I'm going to go and visit family for along weekend and to see the Machias Blueberry Festival. It would be awesome to be able to buy a few things from some of the local artists when I'm up there.
So to get a little extra spending money I'm putting out a coupon code for free domestic shipping. The code is vacationcash all lowercase and no quotes around it.
This is good for anything in my etsy shop. If you've been holding off on getting an original piece, this effectively takes $5 off the price.
Last night I sat down with my Americano at the regular Fiddle Jam session and everything I tried to draw was horrible. Faces were off, I couldn't get the perspective on the fiddle, the lights were low. It was frustrating. I kept drawing. I felt myself getting more and more aggravated. Usually the week's aggravation melts away as I sketch on Friday nights.
For whatever reason I just couldn’t hit my stride.
A customer moved and I had a great view of someone. Instead of focusing on perfection I just tried to capture him, fast. Suddenly I had it.
Process smacked me in the face last night. In my quest and frustration attempting to capture one particular face well, I forgot process and labored toward perfection. When I moved back toward process I found my stride.
Since I spent nearly the 2 full hours of Fiddle Jam frustrating myself, I came home and found a photo to sketch. I was pretty happy with the results of my final sketch of the night. This is a reminder to embrace process not product. (Find the original photo here.)
You can enlarge this to fill your screen and see them larger than in real life. HD baby!
You can enlarge this to full your screen and see them larger than in real life. HD baby!
A few months back a friend of mine messaged me on FaceBook asking me to go to a gathering of artists at his place. I couldn’t go because of the DayJob. I got another message that the group was getting together again on Friday. This time I was able to go. I was able to meet a bunch of local artists and talk about some ideas for showing our art and things we’d like to be able to do.
I wasn’t shy about drawing my fellow artists. I stared as they spoke. We passed around examples of our art. We talked. We passed around sketchbooks. We all drew.
Here are some drawings from Friday night.
It’s the first art group meeting I’ve been to since I left college way back in 1998. I had trepidations about going but all in all it was a great time. I met a guy who keeps what he calls “his books” and I would call art journals. They blew my mind. I could have sat there all night and looked through his books. He worked really simply in large sized Moleskine sketchbooks and regular sharpies. Thick bold lines. Simple. Mind blowing. I met scott who makes art chairs and sculptures. Bruce who makes comics and puppets. A potter. A portrait painter, 4×8 foot portraits. A guy who makes soft sculptures and fun audio devices. We were all so diverse and yet all had art in common.
I got a request to take a pic of all 34 ATC in one shot.It measures 15 inches by 21 inches. PRetty impressive. It took a long time to fill up that much space.
I started the thank you ATC project as a way to thank the people who contributed to the AJ ning funding drive. I thought it would be an easy way to say thanks… I was wrong. ATC are a lot of work and bangning out 34 of them took a lot longer than I’d expected. When I first started I wasn’t sure what I was going to do on them. It dawned on me that I should do something people would recognize as mine and something I enjoyed, obviously that had to be portraits.
When you think ATC size, you might think it’s a simple and easy size, fast to fill. After all it’s a small size, so it should be less effort to fill them up. I wrote about my process with these cards before but what I’m most surprised about is how much better I got with concentrated effort. 34 cards done over a 2 week spread of time. In this time I learn how my tools work on the paper I’ve chosen and how to control them for maximum effect. Dry lines, angles, broken line, speed of the pen, rough paper, cross hatching all of that were things that I learned to effectively use over the course of this experiment.You can see the difference in how I used the pens from card 1 to card 34.
You can also see the difference in how I saw the people I was drawing. Some of these images I drew from direct observation and others from photos from flickr’s commons. You can see the change in my direct observation skills from card number 4 to card 25.
It’s amazing what you learn in 34 small drawings that you expected to be easy. This was way more work than I imagined. I probably won’t do another set of ATC for a good long time. These will for sure be collector’s items and rare.
I started out on art early. I started drawing when I was young and kept on drawing until, well, I guess I never stopped. When I went off to High School I was one of the art kids. I spent an unusually large amount of time in the art room and drawing in study hall. I also played sports and was involved in a lot of other activities. Art was my main squeeze.
Being top dog in the art department meant I was asked to submit and participate in a lot of contests. I held a lot of disdain toward art contests, still do, and yet entered them, I still do that too. I may have been one of the top artists at my high school but I went up against this girl from our rival high school during every competition. We’ll call her Mary*. Mary was from a rich family in the town next to mine, her dad was a professor or something like that, and she went to art camp, got to take classes at the local college and played sports. No matter what I did I always came in second place to Mary, except when we played softball. Defeating her on the softball field was nothing compared to losing to her in every art contest I entered.
After 2 years of competing against her I gave up. I stopped entering contests, declaring them rigged politically in her favor. I actually told my art teacher this on multiple occasions. She always asked how I was jaded so young. The truth though was that Mary was a pretty good artist. She used color well and had been able to spend a lot of time working on her craft with some really great instructors. Mary was a hard person to have as a nemesis because she was also really nice.**
Our Senior year we had a group art show and our two schools were scheduled to be at the gallery at the same time. My friends and I were somewhat ambivalent and yet excited to have our work hanging in the local college’s gallery. It was a big deal. Somehow, Mary and I ended up working in the same room together and I got to see her work ethic up close. She was deliberate and careful, measuring her art carefully, hanging it perfectly. My friends and I used two tacks, cord and a level to give us a baseline for our art. Our teacher letting us run the show. Ours looked good, Mary’s and her classmates looked better.***
What set Mary apart from teenage me was her work ethic toward art. While I worked moderately hard at art, I focused most of my attention on my other studies. Which assured me a scholarship to school but, I think, was detrimental to me as an artist.
Now that it’s been nearly 20 years since I got out of high school I realize I was jealous of all of the opportunities Mary had because her family was well off. I also see now that my hard work has paid off for me as an artist and as a person. I’m still making art, what is Mary doing? According to the town paper I read on one of my visits to my parent’s place, Mary is now a successful graphic designer.**** Now that we’re all grown up we both win, we’re both doing something we enjoy. Honestly, I'm really happy for her.
I draw a lot of people in public places. I try to not stare, glancing here and there not making eye contact, my gaze never resting on them but for a few moments. I work in places where it’s busy, I chose these locations so I blend in and people are less likely to notice me. I prefer to draw people who are otherwise occupied with their computer, cellphone, digital contraption or books. They stay still longer than people who are talking and interacting. I don’t usually make people uncomfortable. It’s rare I get made as I’m sketching someone. Occasionally an observant student will spot me but the average person, not so much.
Saturday I wandered into my usual watering hole looking for a few faces to sketch for my thank you ATCs. I did a few failures as people moved around a lot and the place was quieter than usual. A couple walked in and I did my typical assessment for sketching. It was clear that the woman was incredibly ill; her gait was slow and deliberate, a wig covered her scalp, limbs too thin through her sweater, and her partner’s nervous look as she walked alone to the table.
As she sat down she noticed me looking. I admit more than anything I wanted to draw her. The contours of her face and eyes were the most interesting that had come into the cafe since I’d been sitting there. I could tell my momentary glances were making her uncomfortable.
I stopped.
I look at my drawing people in public places as a sort of personal journalism but I could not justify adding to this woman’s pain. Clearly she could feel my momentary glances at her, no matter how I hid them as if I were sketching the cafe tables or my cup of coffee. Perhaps she was hypersensitive to people looking at her perhaps I was less delicate than usual. Whatever it was, I couldn’t nor can I justify making someone in pain more uncomfortable.
At some point we must draw the line.