Cat in Higgins Eternal

Since we’re going sketching at the zoo tomorrow, I thought I might try the experiment of putting Higgins Eternal ink in a new Sakura Koi waterbrush and sketching with that. Charlie here is my test subject. So far so good, the main trick is going to be keeping the brush from bleeding ink all over my hands.

Sketchcrawl is this Sunday!

The 16th Worldwide Sketchcrawl is going to be held this Sunday, November 4th. The Sacramento contingent will be meeting at the Sacramento Zoo at 10:30-11:00.

If you’ve never done this, consider spending part of the day sketching something somewhere: it takes you outside your normal preoccupations, gets you into a meditative state of total absorption. Join a group near you, or just start one! Or sketch alone.

It’s fun, too, folks…

Pomegranate

This past weekend at the Arboretum there was a two-day workshop on painting pomegranates in watercolor. We didn’t take it, it being yet another possibility for an already full weekend.

But a colleague of Pica’s gave her a couple of pomegranates yesterday, and we’ve been doing some illustrations of them. At left is a drawing I did using pastel pencils.

The Creative License

Katherine of Making a Mark is encouraging us all to take part in the Big Drawing Book Review this October. I’ve decided to review Danny Gregory’s Creative License, because this is the book, more than any other, that I encourage people to look at if their response to my sketching is “I could never do that.”

Danny’s story is one he tells movingly in his book Everyday Matters: he left his apartment one morning to go to a fast-paced but unfulfilling advertising job in downtown Manhattan; his wife left to catch the subway uptown. She fell into the tracks and was run over by a train. She survived but their lives were turned upside-down as they each came to terms with her new paraplegic status. For Danny, this was very difficult, even more difficult in some ways than for Patti. He overcame it, he says, by drawing his coffee cup. Then the table. Then something else in the kitchen. He thinks drawing saved his life.

Tragic? No. Tragic, though, is the conviction we develop as children that we can no longer draw, though we did it happily as toddlers and beyond, according to Danny. We stop drawing because of some minor humiliation, and then we stop seeing. Danny coaxes us through this and beyond.

Coming to drawing as an adult is all about learning to see again. Forget what you know: draw what you see. The Creative License takes you on a journey of ways to see again, and then explores different ways to translate what you see onto paper. There are exercises but mostly it’s an exuberant series of encouraging noises: go ahead, it won’t bite you.

It’s not a “how to” book (except he does urge you to use pen, to commit to your line). It’s more about giving yourself permission to do the previously unthinkable, to pick up a pen and paper and draw. Sketch in the journal you write in. Fear no mistakes; it’s all good, even the bad drawings.

Five pencils, this one.

Drawing Through The Day

A couple nights ago we went to a presentation by artist John Muir Laws at the monthly meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society about his 6-year project to illustrate a new field guide to the Sierra Nevada. His beautiful illustrations inspired me, and today I ended up taking the day off and doing a fair number of drawings, many of them with the new set of pastel pencils. Here is a drawing of a magpie skull with chili peppers.

Every Hue of Dull

A trip down I-80 yesterday afforded yet another opportunity to reflect on how unimaginative the colors of cars that are available on today’s market. With the exception of midlife-crisis red, one can find almost any color out there, but the color saturation level is, say, no more than 12%. And heaven forbid trying to find a two-tone color scheme.

This New York Times blog post discusses this phenomenon. As commentators suggest, does this have to do with resale value? Or perhaps the desire for camouflage?

Rediscovering the Crowquill

Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark has started a new project of reviewing drawing books (and encouraging us all to review them, also). She recently reviewed Jos. A. Smith’s The Pen and Ink Book, which I have sitting on the bookshelf, and I decided to take another look.

( One of the things I like about working in ink is its strength. You have to commit to your line in ink. But that doesn’t mean your line has to be overwhelming; Smith reminded me that using a very fine nib, say a crowquill, with ink can be delicate as well as strong. I hauled out some of my walnut ink from the fridge (the batch I made in 2001 is still going strong) and started dipping.

Drawing a bird a day — and posting it — has given me the chance to become more familiar with bird forms, a practice I welcome and am eager to continue. But I haven’t drawn a while lot else. So yesterday I did some studies of the cats and of Numenius while the baseball game was on…

The Non-Moleskine Moleskine

We find Moleskine notebooks to be well-put together, but too much of a cult object to go off and purchase them. Fortunately, there are a good set of imitators on the market now. Here are some I’ve acquired in the past couple of months. At top is my sketch-a-day notebook, with a couple of drawings from my trip this week to Victoria, British Columbia. At bottom is another landscape format notebook I picked up at our latest visit to the art store. At left the notebook I was taking notes in at this week’s conference. And at right a freebie I picked up during said conference.

Pastel Pencils

Our trip Sunday to Berkeley featured a visit to the art store, located conveniently three blocks from where we had lunch. My cousin Susan is a colored pencil artist, so there we gathered around that appropriate aisle in the store. Pica spotted these Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencils, and started playing. With no shortage of encouragement from the rest of us, who all had their own temptations, she ended up walking out with a set of 48 of these.

Basically these are pastel chalks bound inside a wooden pencil. I have not done much of anything in pastels and these are very fun to try out. The concept of adding white to a drawing to raise the value is hitherto new to me.

Above is a drawing of one of the white eggplants that Pica has been growing in the garden out front.

A Trip to Berkeley

We took a trip to meet a cousin of Numenius visiting from Cleveland. It was a delightful surprise to find she’s an artist. We spent lunchtime talking about pencils, brushes, pastels, and finally decided to drag everyone else off to Dick Blick on University Ave (far enough down that Cal football traffic wasn’t an issue). I bought some pastel pencils I think will work well for bird portraits, though there wasn’t any Ampersand Pastelbord at that shop — I’ll have to order it.

I did a sketch of Numenius’s father. He’s a great gentleman and a great person and I’m always happier and richer to have seen him.