27 November 07
Illustration Friday: The Zoo
The Illustration Friday topic this week is The Zoo, so here is another sketch from our trip to the zoo at the beginning of the month. I sketched this giraffe with a fountain pen and a marker pen.
25 November 07
Calamari And True Love
Two graffiti from the road leading from our place into campus and town. The first is under the freeway right near campus. The text reads “Looks Like Rain”.
The second one at right is from the bridge over Putah Creek. I expect it will last longer than the first one: the campus grounds people usually paint over graffiti under the freeway pretty quickly.
18 November 07
Tertials and Telescopes
Pica finally had a day off oil spill duty (she goes right at it again tomorrow, having to shepherd a national media crew around the Cordelia center at 8 in the morning) just in time for us to attend the Central Valley Bird Symposium down in Stockton. This event has the usual mix of field trips and indoors workshops, but we went down for two reasons — to attend Keith Hansen’s workshop on bird sketching, and for Pica to buy a new spotting scope.
Keith starts his bird sketches with two circles (or ellipses), body and head. In pencil, with eraser. I don’t even generally bring pencils when I go sketching, preferring to be bold in ink. I do see the point though. Keith worked up to an excellent overhead pencil view of a red-tailed hawk, done completely from memory. I decided maybe I should have brought the Derwent Graphitints.
Then to the optics question. It is surprisingly hard to properly compare optics when contemplating a purchase, for in general places that have a wide selection of binoculars and telescopes are few and far between. The best store in Northern California for this task (Out of This World) is way up in Mendocino. This is why one waits for events like the birding symposium because the dealer from Mendocino came down to our neck of the woods with assorted goodies. Pica quickly confirmed that the scope she was investigating was the one she really wanted (the 50mm Nikon ED Fieldscope), but tested out eyepieces before going with the 13-30x zoom instead of the 20x wide angle. She also learned to expect lots of comments saying “oh, what a cute scope!”
Once we got home, I practiced with the Graphitints a bit, but not on a bird, see above.
Baseball note — the new Stockton Sheraton where the symposium was held is right by the ballpark for the Stockton Ports, which is the Single-A minor league team for the Oakland A’s. A nice little stadium — it would be fun to go to a game there next year.
7 November 07
Arrival of New Sketchbooks
Finding the perfect sketchbook is as chimerical as finding the perfect planner: you basically need to make your own. Well, now you can: on a recommendation by John Muir Laws, I checked out Komtrak, a quaintly archaic company out of Plainview, New York, which offers completely customizable sketchbooks and notebooks (and, it must be said, planners).
The three sketchbook options I ordered arrived today. The paper options include drawing, multi-surface, arches cold press, a very fine paper for pen and ink work. You can get pastel paper, or just cut up your own and get it punched at Kinko’s or some other such place: the vinyl-covered sketchbooks can be refilled easily.
I tried a couple of the surfaces but will hope to put these books through their paces this weekend.
5 November 07
Brush Pen in the Zoo
Every time we go on a sketching outing we are always faced with the crisis of what art materials to pack. Not having to carry the materials on a week-long backpacking trip means the luxury of porting drawing implements one never ends up using. Of course I try to guess what will be most useful, but the guess is usually somewhat off.
My experiment yesterday at the zoo with the waterbrush loaded with ink was interesting — I like the technique, but the particular waterbrush I had was leaking too much ink onto my hands. I ended up using mainly a sepia Faber-Castell brush artist pen together with watercolor wash. The red pandas were simply crying out for lots of rich burnt sienna. At left is one of them being fed bamboo leaves. I also drew lots of the big cats — at right is a tiger I sketched just before we headed out.
4 November 07
Sketchcrawl XVI: Sacramento Zoo
There were about eleven of us at the Sketchcrawl though I think we added some numbers along the way (it goes like this: What, are you guys in a class? No, this is worldwide sketching day. Oh. That’s really cool. Turning to partner: I think we should go and get some paper and a pencil and start drawing. Haha, the cult’s expanding…)
Some really fine artists were among the bunch, and a good time was had by all, especially by young George who’s in line to be the next zoo docent: “That’s a giant anteater. It’s bigger than you are. Daddy, can we go on the train?”
3 November 07
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.
1 November 07
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…
23 October 07
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.
22 October 07
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.