, right?
To quote my little brother at age nine: There IS such a thing as too much paradise.”
Anyhow, I did manage to do a little sketching here and there. Not as much as I wanted, but there was just so much effing paradise going on.
I did one pretty cool sketch of Richard as he was sitting on the couch in our cabin reading. Richard has a lot of unusual hats, and he was wearing one that night. That hat made for a fun sketch. I spent a lot of time on the inking, but I never got around to putting in the background or colors.
Another night, while we were in the cabin, winding down for bed, Richard suddenly shouted, “HOLY SHIT!!!”
I said, “What? Is there a bee?”
(He’d found a bee in our enclosed porch earlier and his frustration with it had been a little over dramatic, IMHO.)
“No! Antlers!”
“Huh?”
“Out the window!”
“Wha?”
“Just put down that drink and come outside!”
And so out we go, and right there in front of our cabin is the biggest most beautiful elk I had ever seen. We spent the next hour stalking the poor thing like paparazzi as it strolled the grounds, snacking on grass. To the elk’s credit he did not seem to mind us at all. In fact, sometimes he would stand a certain way, turning his head, as if posing for a picture.
If Richard hadn’t spotted it, that elk would have walked circles around our cabin all night and I never would have known.
Yesterday I was looking at that unfinished drawing and trying to figure out what to do with the background. Then I remembered that cool experience with the elk. That’s it! Instead of adding the background that was actually behind him when I did the sketch – a boring old wall and TV – I drew a window with the grazing elk, and the river beside him. Then I colored it with colored pencils.
So here it is. My one and only completed drawing from Estes Park. But at least it captures my favorite moment from the trip. And that goofy hat.
Happy Accident: In the drawing, Richard is holding a book, but he isn’t looking at the book. That was an error. I didn’t draw his eyes pointing in the right direction. I make that mistake a lot. The effect here is that it looks like Richard is distracted by a thought or something, which is preventing him from reading.
Now with the background added in, it looks like Richard is sensing the elk standing outside the window and he is about to turn his head. And that is pretty cool because he is always spotting things that I seem oblivious to. Like in our house, he has found dozens of scorpions, and I never find any. It’s almost as if he has a sixth sense for that kind of stuff.
Hey! Maybe that’s his super power! And if so, maybe his hats are what give him that power! Look out world. Here comes HatMan!
sketchbookfactory 
