Tag: drawing

Serious things

“What did you do last night?” she asked as we walked through the neighborhood in the pre-dawn moments of the day.

“I worked ’til six. Clocked out. Made supper. And spent a couple hours drawing.”

She did not say anything for a few dozen steps. She took the kidlingers on an adventure the night before. And she was tired.

I continued. “The challenge is that it takes me nearly an hour to set up. Not just gathering tools like pencil, ink, brush, illustration board, and setting up a space to work. But planning. Composing a page. Thumbnail sketches. Reference materials and such.”

She listened. We walked further. In the hour before sunrise, I looked East. I saw Venus. Or maybe Regulus. Possibly both.

“By the time everyone got home,” I said. “I had finished marking out a page and composing three panels.”

She told me about a conversation with the one of the kidlingers as we walked. We exchanged comments about plans for the day. We continued for a quarter mile or so before returning home.

Thoughts of last night’s drawings were pushed into the shadows of a day filled with choses sérieuses.

Try again another night

How long did I look at this drawing the other night? 15 minutes? 30 minutes?

Calculated the time it would take to complete the drawing. Did I have the time?

Considered if the time spent on this illustration was valuable.

Too late. A kidlinger requested help. Followed by a short list of other household chores.

The illustration was placed back in the portfolio with 60 other drawings in various stages of completion.

Try it again another night.

Art making in quarantine

Inspired by Inktober 2019, I kept working on illustrations throughout November and December. For me, this was intentional art exercise. Keeping up the practice of crafting pencil compositions on illustration board. It was a private affair. No commercial application. Just me, a pencil, and board. But I hit a dry spell entering the new year. Actually, it was not a dry spell, but rather a lack of designated time to practice.

Commuting for two hours a day was part of the daily routine. By train and by street car. Or by automobile. Traveling sapped my energy. But now with state and government safe at home orders, I tried to ease back into evening illustration exercise.

Working from home had its own set of demands. Working from home with a family in an area of less than 1000 square feet presented additional challenges. But these are first world problems.

The first week was difficult. Routines and life patterns merged. A lot of discovery. Kidlingers and spouse realized what I did for work all day. Or at least attempted to do in spite of technological challenges with internet speed and video conferencing.

All evening activities outside the home had been cancelled until further notice. I had more time to catch up on reading and art projects. But resuming the exercise of illustration was difficult.

The first evening all I did was organize and clean the art tools and space. The next night all I did was ink one of the drawings. The plan for the illustrations were simple, clean drawings in the fashion of cartoons and comic books. Another night all I did was tone an illustration with shading and hatching. The direction shifted to a stylized portrait. The results surprised and pleased me.

This encouraged me to continue the practice. And it also encouraged the kidlingers to make art as well.

Inktober — Day 23 #inktober #inktober2019

Tried to accomplish four Inktober prompts in this illustration — days 20 through 23. Inspiration for the piece comes from reading the poetry of Li Po.

Enjoy — and keep inking!

Inktober — Day 15 #inktober #inktober2019

Inktober’s rules are simple: draw something in ink each day for the month of October, post it online, hashtag it, and repeat. So, if I draw three panels in a single day, does that make up for two missed days?

Ever watch those drawing challenges? Do a drawing or illustration in 10 minutes, 1 minute, and 10 seconds. My self-imposed challenge for day 15 was two hours.

The prompt that day was “legend.” The inspiration: two-fold. One, I revived a cartoon character I created long, long ago. Two, an homage to Starchild, created by James A. Owen.

The big challenge for me is that a two-hour block of time is a lavish luxury for me. It means I can not begin until the work day is done, household chores completed, and kidlingers in bed. Mostly.

Before I finished the inking process, one of the kidlingers reminded me that within the two-hour window I stopped twice. Once to spend 15 minutes brewing a pot of tea for the night owls of the household. And once to re-tuck a younger kidlinger into bed.

Hope you enjoy the results of day 15 of Inktober.

Find four more hours in a day


Personal archeology.
Discovered these old sketch books in September. Looked at them. Placed them on a shelf. Lost them again.

Rediscovered the sketch books again this weekend. Marveled at how much time was invested. Considered how these books were populated with sketches of classmates,  drawings of roommates and other ephemera in a place and time were smart phones, tablets and laptops were not ubiquitous.

Question:
What would you be able to create if you were not glued to your smart phone for more than four hours[1] a day?

NOTES:


[1] How Much Time Do People Spend on Their Mobile Phones in 2017?, Hacker Noon, May 9, 2017, accessed December 11, 2017 https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-their-mobile-phones-in-2017-e5f90a0b10a6

The final page


The final page of a sketchbook is a peculiar geography. . . read more ->

Book cover illustration – update

Fear motivates. The paralyzing fear that if I mess up the coloring of this book cover art, I will have to start the whole process over again. And the completion date is fast approaching. But the task needs to be done. So, onward.

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Watercolor washes begin the color process for the book cover illustration.

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Paint to the edges and then let the colors bleed. The basic color palette had already been determined weeks prior to the final execution of the cover art. But once the water and pigment are activated on the surface of the paper, the color palette organically builds to its own organized spontaneity.

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Details. There are always small details that many casual observers may not detect at first glance. For example, the color for the shotgun shell includes multiple wash layers of different pigments — each layer pulling or pushing color from previous layer.

HardCover

Once the final art is approved, I finished the design with title bar and a map overlay to texture the collage art.

The pleasure of drawing

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Nearly done with the back cover illustration. A brush is often forgotten in the process of keeping a clean drawing surface.

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Detail of the back cover illustration — a catfish. I have to admit — besides the firewheel flower blossom on the front cover — drawing the catfish was a pleasure.

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Front and back cover pen and ink collage drawing completed. Ready for the next phase — watercolor.

The purpose of drawing

The foundation of a great painting is a solid drawing. At least that was my goal when I worked on this book cover illustration for Orison Books. The collage features a firewheel — sometimes called Indian blanket — blossom, shotgun shell and expansive Texas landscape.

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Nearly completed pen and ink work on the cover.

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Detail of the firewheel flower blossom.

 

 

 

The purpose of thumbnail illustration

The purpose of thumbnail sketches is to advance the concept of artist, art director and editor to a final product. It seems like a lot of busy work, but three elements are essential: brainstorming, mind-mapping and closing the gap. The following images illustrate the process of thumbnail sketches as it relates to a book cover illustration. DSCN3558[sqr-tilt] Three thumbnail cover comps presented to the publisher a couple months back. DSCN3560[sqr-tilt] Full-size book cover sketch to gauge color temperature and composition of elements.

Wordshop

Wordshop
The weekly Racine Public Library Wordshop gathering of poets and writers is always lively and engaging. Last week there was a special presentation of Beat literature.

Before instagram

Weekend sketch

Years ago, the practice of capturing a moment or event was accomplished with pencil and sketchbook.

One of the three B’s?

ShostakovichThis morning, kidlinger walks up to my desk while I work, looks at the laptop screen critically and asks: “What’s that?”

Me: “I’m listening to Shostakovich.[1]”

Kidlinger: “He’s not one of the three killer B’s.[2]”

Me: “True. Would you prefer to listen to Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms?”

Kidlinger: “I don’t know.”

Me: “How about some Bach… violin sonata in G minor? Something to encourage you to practice your violin.”

Kidlinger: “Yeah, that sounds good.”

NOTES:
[1] Here’s a brief bio on Shostakovich: http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/shostakovich.php
[2] This is not a reference to the 1991 release of Anthrax’s B-sides collection Attack of the Killer B’s. But it is a reference to the three greatest classic music composers, commonly knowns as the Three B’s, Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms. Here’s a link to recent relesases of the Three B’s from NPR’s “Music We Love Now: New Albums Of Bach, Beethoven And Brahms”: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/03/18/174659127/music-we-love-now-the-3-bs-on-cd

For years have pushed art making away from me. Partly due to lack of space and consolidating my paintings into small sketchbooks. Then I replaced paint for pen and ink, and drew smaller images into Moleskines until my drawings disappeared into lines of characters trying to form poems…

Now, I want to start painting again…

(Image source via creativeinspiration: 472239364: artpixie: love letters and skypaints: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinycastles/3912498882/)

Sketch: Another Cafe Reader

 

Sketch: Cafe Reader

 

Sketch: Woman Reading

Sketch: Coffee Underground

Sketch: Art Studio Still Life

Sketch: Woman Reading