Category Archives: Journaling

Review: Faber Castell Gelato

I’d
heard a lot about Faber Castell’s Gelatos. I’d heard they were like a
tube of smooshy rich watercolor. So I had to try them out. I went small
and bought a 2 pack. The only packs the local Michael’s had were either 8
packs or 2 packs. The 8 packs are all matching tones in one shade or
another, the 2 packs were the blending shades to mix with the colors. I
didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the 8 packs and the 2 pack was
only $3.50 and I had a coupon.

The
tubes are hard plastic and hold a water soluble substance that feels a
lot like chapstick, which makes sense that it’s in a chapstick-like
tube. No holds barred, I went straight into my art journal and slopped
some white onto a spot that I wanted to bring the neighboring area into
prominence while blending the color back.

Once
on the page I found the white was nicely opaque, thought it took a
decent amount of product to get that result. I really liked the look of
the product straight out of the tube, but found that without adding
water it smudged with ease. Adding some water kept a lot of the
opaqueness of the product but cut it’s greasy slick texture.

For
those of you who like to stick your fingers into paint, these are
nontoxic. I have not had a chance to test them for lightfastness, but
will do so soon.

They
lay down in a greasy thick and smooth feeling, not unlike writing on a
wall with high quality lipstick… I’ll be honest after so many rave
reviews I was expecting… MORE. Instead I was left feeling
underwhelmed. The plastic tube is brilliant marketing for adults who
don’t want to get their fingers dirty with Portfolio Water Soluble Oil
Pastels. They also have a more adult appearance than Portfolios, a
certain je ne sais quoi, if you will. They are also packaged in a way
that will appeal to adults.

Underwhelmed
is a good way to express how I feel about these. I’m not a fan of
Portfolios. They are close enough to watersoluble crayons that I don’t
see a reason to add them to my art arsenal. Instead I’ll stock up on
more watersoluble crayons. I do like the white though for it’s
opaqueness.

Dark Days

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I notice that a lot of art journals only seem to cover the happy parts of life, as if only the pretty parts are deserving of a page.

Ignoring the crappy hard parts of life isn't the best way to deal with the garbage. Disappointment, sadness, death, and our distress all deserve to be explored and figured out in the pages of our art journals.

My art journal is a place for me to work out my thoughts and ideas, exorcise the demons if I need them gone. It's a place to explore and even fail.

I've got some dark not so happy stuff in my journals, and that's just the place to shut it away.

Waiting Area Sketches

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Yesterday, I was doing my usual routine when sitting in a waiting room, I sketched. Usually, when I go to the orthodontist I'm in and out in 20 minutes, yesterday, I waited for 20. No big deal, I whipped out my sketchbook and sketched the people waiting. Adults were sparse and accompanied by 2 or more kids, one lady had 6!

I sketched away when a woman sat next me with her daughter. I could here some whispers and the mother finally said, "Just ask, what could it hurt?" Shortly after the girl, around 13 or so touched me on the shoulder and asked about my sketching. She was really sweet and I could have been more talkative. She was shocked to find out I was not able to make a living drawing. She watched me draw the rest of the time I was in the waiting room and we were called in at the same time.

It was neat to talk to some one who still finds art a magical thing and lacked the jaded feelings of adults.

Perfection vs Process

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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.)

Friday Night

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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.

Finished Project

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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.

Rivalry

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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.

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Days of Art

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The last few days have been days of art. I’ve been soaking them up and putting them into the reserve to carry me through the next few months. I’m headed back to the DayJob on Monday so I can continue to fund my art activities. The last few days have been nothing short of glorious. It doesn’t get much better than spending days off of the DayJob making art.

I’ve been banging out the thank you ATCs for the ArtJournaling.ning.com sponsors, I’m 24 into the total of 34. Only 10 left. I’m pretty excited about getting them done so timely. I think I can get another 5 or so done today.

I spent Saturday doing my usual art visit with Jane in Salem.We talked about Put it on Paper, our reviews we’ll be doing, updates on the articles for the next issue and things we’ll be doing on the blog. Pretty exciting stuff. Then we spent the rest of the AM drawing around Salem. I also stopped to snap a lot of pics along the way.

In the afternoon, I switched lenses and C and I wandered up to Atomic for some iced caffeinated goodness and then went to sit in the Common. We stumbled upon [space] having an interactive still life. They invited us to sit down and participate, so I did. Now that I’m 10+ years out of college it was a blast listening to the art school kids talk art. I haven’t heard so much art speak in one place since 1998. It was particularly enjoyable to sit down and sketch an everything and the kitchen sink still life, since I haven’t done that since drawing 1. I should have moved around the still life more and tried a few different angles, I really wanted to draw this parrot sculpture again, but instead stuck to my spot and continued on making muddy sketches. It was fun.

The vintage 28-50mm Magnum lens performed really well today when I was in Salem. I picked up a lcd viewfinder so I could focus the manual lenses in harsh light and it made all the difference in using my vintage manual lenses. Where I was unable to get a sharp focus before I did this time. Perfectly sharp. The Star-d 28mm lens(rebranded vivitar) gives me fits in harsh light. I need to get a lens hood. It completely flairs out and I end up with washed out image. I don’t even get good flair with it, just washed out images. So aggravating. But when it was good it was really good.

magnum lens

star-d lens

Antithesis of Athletic

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For the last few weeks I’ve been walking a lot. In the summer I walk around town as a matter of habit, it’s nice out and pleasant to walk to the cafe for an iced coffee. Naturally, my walking increases. My doctor said to me during my last visit, “Have you considered walking?” Which I think is a funny way to say to me, “Hey tubby, you need to lose a few pounds and get your blood pressure down, so you know you should walk.” So I’ve increased my usual walks from short pleasant walks to longer less pleasant walks, especially with the heat we’ve been having.

One of the side effects of these walks is that my feet have been hurting because I’ve been walking in my usual shoes; chuck taylors, doc martins and the like. I haven’t had true athletic shoes in a very very long time. So last night I ventured into a big box shoe store and looked for womens’ sneakers that were black with no neon colors or pink, pale purple, or baby blue. Pretty much an impossible task. I found 4 out of 500 pairs of sneakers that were not garish in color.

I am tempted to go on a long tirade about how some women would like plain black sneakers or even black and white without the addition of neon colors, but I think that’s a tirade for another day.

As I tie these sneakers to my feet I feel like a big fat fraud. I used to be pretty athletic. I used to run, mountain bike and a lot of those athletic things. At some point I ran out of time. When I lace these shoes up it doesn’t feel right, like I'm a fraud. I know I’m not going to do the things these sneakers are suggested for like running or whatever course work is. Instead I’m going to be walking around my city with a camera around my neck, a sketchbook in my bag, and an eye out for interesting things. Pretty much the antithesis of athletic. I took them for a short spin last night and found them to be perfectly comfortable and lovely to wear.
I ended up with navy blue sneakers with a small hint of bright neon blue. I opted for these knowing that in a few short walks I’ll have them dirtied up to being unrecognizably colored.

Reflect on 2 years of Drawing Practice

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I’ve been doing a lot of research for my pen and ink booklet/class that I intend to release into the world at some point in 2012. One of the books I’ve been reading as part of the research is “The Naked Art: Why We Draw” by Peter Steinhart. It’s not recommended reading for everyone. His writing while good, might bore anyone not interested deeply in art and why we draw.

I picked it up because it came up in a keyword search of my local library’s books on drawing. I’ve continued to read it because it’s written from the perspective of a person who does not consider himself to be an artist. He writes about how drawing the figure is meditative and trains his brain. There is an entire section devoted to the idea and process of training your brain. If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time you know that this is a concept that I hold dear and affects me deeply.

This book reminds me of when I decided I wanted to draw better. That was 2 years ago and I knew that what I had ahead of me was work and practice. I gathered my tools and I started to work. I had an understanding of art. After all I had taken drawing and painting in college, but only one included real practical advice for drawing. That one class rocked my world. In one month my drawings went from… not very good to better. Had I stuck with it I can only imagine the draughtsman I would be today. Instead, I saw and felt that drawing was a lot of work and took time I did not have.

So my drawing went by the wayside.

For 10 years I ignored drawing as a skill and a tool that I needed to work on. Instead, I drew when I felt like it and not enough to exercise my brain.

from 2 years ago

When I started to draw again, everything felt stiff, and as if it didn’t work. I produced a lot of terrible drawings, things that I simply flipped the page to the next and moved on from. Each terrible drawing was a learning experience. I had to be sure to NOT let them get me down. Each one was a step forward. Eventually as time went on, my drawings became better and better. At some point, I felt I was getting a realistic enough representation that I could move toward giving my drawings my own style- a tweak, if you will, of me.

from 2 years ago

One of the many things Steinhart probes in his book is the idea that through drawing, we better ourselves. Although I can’t say I’ve bettered myself, I know that through observing the world more closely that I’ve definitely stretched my mind. While sketching, I’ve been able to make some difficult decisions that I’d otherwise not have been able to come to as easily. A rough day at work melts away when I pick up my pens and brush, even if the sketch doesn’t look quite right. The important bit is that I pick up my pens and brushes that day and draw.

recent image

There are many sites that promise success in drawing in 5 to 10 minutes a day, but I don’t think that’s enough time. It’s a great start to get you fully addicted to drawing and it will exercise your mind to increase your ability to look and observe the world around you. 5 or 10 minutes is simply enough to get your drawing to a point where it will rock your world. I draw for the same reasons some of my friends do yoga. I draw because it is as essential to my happiness as eating, drinking and exercise. My friends who do yoga say the same. Yoga is a core part of their day. Without it they would not find themselves centered and rooted in reality. None of my friends do yoga for only 5 to 10 minutes a day, but rather 20 or 30 minutes. Why are people willing to devote 20 or 30 minutes to exercise their body, yet they avoid spending 20 to 30 minutes to exercise their mind?

recent cafe sketch

Like my friends who do yoga, I was so inspired by my brief time practicing drawing for 15 or so minutes that I found a way to give myself 20 or 30 minutes to draw. I gave up TV. I draw on my lunch breaks. I moved a TV tray table into the office to draw on while my partner studied. I found a way to make 20 or 30 minutes of drawing per day. Now I bring a sketchbook with me everywhere I go and draw every free moment. The time I spend drawing is never time wasted.

I’m happier, possibly a better person, and definitely more relaxed and centered- all for the cost of a few sketchbook, pens and time.

For me it’s very much worth the time that I spend drawing. I’m happier, possibly a better person and definitely more relaxed and centered, all for the cost of a few sketchbook and pens.

Comfortable Shoes Studio

Musings about art and writing supplies.

Category Archives: Journaling

Review: Faber Castell Gelato

Dark Days

Waiting Area Sketches

Perfection vs Process

Friday Night

Finished Project

Rivalry

Days of Art

Antithesis of Athletic

Reflect on 2 years of Drawing Practice