I've written about this fence before. I adore it. If I had money I'd buy the empty, yet cared for, house that it surrounds, just for the fence. It's really something. Old school wrought iron. Heat, hands and hammers touched this and coaxed it into shape. This is from when craftmanship meant something.
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.
