Museum Head or I Need a Muse

Cleaned out some old photo files on the computer and found one of this guy. He's just a head, part of a sculpture exhibit from who knows where. I thought he was wonderfully weird looking and liked the way the light accentuated the strange chiseled cheekbones.

Late at night I want to draw. I have a passion, a need, a craving, to make marks. But I don't want to draw the stuff in my house. Yawn. Nor do I want to draw more flowers (although the purple iris have bloomed and are gorgeous.)

I also don't want to draw from other people's photos. That's their creative work and I don't really want to duplicate it. Sometimes I do just to work on a technique, but I want to create something original, something from my head. But what?

My imagination is rather unimaginative lately. What to do, what to do?

I need a muse.

You Can Draw! - Class #5

Tonight we had the option of drawing three things: a garden deer statue, a bugle, or the Indian doll. I opted for the doll even though she was more complicated. There was more opportunity for fudge factor with her. If I gimped up the bugle or the fawn it would have been obvious. I think about those kind of things when I pick what to draw. Cheatercheatercheater.

There were lots of geegaws on her dress I couldn't make out. Just rubbed the pencil across those parts and called it done.

The teacher said that he was please with the progress of the class. We all took lots of time tonight and spent the whole two hours drawing just one thing. The drawings of the other four are vastly improved over the first night. I think they're beginning to "see" what they're drawing and can get it down on paper.

I don't know if my drawing has improved but my patience has. If I spend more than about 15 minutes drawing one thing I get antsy and have to move on. I finally got in the groove last night and found the zen place of drawing. It felt good.

It stands to reason if I take time with a drawing it will be better than a quick sketchy-sketch. However, I do have the tendency to overwork and not edit. I can see myself spending hours on something and putting in every single nit-picky detail. That's not always a good thing. Still trying to hone the editing factor.

Teacher said I should take this home and frame it. That was a very nice compliment but, ummm....no. Don't really want her hanging on my wall but will be pleased to have her live in my portfolio.

Next week we start a new class, "Sketching Historic Downtown." It will be good to get out of the classroom and sketch in the wild.

Gesture Drawings

Realized last night that the art books from the library were due back on Monday. Had to crack one of them open for the first time today.

The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides was published after his death in 1938. It has been THE how-to-draw book for decades. My three-penny review is that it is more a how-to book on seeing rather than drawing. There are no tips or tricks on drawing per se, but how to think, feel and relate to the subject.

He uses four kinds of drawings:

1) Blind contour - Draw slowly without looking at the paper, *feeling* along the edge of the subject with the pencil as if you are touching the edge of the subject with your finger.

2) Gesture drawing - A scribbly type of drawing to capture the essence of the thing as a whole, not concentrating on any details, just the motion or gesture of the subject.

3) Weighted drawing - Mashing the pencil to the paper to make darker scribbles where the weight of the subject would occur: hips, thighs, the leg with weight on it.

4) Modelled drawing - Mashing the pencil into the paper to make blacker marks where the form of the subject goes away from you and lighter where it comes closer. Similar to a sculptor mashing his thumbs into a clay head to form the sides of the nose.

And that's it. That's all the kind of drawing exercises there are, just in different media: Pencil, charcoal, watercolor, oil.

To use the book properly would take a year of hard work, and that is no exaggeration. There are 64 exercises, each one having five sections, and each section requiring three or more hours of drawing 40 or so drawings. The basic premise seems to be that if you draw three hours a day every day for a year you'll get better. Ya think???

The only part of the book that stuck with me was the gesture drawing. Nicolaides said that in 30 seconds you should have a whole, recognizable form on the paper. Oy. Thought I'd give that concept a shot. So I trotted out on the porch with the big Black N Red to watch Hubby rake the last of the leaves.

Hubby was taking a break on the porch and that was a good thing. It was less daunting to draw him sitting than trying to draw him raking leaves. Usually if I ask to draw him he immediately finds a pressing matter to which he must attend and bolts. He actually agreed to sit absolutely still for a few minutes while I drew.

Sitting 1:
Sitting 2:
Reclining:Hubby said these were OK but they make him look like he has a big ol' belly and moobs. He does have a big ol' belly and moobs.

Hubby got bored with posing and went back to his leaf raking, so I drew the neighbor's car.

Hubby took another break and Cheezburger joined him for a little lap time:
They sat there together for a long while, so I started adding facial features. Shouldn't have done that.

Hubby went back to work, so Cheezy became my sketching victim:

Then Hubby got a phone call....


...and switched the phone to the other ear.


The neighbor came out to chat and inspect:
Believe it or not, the drawing on the right is recognizable as the neighbor. That one gets a Woot! The drawing on the left with the thin lines is where I showed them to her and had to trace the features so she could understand what the scribbles represented. I thought it was obvious but she was having trouble seeing it.

Tried tackling Hubby actually raking leaves:



Hubby finally wore himself out raking and piled up on the porch to cool off. I drew the only part of him I could see as a whole from a distance of two feet, his arms:


I realize these are rough drawings, not really post-worthy, but they are valuable to me because something clicked in my brain about halfway through them. I got it. I got what Nicolaides was attempting to teach his students through repetitive drawing exercises. I have a new way of seeing things as a whole, not just as the sum of their parts. Eureka!

You Can Draw! - Class #4

This is supposed to be a Teddy Bear but it looks a little like a Teddy Pig to me. Oh well, this is Arkansas so a pig is fittin'. I think I got his feetsies too small. He's got a big ol' head compared to his feet. Hummm....

I used the chiaroscuro method of drawing the shapes of the lights and shadows on this. Wow! That made it sooooo much easier than drawing an outline and the result was much better too. Woot!

The second drawing of the night was our hand. I only got the basic shape down before everyone else finished and starting packing up to leave. That's probably a good thing because it was starting to resemble Frankenstein's hand. Eeek!

The class started with 10-11 people. Tonight there were only four. Next week is the final class. Wonder how many will show?

Dis, Dat, and De Udder Ting

Jollydog asked if the new journals I bought at Wal-Mart would take watercolor. I didn't think they would because the paper was thin, but I did a test for her to satisfy my own curiosity.

This is a Black n' Red casebound notebook with ruled, 90 gsm white paper, purchased for $5.00 in the clearance aisle. It has a yearly date planner, 3-year calender, Table of Contents, Contact list section, World Time Zone map, as well as paper, envelope, measurement, speed and temperature conversion tables inside the front cover. Inside the back cover is a map of Los Angeles and the United States, and maps of the New York, Chicago, and Washington DC metro systems.

This paper is so slick the ink from the Staedtler Pigment Liner smudged a little at the first blob of paint. I should have let it dry for just a minute. Thirty more seconds of dry time and no smudging on the rest of the drawing.

I slathered a lot of water on this trying to build the layers of color without letting it dry between colors. In some places it picked up the paint like WC paper. (I'm not used to that.) The paper crinkled a little bit but it wasn't bad enough to deter me from using WC again. Neither the pen nor the paint bled to the reverse side.

I was very surprised at how well this paper held up. It gets a double woot...Woot! Woot! That opens a vast new territory of possibilities on how to use this journal.

Next was a Mead Genuine Bonded Leather Graph Paper Journal, Product #88185, brown, with padded, top-stitched cover and ribbon bookmark, purchased for $9.00 in the clearance aisle. I searched for this on-line hoping they also made a blank paper version, but was unable to find even a mention of it anywhere. Maybe this was made exclusively for Wal-Mart.


Wow this paper kicked and screamed at the watercolor. It sucked up the paint, turned a nasty looking gray, and the surface came off with a few strokes of the brush. The paper crinkled badly and paint bled through to the reverse side. I might could live with the crinkle and bleed, but when the paper starts falling apart under the brush there's no hope. Copy paper performs better under watercolor than this stuff. Pen and ink only in this journal.

I was surprised at this performance too. Of the two journals I expected this one to take a light wash and the Black-n-Red to crinkle like a Ruffles potato chip. It was, in fact, just the opposite. Ya just never know until ya try.

It was luscious under the pen though. Gave me an adrenaline rush. Wanted to draw everything in sight and fill the pages. So I did, kinda, sorta.

I have a little game I play late at night when I'm brain dead but still want to draw. I go to Flickr's Most Recent Uploads and pick the photo three columns over and three rows down (3x3) and draw it.

I never know what I'm gonna get, but there are lots of drooling babies and wedding photos uploaded to Flickr. It's good to know the world is reproducing, or preparing to reproduce. The lighting on the subject is never good, composition is wonky, and more often than not the pic is out of focus. Camera phones are the bane of my drawing existence.

Guy at a Concert - Lighting was horrible, angle was worse. Messed up his eyes in a big way, but thought the foreshortening wasn't too bad. It was a challenging angle to draw.



Girl and her Mom on a Tram - Went quicky sketch caricature on this one. The big fat pen I was using doesn't do details well. I guess I should have changed to a smaller sized pen. I like the shape of the girl's face. Might recycle that into another drawing.



Self Portrait in Mirror - Once again the lighting and focus was terrible, but the subject was a very interesting composition. Broke out the drawing pencil to see if I could capture the delicate shading on the face. It looks a little wonky to me but an Asian face has a much different structure than a European face. The eyes appear wider and shallower and the nose bridge much flatter.


I need to learn to draw the Asian face if I keep playing 3x3 on Flickr. In the wee hours of midnight the majority of faces being uploaded are Asian.

Hubby at the Bank - Hubby and I were at the bank Wednesday waiting for the Customer Service lady to fill out a pile of paperwork. I suddenly noticed how awesome Hubby's face was bathed in the diffused sunlight. I snatched up a tiny 3x5 notebook and a ballpoint pen and started drawing.

He is almost recognizable. Woot!

---

And the journal page to document all this:

Chiaroscuro

Journaling:

Reading the book The Artist's Complete Guide to Drawing the Head by William L. Maughan (The drawing is the front cover of the book.)

CHIAROSCURO

-An Italian term meaning light (chiaro) and dark (oscuro).

-Technique of drawing light and shadow to form the illusion of three dimension.

-"Duplicating the exact shapes of both light and shadow, and paying particular attention to the edges between the two, is fundamental to capturing a likeness."

-Uses Strathmore's charcoal paper "Velvet Gray"; CarbOthello pastel pencils "Caput Mortuum Red" and "Titanium White."

-Paper serves as midtone, Red is shadow, White is highlight.

-Eyes should be the only part of a portrait in sharp focus. All other features should have soft, fuzzy edges.

=================================

The method of drawing shadow shapes seems a much more intuitive way to draw than the egghead with longitude and latitude lines. I never understood how to get from that to a realistic portrait.

I'm only to the middle of Chapter 2 at this point. Scanning forward into Chapter 3 I see he starts showing the step-by-step instructions on how to draw a portrait correctly.

I did this one bass-ackards.

I should have waited.

Sigh.

You Can Draw! - Class #3

Fell asleep on the couch last night at 11:30 p.m. The cat woke me up at 5:30 a.m. this morning wanting breakfast. I threw a pillow at her, rolled over and went back to sleep, thinking Hubby would wake me up in an hour or two. Wrong.

I slept soundly until 1:30 p.m. Un-BE-LEEVE-able. That is 14 hours, count 'em, 14 hours of sleep. I must have needed it. I know I didn't feel jittery and annoyed when I got up like I have over the last few days.

A couple of loads of laundry, a bath, then off to drawing class. I must admit I was a little groggy from all that sleep so I wasn't so wound up in class tonight. I did move to the front row and my eyeballs appreciated that.

Since I crabbed previously about the things we were drawing, I took stuff I wanted to draw - stuff I love and cherish. It's always easier to draw something I find interesting. If I don't care about it, I don't care about drawing it.

Anywho, first up tonight was a model boat. It's about 3 1/2 feet tall. I thought its shapes were fairly simple without a bunch of geegaws to trip up beginning drawers.



I just let loose and drew kinda sketchy-sketchy like I normally do. It was much more fun and relaxing than last week. After I got it blocked in with correct proportions I erased the sketchy-sketchy lines and left the one that was correctest. Other folks really struggled with this and I was surprised. This was way easier than the guitar from last week.

Next was the lightning rod. I ran out of time with this one. Realized after I got home there is supposed to be a bunch of curlicue doodads on the shaft of the arrow. I missed them completely. Shows how much I was looking at this thing.



The arrow is a black rusted metal and the ball is glass. On this rough sketchbook paper the texture of the metal came out perfectly, but I couldn't get the texture of the glass smooth. There must be a trick to that. Must remember to ask.

No class next week due to spring break.

Pirate Day

Pirate Day at the elementary school in my hometown. This little guy was as cute as could be and got his picture on the front page of the newspaper. His moustache and goatee were drawn on in magic marker.

Finally quit reading, thinking and dreaming about drawing with pencils and DREW WITH A PENCIL!

I showed it to Hubby. He said, "Kinda looks like an ad for The Art Institute of America."

No dinner for him tonight.

Art Supplies & Pencil Ponderings

Journaling:

Momma got Blicked! It's always a happy day when the postman delivers a box of art supplies.

Sharpened up the pencils to take them for a test drive. Discovered the Derwents were too big to fit in my electric pencil sharpener. Pfft! Bought the Derwents on a recommendation by Roz Stendahl. Wanted a pencil that would lay down a very black line and scan well. These are "pigmented" (with carbon maybe?), not graphite, so the shine doesn't confuse the scanner.

Got the Design Ebonys because they are the pencil Rick Tulka uses to do his Le Select Cafe drawings. I've long admired his clean black lines and hoped it would be the miracle pencil I was searching for.

Did a little test with the four blackest drawing pencils I now own using the Big White Marble from drawing class as the subject.

The Derwent was the winner hands down in the qualities I wanted. It has the blackest black of lines and a matte finish that plays well with the scanner. It is waxier and somewhat stickier to draw with over the graphites, and has a rougher, looser line. It also has a very soft lead and is a booger to keep sharp.

Don't think this would be a good pencil for fine detail work but would be great fun for guerilla sketching. Add a bit of water and it makes a dandy wash for shading and shadows. Woot! Great fun!

Had an epiphany doing this little test. *This* is the kind of sketch the drawing class teacher wanted us to do...general shapes with shading for contour, not the details of the cut glass. OH! Of course! These were easy - whipped them out in a few minutes. I should have done something similar in class. Doh! I have a new perspective going into Class #3.

Decided to put down the pencils and check up on the arty bloggers. First one I hit was Karen Blados who had posted a macro photo of a housefly. Ewwww! Had to draw.

(From photo by Karen Blados, used by permission)

This is just the head of course. Didn't have the gumption to draw the whole body or his sticky tongue lolling onto Miz Karen's sofa. Ewwww!

Now you know why I seldom leave comments on blogs. My ADD kicks in and I'm off on a new tangent. Never did leave a comment. Must go back and do that.

I used Rick Tulka's favored Sanford Design Ebony for the fly. There's no way on God's Green Earth Tulka managed the black lines I see on his drawings with just this pencil. Or maybe I should say there's no way on God's Green Earth that I can get the lines I see on his drawings with just this pencil. Frustration, disappointment. There must be something I'm missing. Must ponder on that.

While pondering I was staring at my happy little manikin sitting on my desk. He suddenly struck me as wonderful and needing to be drawn. Picked up the black Derwent.
Manny's been in this pose for quite some time. I don't remember why I posed him like this, but I remember it's supposed to be a vaudeville high kick with a cane and top hat. (Hear the music "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere, It's up to you New York, New York!")

That thing curving around his upper arm is a paperclip for the cane. Never could figure out a top hat for him.

One more doodle and I'm off to bed....



Realized if I keep drawing with pencils I should be drawing in a sketchbook, not on loose pieces of copy paper. The sketchbooks I own are too rough for drawing in pencil (in my opinion) and I don't want pencil drawings smudging around in my daily journal anyway.

Must see Dick Blick about a sketchbook with slick paper.

Yay! More art supplies!

You Can Draw! - Class #2

Bob, the teacher, started out tonight's class explaining about different kinds of papers: hot press, cold press and rough, and why to use each of them.

Then he showed the trick about getting scale and proportion correct by measuring down the pencil with the thumb at arm's length. That part I knew already. But what he added I had not thought of before. It was a Doh! moment for me.

If you eyeball out the thing to draw and it's only an inch or so of pencil length, but you want it to be four inches tall on the paper, make four equal marks to arrive at the top and bottom of the thing. Then any other measurement you take multiply by four lengths also.

That's a big ol' Duh! but I would have never come up with it on my own. That's why I wanted to take a class with real people...to learn practical applications of art theory.

Then we start on our first drawing. Lighting conditions weren't ideal because the fluorescent lights washed out all the shading and shadows from the spotlight he brought. And the things we are drawing are sitting on a desk at eye level. It's tough to get perspective going at that angle. If there were any shadows we wouldn't be able to see them.

So what did he choose? Cut glass. Grrr.... Glass is probably one of the hardest things to draw. And it was a little bitty cut glass candlestick thingy I could barely see from so far away. On the candlestick was a white marble ball. Behind it was a rough Mexican blanket. He let us cheat on the ball and trace around a styrofoam cup so we all at least got the ball part correct.

I worked mainly on the candlestick and had just started putting shading on the ball when he started around the room doing show-n-tell. Since I'm on the back row I'd be the last one. The first drawing he held up had darkness all around the ball to make it pop. Ohhh! Good idea!

I cheated and whipped out The Magic That Is The Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and scrubbed in a little black around the candlestick before he got to me. Yes, I cheated in class. I filled in the rest of the blackness with pencil after I got home.

I have no idea what that candlestick actually looked like. I drew the dark spots and saved the light spots and kinda just let the rest be what it wanted to be. I don't think it really had fluting around the top and it looks a little weird around the base. Not cut glass-y at all. Oh well.

The next thing we drew was this old guitar. I struggled and struggled getting the proportions correct even using the measuring down the pencil trick. Everyone else moved right along and was finished by the time I started shading. This is as far as I got:



I had to keep fighting the urge to whip out a PITT pen and do a five-minute sketch like I would do in my daily journal. But no, no, I'm here to learn to draw in a new way.

My frustration level is building.

After one more class I may not be able to draw anything at all.

le Sigh.

You Can Draw! - Class #1

Started out with an overview of materials: pencils, erasers, blending stumps. I had a blending stump and threw it out not six months ago thinking I would never need it. Made one after class out of a rolled up bit of drawing paper. Sanded and softened the tip with an emery board. Yes, I'm a tightwad.

Tips and tricks:

-Cut slits in a white block eraser leaving thin ridges to pull out highlights in hair. Cool!

-Don't blow on a drawing to remove eraser crumbles. Turn it vertically and tap it instead. Blowing leaves moisture on the surface and can mess up a drawing.

On to values, white to black and how to apply them to what you see. Excellent!

Next was shading on curved objects to make them appear curved, and shadows on the table surface so things wouldn't look like they're floating. Clipping right along.

The first thing we drew was a coffee box thingy that happened to be sitting in the room.



As with every box-like thing I try to draw, it turned into the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Slanted decidedly to the right. Tried to fix it but didn't quite get it all plumb. I was sitting in the very back of the room fighting with my new glasses. Couldn't quite see what the coffeecup part of the label was supposed to be so all I could do was draw the dark shapes I could see.

A show and tell when we were all finished. He held up each person's drawing and pointed out all the good stuff on it. He concluded every one with, "That's a good drawing right there."

Next he drug in a plant from the hallway. Yes! Something with major fudge-factorability. Nobody is gonna know what the stalks and leaves really look like so freeform time on the foliage.

I was drawing away and the teacher stood behind me and watched. For some reason that gave me the heebie-jeebies. Because I couldn't see my drawing with the new bifocals, I just looked at the plant and drew what amounted to a blind contour. He watched me doing this for a while and said, "So how long have you been drawing?" Arrggh. Busted.

Told him I had never had a drawing class, that this was the first. (eyebrow cocks in disbelief) But I study and read a lot....

He loaned me a book he had brought for show-n-tell, The Artist's Complete Guide to Drawing the Head, by William L. Maughan. He said he had a whole library of art books at his house and I was welcome to borrow all that I wanted. Woot! Tightwad's Nirvana.

Realized on the way home that my brain is geared for speed sketching...quick, imprecise, capturing only the essence of a moment. I've tried very, very hard to break myself of the need to draw all the little nit-picky details. To sit and draw them now was proving difficult. Skerritttt! Zzzzzztt! Major synapse disconnect.
I have much to learn.

And lastly, apropos of nothing, the song "Sylvia's Mother" has been stuck in my head for the last three days.

And the operator says "40 cents more for the next 3 minutes"
Ple-ease Mrs. Avery, I just gotta talk to her
I'll only keep her a while
Please Mrs. Avery, I just wanna tell 'er goodbye

Achala, A Nomadic Herder

Tomorrow is the first "You Can Draw!" class. Required class materials are paper, pencil, and eraser.

Wow! Holy cow, I haven't drawn in pencil in eons...Oct. 21, 2008 to be exact. I discovered my scanner doesn't play nice with graphite and that was the end of that little experiment.

However, since I'm gonna have to draw in pencil, might as well dust one off and have a go at it. Discovered Rick Tulka does all his drawings in pencil, so that gave my soul a little encouragement too. Dug out an old General's drawing set which included an Extra Black layout pencil. Have no idea what a layout pencil is used for, but it was the blackest pencil in the box, so I sharpened it up.

Meh, that didn't melt my butter. There are tips and tricks to drawing an eye and they weren't in my brain at the moment.

Drawing from real life is better than drawing from my brain, but since nobody was up but the cat, a photo would have to suffice. Hello National Geographic.

This is a tiny piece of a much larger portrait of Achala, a nomadic herder in India (photo by Steve McCurry; Nat'l Geo, Feb 2010, p. 107).



Big sigh, got his nose turning left onto Route 66 just after the bridge.

I think when you draw a face, you're supposed to lay out the shape of the head and location of all the major parts. I don't do that obviously. I start at the feature that attracted me to draw, draw that, then draw outward from that point. Art teachers across the nation will gasp in horror at that statement I'm sure.

And my scanner still doesn't play well with graphite. I fiddled with the settings and never could get the blacks to be black. Oh well, visualize blackness in the appropriate places please. Thank you.

New Palette

6"x8", graphite pencil in small sketchbook

This is a new palette for me, purchased recently at Goodwill for 50 cents. I got two actually. It's actually a divided melamine picnic plate, but it will do just fine for a cheap palette.

Since I have only six tubes of watercolor paint I need lots of territory for mixing. I already have two of the round, plastic, 10-cup palettes, but somehow that doesn't seem to be enough.

I had a devil of a time trying to get a good scan of this sketch. Apparently scanners don't play well with graphite. Maybe because it is too reflective or something. I don't know. Anyway, the actual sketch looks far better and much less grainy and whomperjawed.

Sigh. I actually do a decent drawing and I can't seem to get it shared. Sigh.