Sketches of LEAF

Oh no! My last post was in August. Sorry! I haven't even kept up with my altered calendar because I have been putting so much energy into creating a studio space and moving into a new house. Life does that sometimes, but I am here to post the sketches I did on my trip to North Carolina last week-- I went down to Asheville by way of Charlotte, met tons of wonderful dancers, many of whom offered beds and futons and rides and food and great conversations and, naturally, dancing. The main event was a music and arts festival called LEAF, which happens twice a year. It was wonderful-- I think I stepped into a magic fairy land for a little while. There was contra dancing every day, slam poetry, delicious festival food, and I sketched anything I could in spare moments.

The view from our southbound plane window. Air plane en en plein air!

Anyone who has been to LEAF probably will recognize this chair. There are hundreds like it in the main dining hall. To the left of the chair, some sketches done while people-watching. 

I spent a great deal of time on this nightscape, and I don't think this image really conveys the drawing very well but I think you get the idea! This is the view from the merch tent where I was volunteering. 

I got to see Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn perform at LEAF as well and at one point, Abigail Washburn introduced a song by asking the crowd, "so who else here likes old-timey murder ballads?" The audience responded with wild cheering, of course. It inspired this drawing:

After LEAF, we spent a day exploring Asheville, which it a lovely town full of cute local craft stores and great cafés, like this one where Neil and I ate breakfast (ok, it was probably about 2 PM, so, more like late lunch of breakfast food).

The next day we piled into a car with a bunch of other contra dancers and headed back to the airport. See ya next time, NC!

Tucson Sketches

A couple of weekends ago I visiting my sister Anna in Tucson and I got a little taste of her exciting, busy, circus arts, desert hiking, moped-riding, Mexican food, hula hooping life! These are my sketches from the trip. The first is the outside of a venue where my parents and I watched her perform with her fellow Cirque Roots people!

While I was sitting outside drawing before the show started, lots of people came up to ask me about information for the performance. My customer service/front of house vibes must be very strong.  The tickets were by donation and a few people asked if I was the one taking donations. It was tempting to tell them, why yes, you can give me your money. But in all seriousness, I directed them inside with the professionalism of a Tony Award winning theater's usher (which I am! Cool right?).

Anna got all fancy for her lovely hula-hooping-while-drinking-and-pouring-wine act:

Later in the visit we got to go to a Cirque Roots fire rehearsal. They were fire dancing and hooping and the lighting was so interesting! I made some sketches there too, though it is hard to sketch figures in motion, but I did get some photos in case I ever need a reference. 

Triple Project Update!

Hi all! I have three projects I want to update you on. FIRST PROJECT: Were you wondering what ever happened to Project Fox Bed? Well, I'm still working on it! Here is the progress on the headboard:

I am excited about how far it has come, but I clearly need to finish up those dandelions. I also am going to do the back of the headboard even though it will be up against the wall. I'll know it is there even if I don't see it!

SECOND PROJECT: Marker portrait practice is ongoing:

 

Look! Some of them are even not in profile and they have their eyes open! PROGRESS!

And finally, THE THIRD PROJECT. I am introducing a new project for 2014-- Every year I get a wall calendar and aside from helping me organize my busy life, I think the images set the tone for my year in a way. It is important to me to have a calendar that I like, that makes me smile, or inspires me. Then I save my calendars from past years-- I have calendars dating back to my high school days. I have had Penguins, Japanese Woodblock Prints, Black and White Photographs of Paris, Gundam Wing, Van Gogh, Ferrets Dressed in Silly Ferret Costumes, Bread and Puppet, Inuit Art, and Goats in Trees (who knew-- goats love to climb trees!) 

Anywho, this year I waited until about January 6th to start looking for a calendar and by then they were %50 off at least, but they were also the worst ones that no one else wanted. I could not find the calendar of my dreams to define 2014! I found a $2 calendar at Walgreens that has pictures of beautiful and generic landscape photography and I was like, "ok, fine, this one is not the worst" but then I decided that these landscapes would be perfect surfaces for collages or drawings. Each month I'm going to alter the photo in some way and create a new, interesting art piece! Here is January-- I turned the negative space of this glacier into a disgruntled hippo monster and its grand baby:

I'll keep you posted on the upcoming months!

Marker Portraits

I am still refining my marker portrait skills-- one thing I love about markers is the challenge of being unable to erase. If I make a mistake (and trust me, there is no art making without mistakes) then I just have to find a way to incorporate the mistake into the piece, kind of like improvising when you're playing an instrument. 

My goal for marker portraits as I continue making them is to draw people with their eyes open for once.  I notice I tend to draw people while they are doing things so they are either looking down or away. To draw open eyes, I would need someone to really sit for me and not be doing anything else but looking at me. It is hard to get people to do this. 

Here is my friend Aaron, rocking a bowtie!

And here is my neighbor Hannah, 

though this sketch doesn't actually look very much like her. 

I want to try again.

This is my sister wrapping christmas presents!

These are little cartoons of me and my sister, though I didn't capture her quite right.

This is another one I'd like to try again.

I also did drawings of some cool antiques I saw around my house in Ithaca.

I call this one Shur Shot Plus One Extra Line

And here is a record player with a fancy leaf-shaped vintage lamp on its head:

I'll be doing more marker drawings as I visit Tucson this weekend! 

STAY TUNED!

Life at the Apartment Drawings

As promised, I have more marker sketches to share. I have been drawing life in my new apartment. I am fortunate to be surrounded by inspiring people!

Drawing for Illustrators: copying things

Oh dear! My last post seems to have been two months ago! A lot has changed in those two months-- I live in a new house now in Arlington and I am 25 now and I quit one of my jobs and I went to Ithaca and came back and I started a new art class. 

It is that last one I want to write more about-- my class is called Drawing for Illustrators and is the next course in the sequence towards my Illustration Certificate from the SMFA. It is a crash course in how to draw everything. We started with basic three dimensional shapes-- ping pong balls, wooden blocks and cylinders, then moved on to faces, eyes, shading, hands, and we will soon be doing fabric, the figure, and more. We spend about half of our time in the classroom studying from copy plates or still life setups and half of our time at the Museum of Fine Arts drawing from statues and paintings. 

I am surprising myself by really enjoying the copy plates because in every other art class I've ever taken, even waaaay back in middle school, I have always detested copying things. In seventh grade, a substitute art teacher gave us a packet of drawings to copy and instead of copying the drawings, I wrote her a long note about why copying things wasn't art or wasn't creative or was not worth my time, or something like that. She wrote me back a note about how no, copying things is a really useful tool as an artist and I should copy things. Her note did not convince 12-year-old me and I probably failed the assignment, but I didn't care because righteous outrage against The Man.

In eighth grade, we had an assignment to draw an oil pastel self portrait based on a photo that our teacher took in class and then for the background, we had to do a copy of a famous painting-- as though we had stuck ourselves in a painting. 13-year-old me again was outraged at being asked to copy another artist's painting (and working from a photo rather than the mirror?! All wrong!) and so to deftly avoid copying another artist's work, I chose to put my self portrait in an Ad Reinhardt painting. He was an abstract painter who painted a lot of solid black canvases, or grids of dark grey and black squares. Most of the rest of my class did Starry Night by Van Gogh. I was like, "Van Gogh is so overdone" while I filled in my grid of abstract black squares." (Now Van Gogh is one of my favorites though).

In my high school, I avoided art classes until my senior year and instead took classes at the Community School of Music and Art to build up a portfolio because I was a big art snob, basically. The studio art classes at my high school had the reputation of being a big joke that people just took to get their art credit out of the way and I did not care to be around that atmosphere (cough*art snob*cough). I did however take AP Art my senior year which included all the creative problem solving and self expression I had ever dreamed of! I was also taking a drawing class alongside it where I encountered, you guessed it: copying things. "Aaargh! Copying things!" 17-year-old me lamented, but I plugged through packets and packets of pictures of bones to copy. I got a 2 on the AP Art portfolio review. You don't have to be familiar with the AP grading system to know that 2 is a terrible score. I doubt it was related to copying things though.

In college, we mostly drew from life, but there was some copying involved. We got a book of master sketches and copied things from it every week. We did Da Vincis and Michelangelos and all those Italian guys and I didn't hate them as much as I used to, I just found them boring and I was really impatient about it. I have fond memories of 21-year-old me doing master copies from this book while watching the Colbert Report with my friends at their house during my last semester of college. 

So basically, I have never liked copying things ever, which is why I am so deeply and pleasantly surprised by this class! More than half the class consists of master copies and I really, really like it! I am finding it really kind of meditative and zen. I get so focussed and calm while I do these drawings! It is incredible! I think I have arrived at a place where I understand the lessons to be learned from copying other people's work (because you can never make it an exact copy, you are bringing your own eye and your own hand to it, you're not a machine. The practice can only help you). And Da Vinci for example, studied cadavers and understood that every shape your body makes is because of the muscles and the bones underneath and how they fit together and in fact, copying his work will make you a better figure drawer than drawing a living person because he knew what was under the surface and all of that information is in every line he put down and copying his drawings teaches you to see that way because drawing is seeing.

However, I do not think that I was wrong at earlier stages of my life. I think that developmentally, as a human and an artist, I had to go and figure out what I wanted to do before I would arrive at a place where I wanted to be learning these lessons. I guess 25-year-old me wants to learn these lessons. I needed to experiment and gather my own ideas about drawing first. The time is now right and I am speaking the same language as the copy plates. 

The darker image in all of these photos is the copy plate, 

the lighter pencil sketch is what I did.

The sketches below are Roman statues from the MFA.

Drawing the Expressive Figure (Nudity! Heads up!)

I spent this past week doing an intensive art class as part of the Illustration Certificate at the SMFA. The class was "Drawing the Expressive Figure" and it was basically eight hours of art-making every day-- 9 AM to 6 PM. It was fantastic! It got me so jazzed about creating figurative work (since I have been doing so many landscapes lately). Focussing so closely on the nude models and doing observational work also made me really loopy and zoned-out at the end of each day, which has never happened to me before, so that was cool!

We experimented with different mediums including ink, chalk pastel, permanent marker, paint, and oil pastel on a variety of different surfaces. I am just going to go ahead and post all my best stuff (If you didn't want to look at nude figures, this is your last chance to turn back):

DAY 1: We did contour drawings with permanent marker and added chalk pastel over top!

This one is huge! It is 22" x 30"

DAY 2: Ink! I loved working with ink-- I had never attempted realistic figure drawing with it and it was great to work with. We talked a lot about the power of suggestion. With ink, you can suggest a whole face with just a few marks. Also, the model's hair lent itself well to being represented in ink.

We tried some silhouettes as well:

DAY 3: More ink! Yeah! I felt really good about almost everything I did that day. I was able to get pretty detailed renderings of faces.

We then created our own textured paper by putting down thin washes of acrylic paint and then placing the figures on top:

DAY 4: We tried out oil pastels on yupo, which is a plastic paper. I don't know how they make it, but it creates an interesting surface to work into. The materials really want to slide around on the yupo.

The model brought some really great wigs and when she put this long, pink wig on, it seemed like she was really building a character and a story, which I totally love! I asked what her super power would be if she could have any power and she chose time travel and the ability to solve unsolvable math problems. I imagine those two powers would be related, she could somehow use her knowledge of math to find her way through the time/space continuum. Thus The Naked Time Traveler was born! 

This pose looked to me like she had just lost a battle of some kind and was down for the count, so is this the end for the Naked Time Traveler?!

DAY 5: Another morning of figure drawing from the model, then finishing touches and group critique.

The above figure and the head below are from the same painting and I am super proud of both of them, but unfortunately the head is super small in comparison to the body, which I am really embarrassed about. Alas!

One project that I didn't quite get the chance to finish up integrating pattern into the figure, or the figure into a pattern, so I created a pattern and then translated some of my sketches from the week on top of that pattern. Here is what I came up with:

My next steps are going to be definitely continuing to work with ink and also practicing drawing hands and feet. I didn't realize until my teacher pointed it out how much work I have left to do in terms of my hands and feet drawing skills. 

It was productive, fun, and eye opening week. I was totally immersed in drawing and my classmates were fantastic and talented! I actually wish the class had been longer. There is so much more we could have done!!