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A VanGoghish Chair

July 14, 2012

Richard and I recently traveled to Buffalo where his aunt and uncle were kind enough to put us up for a few days. I loved the entire town and was particularly struck by houses, which were colorful and historical and so so so different from the rows and rows of cookie cutter houses here in AZ.

(For the record I hate the term cookie cutter houses.)

Anyway, the houses all had a real sense of history. The room we stayed in had this awesome old chair that I became obsessed with drawing.

The reason I was so drawn to it was because it reminded me so much of this painting by Van Gogh.

I’ve been trying to draw more chairs lately, as well as trees and buildings and other non-human things. I have a bad habit of just drawing people all the time, so I’m trying to make myself branch out. The chairs have been quite a challenge because there are so many angles and you really need to get them right or else it will come out pretty wacky looking. Drawing people doesn’t really pose that problem (although it poses many others). Also chairs usually sit still (unlike people) so it forces me to exercise some patience and take time to study the details.

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A Few Random Sketches

July 4, 2012

Last 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.

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Cups and Caps

July 2, 2012

This is a quick sketch that I did at a bar recently. To the naked eye this is pretty insignificant, but to me this represents a lifetime of sketching practice. Why? Two reasons:

1) One of the hardest things to draw is a person in a damn baseball cap. There is something about the bill of the hat, the way it covers part of the face and has that curve, it almost always comes out looking all distorted and weird.

2) Catching this guy mid-drink, figuring out how to show the nose and the mouth through the glass…well, it was harder than it looks.

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Fancy Steps

June 21, 2012

So I recently got to stay in a condo that had this charming little spiral staircase. It was so cool, I could not stop looking at it.

Here is my attempt to draw the staircase. It was quite a challenge with all the angles and things. I made a lot of mistakes. For one thing there were eleven steps but I could only make it work with ten. Also that railing at the top is way too short. Especially in relation to the light fixture on the wall. It took a loooong time to do. Basically all of Sherlock Homes, and about half of Star Trek (the 2010 movie).

 

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Pub Sketching

June 8, 2012

I’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.

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

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RJM

June 3, 2012

Of all the people in the world, my very very favorite person to draw happens to be my husband Richard. I suppose you’d expect everyone to say that about their spouse, because they love them oh-so-much, but in my case it is just a coincidence. Don’t get me wrong, I do love him oh-so-much, but if I was married to someone else I think Richard would still be my favorite person to draw.

Aside from the fact that he is a very handsome guy (I mean seriously, just look at him) he also has this face that is really fun to draw…

His eyes and his eyebrows are pretty expressive and he’s got this awesome nose that is kinda big and rounded, and which I usually get wrong (see below).


Also, he wears a goatee, which makes him easier draw.

When it comes to faces, I say the more features the better. Beards, wrinkles, glasses, scars…all of that stuff helps map out the face. It’s a lot easier to judge the distance from this to that when you’ve got a lot of anchor points.

Another thing that’s cool is that as long as we’re together, I never get bored. If we run out of stuff to talk about, I just draw him. Which often happens at restaurants when we’re waiting to order.

Luckily his favorite hobby is “thinking”. So he thinks and I draw, and he usually comes out looking pretty thoughtful…

Richard is really good at sitting still, and he doesn’t seem to mind me following him around the house…

This one (below) I did at the bar at the Biltmore while I was very intoxicated. Not bad huh? Check out that hair. I usually have a tough time with hair, but that is some damn good sketchy hair right there.

I did this one when we went to see that movie The Artist and we were in the theater waiting for the movie to start. He looks really bored in this picture, which incidentally was something of a premonition because he thought the movie was really boring. (For the record, I loved it.)

Here he is at the zoo looking at monkeys. Even at the zoo I am more interested in drawing him than the animals.

Sometimes Richard sings in the car…

And sometimes he sleeps…

Sometimes he looks off into space…

But mostly he just looks cool…

Posted in Gesture, Ink & Wash | Tagged | 2 Comments »

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Now in Technicolor!

May 24, 2012

My tentative journey into the world of color continues…

I recently had the pleasure of working with Corel Painter and I never want to go back. Here are a couple of sketches that I scanned and painted using Corel. I tried to give myself a 10 minute time limit in an attempt to create some sort of fresh, dashed off look, but then I got into what I was doing and lost track of time. Each of these probably took about 30 minutes to paint. Having the option to erase mistakes and undo regrets is at once the benefit and the curse of digital painting.

The above drawing is of my husband and my brother at Disneyland. I talked a lot about this and other drawings from that trip in a previous post. In this drawing I committed the sin of mixing moments, resulting in a very unenthusiastic looking Richard and Tanner among a crowd of happy theme park goers. The truth is I actually did the drawing of R&T after a long first day as they were sitting on a bench outside the park waiting for the shuttle to take us back to the hotel. The crowd of people in the middle ground was added here and there as we waited in various lines the next day.

This fountain was in the courtyard of the Sheraton Anaheim where we stayed during our trip. I must have drawn this in the morning on the day that we checked out, as I can’t imagine I would have been willing to sacrifice much Disneyland time on a drawing back at the hotel. I do remember being quite happy with it when I was done, and it was nice to rediscover it again and freshen it up with some fake paint.

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Restore Faded Color

May 17, 2012

So I went back to the Grand Canyon recently and did a handful of campfire drawings. I did the sketching and inking at camp and then colored them with pencil in the car ride home. Actually I only did some of the coloring in the car because (as usual) I got carsick and had to finish the rest at home.

That was easy part. But getting motivated to scan the drawings, that’s a whole different story. The first three drawings scanned with no issues.

   

But when I went to scan the last one I had some trouble. It came out way too faded…

Everyone just looked pale and sickly, which is not how I colored them. And the sky just looks white. This sometimes happens when I am scanning and it drives me crazy. I attempted to fix it by adjusting the contrast in photoshop to punch up the colors, but then I had to change the brightness as well, which made it come out too dark…

Finally I tried to rescan the drawing altogether (which took an enormous amount of patience on my part) and this time I noticed something that I have never noticed in all my centuries of scanning drawings: the “restore faded color” option. Just put a check mark in the box and wahlah…

You learn something new every day.

Posted in Color, Nature, People & Places, Settings & Scenery, Travels | Tagged | 1 Comment »

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More Instruments

March 29, 2012

Last month I returned to the MIM to draw some more exotic instruments. As before, I had so much fun sketching that I forgot I was in a music museum. The instruments are so carefully crafted and so cool looking that it really is more like being in an art museum.

I also enjoy wearing the headphones because then when annoying onlookers try to talk to me I can just pretend I didn’t hear them. I often get lured into a conversation by someone pretending to be interested in the sketching, only to find myself trapped 30 minutes later as the person is talking my head off. Hey I came to draw, not hear your life story. Such is the burden of the urban sketcher.

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A Little Behind In My Processing

March 22, 2012

This is my first blog post in several months, and I can’t believe how easily it slipped away from me. I am still sketching all the time, but I have a difficult time finding the patience to scan and post them.

When I was taking photography in college and we learned about this one famous photographer who was constantly taking pictures, like he would go to a party and take seven rolls of film. He basically lived life through the viewfinder of his camera. But he wasn’t nearly so productive when it came time to develop the film and make prints. Whenever his friends asked how his photography was going he would joke “I’m a little behind in my processing.” When he died they found hundreds of rolls of film that had yet to be made into prints, and hundreds more that hadn’t even been developed.

So that’s me. I’m still out there making sketches. Just not doing anything with them. I have drawings that I’ve been meaning to post for months.

Here are a couple of old master copies that I did one Sunday morning in January when I probably should have been doing something else.

Portrait of an old man, late 15th century by Francesco Bonsignori. My guy came out a little more friendly-looking than Mr. Bonsignori’s.

And here is a Woman’s head, by Rubens…

Both are conte on toned paper.

I enjoy the meditative state I go into while doing old master copies. It’s not the most creative activity, since you are just copying another drawing, but it’s a nice way to get some marks on the paper when you are not in the mood to do any thinking.

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