works of wanderlust

Category: style

  • of a thousand little details.

    I find there are certain kinds of art that take a lot of concentration, focus, and attention to everything. But then there are other kinds of art that almost let the mind fall into a bit of a flow-state and the world passes by and you play an episode of some random tv show in the background or listen to an audiobook and then suddenly an hour has passed and you’ve filled up a nice chunk of the page with something that is actually pretty interesting.

    I suppose in some ways you could just call that doodling, and if so, I was doodling. I prefer to think of it as planned illustration using a method that was repetitive enough that the aforementioned flow-state was inevitable as was the specific level of detail that I set out to achieve when I started drawing.

    additive details

    I tend to do a lot of drawing where I draw big shapes and fill in the details afterwards. But lately I’ve been flipping the process and starting with details, and iteratively working to build something big out of lots of little pieces. You do need to always think about the big picture and sometimes starting with strategy is fine. But other times when you just start building the pieces you know are important, then time and persistence turn into something you might not have planned but is exactly what you need after all. What this amounts to is the collective result of a thousand little unplanned details. Each detail is part of a bigger picture, not random but certainly plucked out of the air in the moment of creation to build a whole picture that is a multiple of its parts.

    I’ve been following a couple accounts on instagram that appeared in my suggestions months and months ago based on “similar interests” and when I first saw them they seemed to be sketching in the realm of what I would have classically called “urban sketching” but now am not exactly sure. I suppose that denotes a certain originality and probably what helped catch my eye to their work in the first place. Fast forward, however, and were you to compare this week’s sketching efforts to those account I think you’d find a tremendous amount of similarity. Not replication of substance, per se, but in what I have been “doodling” there is certainly a style and approach that is following the spirit of highly detailed, medium format, one point perspective illustration of architecture.

    My buildings are purely fantastical, tho. I’m not sure how much reality is ascendant in those artists work.

    Which leaves me at the end of this week doodling in ink on 11×14 sheets of paper while listening to audiobook novels and half-watching old episodes of Doctor Who in the background while I imagine interconnected structures overlapping in a kind of weirdly futuristic but also anachronistic style that is neither dystopian nor utopian, and mostly just hard to put my finger on.

    Art is art, tho. So take from it what you will. And while you’re thinking about it, why not check out the long format video I made of some of the process:

  • in a multi-layer circus.

    About a thousand people walked by me as I sat on the ground in Piccadilly Circus on London one afternoon in July and did the sketch for this piece. People stop to take pictures of you while your sketching, look over your shoulder, and generally treat you as just as much part of the chaos of the scene when you’re doing that. To say I was nervous as heck would me an understatement, but that’s half the fun, right?

    We have returned from our travels.

    We spent three weeks visiting three countries in western Europe: England, France and Italy, and at the core of those travels was a wee bit of sketching.

    To say it was the focus of the vacation would be false. It was a family vacation with some sketching squeezing into the gaps when possible, and as such I brought along just enough of my sketching gear to consider it a worthwhile effort. Paints, pens, brushes and just two sketchbooks, one vacation-specific in which I’ll likely not draw anymore and just set it aside as a souvenir, and then also my urban sketches watercolor folio into which I put another ten or so drawings over the course of the three weeks.

    This was one of the latter. A sketch into my general collection of watercolour urban scene sketches, and to make it, yes, I sat down on the concrete at the edge of Piccadilly Circus in London, England, and with my pen in my hand and my book on my lap just started to draw as fast as I could go.

    public performance

    No one wants to make a scene when they are trying to be creative. I mean, no one who isn't literally performing for the crowd.  And I mean no one who is trying to sit at the edge of the action and just quietly be out of the way drawing.  In a crowded place full of action and tourists and a jumble of people and activity, a guy sitting on the ground sketching it all is almost certain to become an object of attention. Me and my sketchbook are one hundred percent in someone's vacation photo collection. People walked over and looked over my shoulder. People stopped to take pictures. People waved their hands at their friends to get them to come look at the guy sitting on the ground sketching. I'm not sure if the distraction made the final result better or what, but it certainly made me work faster and looser and with less attention on some of those things that sometimes cause me to double think and hesitate.  There was no room for any of that, literally or figuratively.

    Of course, I waited until safely back in the hotel to pull out the paints, and flicked open the photos app on my phone to find the reference photo I’d snapped from where I sat (luckily I remembered to do that, what with the circus chaos around me!)

    And the pressure from eyes of the crowd, and the nudging from my family to get up and move along with the vacation, and the pressure from myself to not overthink or overdraw or overwork any of the picture, I stood up after about twenty minutes and tucked my book and pen into my shoulder bag, and we moved along.

    “What was your favorite part of the trip?” People have been asking since we returned.

    “Oh, the food and sights.” I reply, because its relatable and mostly true. “I did some sketching, too.” I add. And as understated as I make it seem now, yeah, those moments because of the adrenaline rush of the crazy vibe swirling around and through my pen, I somehow think those moments will stick in my brain for a long, long time.

  • of cool thoughts.

    It’s been hot outside. Isn’t that typical of us? Complaining in the winter that it’s too cold then complaining in the summer that it’s too hot. Maybe there is some kind of philosophical mindset we all need to embrace about living in the moment and being happy with where and when we currently are.

    I opted to embrace cool thoughts in the heat wave, and painted a winter scene (a second attempt of my last watercolour class project) using cool colours.

    Also I tend to be a guy that overuses colours and underuses brushes. I’ll use too many conflicting tones and shades, fail to mix them appropriately and then slap them all on using the same brush.

    Instead, I tried to use few colours and more brushes for this piece.

    In fact, I only used one colour, a big sloppy bowl of blue (with some red mixed in) and about five different brushes of various sizes and styles including rounds, flats and even a rigger. One colour, five brushes. Talk about taking things in the opposite direction, eh?

    The first attempt at this painting was in class and was all about colour:

    Lots of colours and just two brushes. (Also we used a tracing transfer technique for the base image, where I freehanded the second one, so the first attempt is closer to the reference photo, but who’s counting, huh?)

    See the difference?

    tonal monochromatics

    Call me strange, but I've always loved monochrome images. Black and white. Sepia. Whatever. I went through a phase in my photography days where one of the custom settings on my mode-select dial was strictly set to take medium-contrast black and white digital images, so that I could just spin that knob over to C1 and be snapping artsy-fartsy moody shots whenever the mood struck. Now that I'm a little more comfortable in my watercolour skin it has become increasingly obvious to me that the layering technique I've been using to add texture and shadow and shape and depth with colours is not only a great way to make monochromatic images (such as the feature image in this post created exclusively with a single shade of blue) but it is in fact simpler than painting with colour. Why? Because it's literally the same technique, but instead of carefully planning and mixing and finding the right hue, you just keep painting with the blue. I love it.

    All this technique-dabbling, though, is really just me prepping for three weeks in Europe this summer and thinking about how to capture that trip in a variety of styles and moods. Snapshot mages full of colour, architectural loose sketches, or old buildings and wobbly streets brought to life in tones and simple palettes.

    All of it is opening a broadening scope of artistic opportunity for me to keep figuring stuff out.

  • in a dimly lit space.

    Not only have I been thinking of all the new things I can do with the skills I’ve learned in my watercolour class, but I’ve been thinking such thoughts in the context of our upcoming trip to Europe where (so I’ve heard) there are plenty of neat things to sketch and paint.

    Of course there are.

    I made a trip to the art store last night, and when the “dude” at the counter asked me if he could help me find anything, I lied and said I was “just browsing” but looking to stock up on some stuff for a trip I was taking.

    In fact, I was in the market for a higher quality “smallish” brush, something akin to the blended squirrel brushes I’ve bought for my class but in a 2 or 4 size, versus a 12, so it’s y’know more handy for small format, travel urban sketchies in a moleskine versus big large format watercolours that we’ve been tackling in class.

    I ended up leaving almost empty handed, just one tube of white gouache (which I’ve been eyeing for a few months now) and a mid-grade synthetic brush size 4 that caught my eye and for which I thought I’d give it a try.

    framing devices

    I saw a clever use of taping that has struck me as a great framing method for my upcoming "travel journal" sketches: the faux photo look.  Tape off a roughly 2:3 proportional rectangle, about the size and shape you might see in an old point-and-click photo style from the 90s, setting it slightly askew on the page.  Paint, keeping into but filling completely the bounds of the box you've created with the tape. Remove tape, and then with a ruler and either fineliner or fine-nibbed pen draw a border with a small white margin around the painted area. Add some incidental shading on a couple of the outer edges of your ink box, and voila! A faux photo on the page.

    I was browsing on one of the socials this morning and that white gouache was stuck in my craw, because a neat little astronomy photo as the header for some article about sciencey-stuff quickly found it’s ways a screencap into my photo library and from there as the inspiration to apply some groovy cloud techniques into a solar view technique and…

    Night sky.

    Spatter some white gouache to finish it off and…

    Well, if you showed me this pic a year ago and told me I’d painted it I’d be as surprised as anyone.

  • of west coast wetness.

    The goal of taking a class has always been, obviously, to learn. Incremental self-improvement is fine, and I’m a huge advocate of digging into a problem on your own and trying to wade through the weeds to find the harvestable vegetables in the mess of it all. That said, having one’s hand held a little bit is never a waste.

    The fifth Thursday night of my eight week class happened last night, and after a hulluva shitty day, three hours with no other obligations than putting paint onto paper in an air conditioned classroom with some groovy jazz streaming in the background was perhaps, for the first legitimate time in a long time, earned and deserved.

    Barely a few days ago I posted on an unguided attempt to watercolour in the form of a scene from a run that I’d turned into a rough bit of art. Sure, I’d used some of the lesson that I’d learned to do a piece that was much more complex than almost everything I’d attempted on my own since starting on this painting adventure. And sure, it’s a decent quality “beginner” piece that well-documents progress on this effort.

    But.

    You know there is a but.

    I attempted to tackle some things I’d nary tried previously and the results are telling.

    What I didn’t mention was that upon showing it to my wife and asking if she recognized the scene, she said “sure, it’s a path through the dog park…”

    “No. Well…. um, no. It’s supposed to be a creek through the ravine. But I take your point.”

    wet wooshes on wet

    It's not that clouds are tough to paint, but man... they are sometime tough to paint. Just when I think I've got it almost figured out, along comes some other complexity and my "that accidentally worked" doesn't work the second time or something gets overdone and now they're not clouds anymore or... sigh. Clouds are tough to paint. At some point perhaps I'll start to document all the little clever ways of painting clouds but so far I think my favourite is the one I learned last night in class. All credit to my instructor here, but here's the verdict: a wet-on-wet gradient is set into the sky of the scene, and then, rinsing and 80%-ish drying the brush for each woosh, whispy whorls of clouds are drawn with abandon across the still-wet sky gradient, pulling a bit of the blue (or whatever colour skies are on your world) paint from the gradient and allowing it to slurp and slither and blur into soft tendrils of cloud-like trails across the sky. The proper name for these types of clouds are cirri, but seeing as they are common on a prairie summer day I think I'll be getting more practice with this technique soon.

    Coincidentally then, maybe, in tackling a west coast beach scene in last night’s class I — three days late — came across the solution to my wandering through the wilderness alone attempt at water and wet sandy mud.

    Should I have been able to figure this out on my own? Well, yeah. Eventually. Maybe after another three or four stabs at it, another twenty bucks worth of paper and paint invested on my mediocre doodles, and sure, I would have perhaps, likely, almost certainly stumbled on the correct answer to my it’s-a-creek-not-a-trail problem.

    Or I could just have it demonstrated in a recreation centre multipurpose room with groovy jazz humming in the background. If I’m smart I’ll not just tackle my homework this weekend, taking another stab at the assigned beach scene, but I’ll fish out that picture of the creek once more and see if I’m telling the truth in this post and I actually did learn something after all.