Sketching A Triffid

It was late in the afternoon and the rain was coming in when I got around to doing my daily sketch, so I drew a plant in the garden through the living room window. Nobody is sure what this is, but it seems triffid-like to me.

This is another sketch with the Neocolor II watersoluble crayons: I used yellow green, lemon yellow, prussian blue, malachite green, brown, umber, russet, and gray in the sketch. It’s fun mixing all the colors on the page.

Comix Coven

I finished the Comix Activism 4-week session with Maureen Burdock last Saturday, and decided to make more of a commitment to my comics making. I’ve signed up for her year-long Comics Coven starting in early January.

I got sent a syllabus for the first two months of the year along with a list of materials, most of which I already own. But I was puzzled by the requirement to bring a “visual journal” — I know of them, and I know people keep them, but I have sketchbooks and journals, and mostly never the twain shall meet, apart from my nature journal, which has actually been a good trainer for this activity. (I’m not in the least bit interested in doing the painted-collage-ephemera type thing which seems to me to be little more than scrapbooking, but I do like the Arne & Carlos “idea book” concept, though I’m not sure how likely I’d be to stick to it.)

I’ve decided to make a start on a visual journal which I’m hoping will replace my morning pages once I’m done with the Artist’s Way (three weeks to go). I like journaling. I like lettering. I like sketching. Throw them all together. Finding the perfect size, paper weight, and paper surface will be a trick, of course…

Christmas Cards

When I first moved to the US from the UK, back in 1988 (the Dukakis election), I got a job at an architect’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was fascinated by the new buildings I was seeing — postmodernism was in full, if somewhat uneven, force. But that experience drew me to, well, draw.

A train trip to Mystic, Connecticut, to visit my mother’s cousin for Thanksgiving that year had me drawing trees from the train — of necessity bare, spare, and plentiful. By the time the train pulled in to South Station I had dozens of small drawings, done in pen and black ink (pretty sure it was a Rapidograph, temperamental bitches that need to be held upright, not a comfortable way to draw, but hey, I was working in an architect’s office, and they had pen cleaning equipment galore; this was before anyone other than a couple of geeks was doing architectural drawings digitally).

This started me on a yearly Christmas card-making journey. Thirty-seven years later, I’m still making my own cards. (The xmas card list has dwindled significantly; I think I’ve only made 35 this year and I still have about six left.) They have been drawn, silk screened, painted, calligraphed, collaged, gelatin-monoprinted, accordion-folded — whatever I was into that year. So in a way this is a good catalog of my artistic journey over decades.

I figured out early on to keep copies of them. The fact that my mother handed me ones I’d sent to her and dad over the years filled out some of the gaps. This isn’t the full set but close…

Fig Tree in Fall

I am continuing to sketch a lot with my Neocolor II watercolor crayons. I think they are a good match to the paper in the Stillman & Birn Alpha series sketchbooks; I really like using the 7” × 7” Alpha sketchbook and a new one of these just arrived for me today.

Here is a sketch of the yellow leaves on our fig tree which I did as an experiment in sketching light subjects against a dark background. This is very hard to do in watercolor without resorting to various forms of masking. I’m pleased with how this turned out via drawing with the watercolor crayons and activating the pigments with a small wet paintbrush to create the wash. The crayons I used were lemon yellow and yellow for the leaves, umber, light gray, and white for the branches, and emerald green and Payne’s gray for the leafy backdrop.

Drawing While Journaling

I’ve been doing my morning pages, but I keep getting interrupted by cats. So I draw them.

Pomegranate In Neocolors

This week I’ve been continuing to practice with my new set of Neocolor II water-soluble crayons. Here is a sketch I did a couple days ago of a dried pomegranate. This is the one Neocolor II sketch I’ve done on cold press watercolor paper; the others have all been on the much thinner Stillman and Birn Alpha paper.

On Painting and Thought

I’m continuing to explore sketching with my new Neocolor II crayons, and here is a painting I did today of one of the Sugar Bee apples from today’s grocery shop run. I’m starting to learn how the Neocolors work as their own distinct medium. They go on the paper very smoothly — it’s a wax crayon — and it’s easy to spread the pigments around with a wet paintbrush. Once the paper is dry again, you can draw on it with more crayon in another layer. I also picked up a trick from a video about drawing birds with Neocolor IIs. The artist in this video uses a plastic palette with a rough surface. After drawing on the rough surface with a crayon, one can pick up the pigment directly with a wet paintbrush, thus turning the crayon into what is effectively watercolor paint. This can solve some problems posed by only using the crayons directly on the paper, such as being able to create a smooth wash, or being able to paint details with a fine brush. I made up an instant rough palette surface by using steel wool on a yogurt container top, and tested this approach out.

It is interesting that learning how materials behave — in this case a new art medium — is as far as I can intuit is the domain of non-linguistic thought. When I wanted to add yellow spotting on top of the red of the apple, I just knew that my little rounded flat travel brush would be a good tool for this. I don’t believe language had anything to do with this thought.

This is a consequential realization because the trillions that are being invested right now in AI are being built for the most part on the manipulation of language. To the best of my knowledge the heart of today’s AI boom is large language models (LLMs). There was a piece published in The Verge today about how this is likely a philosophical error. The article is entitled “Large language mistake” and has the subheading “Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.” The article draws upon a perspective piece published in Nature last year entitled “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought”, arguing its case from contemporary neuroscience and linguistics. I’m not expecting AIs to know how to paint watercolor anytime soon.

The Work

Neocolor IIs Arrive!

At last week’s sketchcrawl, I did a sketch using a small set of Caran D’Ache Neocolor II water-soluble wax crayons. Working with these crayons was interesting enough to warrant ordering a bigger set, and this arrived today. I quickly swatched out the set, and the swatch chart is shown at left. There are thirty colors in the set, and I added a couple of other colors as singles to the collection (Payne’s Gray and Sepia). Now I get to play and experiment to see how they fit into all the other sketching media I use!

Line and Wash and Soy Sauce

As remarked upon previously, for Friday dinners we almost always have a tofu-cilantro stirfry over rice. But we were out of soy sauce and had to pick up a new bottle this morning. It made a fine subject for a sketch. I did this with my fude fountain pen and Schmincke pan watercolors. I tend to use waterbrushes for my sketches instead of actual paintbrushes but today I used the latter — it’s a good practice. One gets a lot more control with real paintbrushes but they are harder to work with in the field.