works of wanderlust

Tag: sketchbook

  • urban sketch, five

    I have a mere three sketches left in this October (sub)urban sketching challenge I set for myself.

    Good thing, too. The weather is starting to become a factor to my outdoor sketching efforts. The one rule that I set for my October month of daily drawing was that they were not just doodles of the houseplants. I had to draw some kind of outdoor scene that could be considered suburban sketching or adjacent. I have tried to meet this goal head on by ensuring that there was something “human made” in every scene, whether that was just a park bench or a fence post. Because the problem with the suburbs is that its all mostly single family homes, cookie-cutter shopping areas, sprawling parks and cars.

    I also loosely set myself the goal of avoiding when possible drawing from a photograph. The caveat to that was, of course, weather. Sure, I have sat in my vehicle and sketched what I saw through the windshield, but there have been two occasions where the weather was less than cooperative for my efforts and/or I put the sketch off for too long avoiding the weather and I found myself sitting at the kitchen table later on after dark drawing from the photo on my iPad screen. But only twice.

    In other words, all these vague and quasi-restrictive rules have done the thing that often drive proper art: conflict with simplicity and opportunity. I made the rules loose enough that I didn’t create so many obstacles that it became impossible to find a subject. I also made the rules strict enough that—as I wrote above—I couldn’t just draw from my couch or kitchen chair every day either. I had to go out. I had to go on walks and find scenes. And when I couldn’t find scenes I had to just draw what I saw.

    And that’s the rub, isn’t it.

    I went into this combatting another mental obstacle: my inclination to think like a photographer. And photographers want perfect scenes and clear subjects and all those things that seem like they would naturally apply to a good sketch, too. But there seems to be a subtle difference that I just can’t put my finger on—it’s something to do with drawing the mundane and the ability of a pen and ink piece of paper to become something far more interesting than a snapshot. Maybe it is the passing of the visual data through a human brain. Maybe it is the focus of detail through the fingers of a person with feelings and memories. Maybe it is the emphasis that comes from the interpretation that stops being as literal as a lens and a pixel sensor is forced to be by its own nature. Art is subjective not just in the consuming of it, but also in the creation.

    A single tree might be interesting enough as a photograph, but takes on a subjective interpretation when the shapes and colours and shadows pass through my eyes, swirl around my brain and shoot out my fingers as pen strokes. It is no longer a pixel perfect image, but an evoked feeling of a tree in that moment.

    heavy pen

    reluctant as I have been to use heavy pens, I have leaned into fine liners for much of my urban sketching in the last couple years. understanding and becoming friends with strong, bold black ink on the page is a work of confidence as much as it is skill. i am yet to be skilled, but i have learned a kind of confidence in finding the places where solid fills of black ink are not only welcomed but adored when they arrive. i too long thought of my black brush pen as simply lacking the detail of my 005 fine liner and little more than a blunt colouring tool. instead, i have started to see it as important as the page itself: white paper, detailed lines, black shadows, all of it in balance and harmony when drawn right.

    Don’t get me wrong. Many, many artists aspire to draw photo-realistically and a hundred fold people who are their audience applaud the efforts. I admire such skill. 

    Yet, Realism in art is just one branch of a towering tree-worth of styles.  Not every image needs to be a replica of a photograph.

    I’ll give an example that is one step removed from my sketching: I am making a video game. It is artistically best classified as a modern-retro 8-bit game. It is not 8-bit and it is not as simple as that implies. But the art style evokes an 80s arcade aesthetic. It is not trying to be photo realistic. It is not using the best of the best graphics engines to make it look unimpeachably perfect. It is leaning into a style. And while making games that are visions of realism is a fine achievement both technically and artistically, there is more to art, style and creating than replicating the capabilities of another art form.

    So here I found myself with a pen, a sketchbook, and a set of manageable rules that forced me to push through tedium, weather, uninspiring architecture and tight deadlines, all while drawing one image a day then letting it go. There was no working towards perfection day after day after day on one work. It was about sketching in the moment and ignoring the inclinations of a wandering photographic mindset.  

    It has mostly worked. I’m 28 for 28 with three sketches to go as of this writing. My sketches have become freer with style, and my pen become more willing to see a subject where my camera would have seen background fluff.  It has been good. And no, not all the sketches are good, but they are exercises that each and every one have obeyed a rule to create an minor obstacle to build a tiny bit of skill in the overcoming of it. And that’s been worth it.

  • urban sketch, four

    I’m nearly three-quarters of the way through my October sketching challenge as I write this and I have yet to miss a day.

    Two things have emerged from that effort:

    First, I think my drawing has legitimately improved. Doing anything daily is inevitably going to contribute to the effort of general practice and growth, but there is always the risk of hitting a plateau and not realizing any noticeable gains. Self-perception is hard. Self-evaluation is even more difficult. But drawing every day feels a bit like running every day: you build on the gains from the day before and the vibe is never really given to a recovery phase where things stagnate or decay back to the starting state. Whatever that metaphor means for the effort of learning an artistic skill, it feels like it is meaningful here as a comparison.

    Second, me concern for lacking meaningful subject matter in the aesthetic wasteland that is the suburban clutter that is the place I live has ebbed into a kind of seeking the beauty of nature fighting against the cookie-cutter-ness of this world. Sure, the houses and windows and rooflines all start to look the same, but the trees are poking out around them in different ways and framing scenes with a kind of pleasing quality that I am getting better each day at noticing. I think that is important. I mean, I wrote earlier about my struggles with getting out of the photographer’s mindset and of moving away from thinking of my sketches as photos with an ink pen instead of pixels. I think I am starting to feel that vibe a little more strongly as I plonk myself down in unlikely places and frame a scene with sharp inked lines to give a sense of something beyond what is just there.

    My plan with this effort was to re-prime my sketching senses before we head off on a vacation where I think the world will be significantly more sketch-able than suburban prairie Canada. Japan is graced with interesting architecture and a kind of shinto-driven aesthetic that emboldens spaces with a kind of symmetry and beauty that one could spend a lifetime studying to attempt to understand. I have a couple weeks to sketch it, so I wanted to go in hot and ready as I have ever been to draw it—and draw from it.

  • urban sketch, two

    Crossposted on Notes for a Sketch

    It’s hardly worth logging a few messy sketches but I will say since declaring that I was going to start a daily art challenge and do a sketch every day… well, I have.

    The afternoon after my last post I made my way to the art store. There are a couple good ones in the city, but I’ve been supporting the place near Whyte Ave called The Paint Spot. It is a pretty typical art store, crammed floor to ceiling with more art supplies, books and toys than one could ever hope to try in a lifetime. 

    I went right back to the corner and bought a couple big sheets of cold pressed watercolour paper. This is the paper we used in the art classes I took and my winter goals include trying to do some regular painting in the shelter of my basement when the temperatures drop. I can break down one of those big sheets into about twenty to thirty smaller canvases, so with a bank of nearly fifty to keep me busy over the winter I should be able to start honing some winter watercolour scenes come December.

    I also made the mistake of walking past the sketchbook aisle.

    Let me be clear. I do not need any more sketch books. 

    I have a medium-sized shelf filled with sketchbooks that are not even close to half-used up. But I do see a new book and get it in my head that, hey, I could use this sketchbook for just that project. You know, like for example, I walked past the sketchbook aisle and I thought to myself: self, what if I bought a book with the intention of using it for practice art? Like, what if I started the book knowing I was going to fill it with half-baked ideas and doodles and experimental stuff?

    That’s the other problem. I stopped buying cheap books. I’ve become one of those artists who buys ahem-quality-cough-cough supplies. That’s great and all, but bougie as that is I then draw myself into a corner of feeling like the art inside those pages needs to match the quality of the canvas. As in, I’ll buy a nice leather-bound sketchbook then feel this overwhelming sense that every picture needs to be good enough to be drawn in a leather-bound sketchbook. It is a bit stifling, to be honest.

    suburban sketching

    there are no strict rules for what makes and urban sketch, I suppose. one could reflect upon the philosophical nature of an art form that was perhaps conceived as a kind of tourist snapshot art form, visiting a place of architectural urban beauty, a place built by people, and turning it into a sketched scene upon a piece of paper or in a notebook as kind of plein air reference art form. if one lives in a place of cultural significance or often visits those places then urban sketching is a revelatory form of personal expression, finding an excuse to sit for a while and take in a scene, soak it in with ones eyes and translate it to scribbles on a page. my reintroduction to the sport was inspired, actually, by a visit to dublin where I sought out an art supply store so that I could compensate for my lack of planning and find something to urban sketch the city. but if one lives, say, in the suburban outskirts of a small-ish and insignificant city on the canadian prairies where nothing much of architectural consequence exists then one is thereafter reduced to sketching little more than cookie cutter houses and chain restaurants and neatly planned community sprawl. to differentiate that as suburban sketching seems fair.

    So, yeah, art store got a few of my bucks and I bought a nice “practice” sketchbook that I have deemed will be messy and disordered and full of whatever drawings in whatever form I choose. 

    I have drawn in that book four times. 

    And I have drawn in one of my bougie books thrice, contributing there to my daily challenge requirements of a sketchy urban sketch.

    Oh, and you thought art was relaxing, huh?

  • of a hundred little bugs.

    Did I mention that I have a biology degree? It factors into this post, so it’s worth mentioning now. Bachelor of Science with a specialization in molecular genetics and minor in entomology, convocation 1999.

    I can’t say that I’ve used it much in my career, though having it has opened numerous doors.

    And occasionally it rears up as a useful bit of dormant knowledge in my head such as when I need to help my daughter study for a science exam, or I decide to open up my sketchbook and draw an insect.

    A couple weeks ago we were roaming around New York City and I was busily drawing urban sketches of the parks and the buildings and the people. We visited all sorts of sights worth seeing for any nerdy, arty sort of guy, including not only museums but also the 5th Avenue branch of the New York Public Library.

    They have a gift shop.

    And I bought a gift. For myself. A gift that was both arty and nerdy.

    I bought a leatherbound sketchbook made with lush Italian paper with an embossed logo from the library on the cover. It looks and feels like I pulled it out of the golden era of philosopher scientists, as if Charles Darwin himself might have lugged it around in his satchel to record his evolutionary observations.

    But what to do with it?

    phylum arthropoda

    As a photographer I have collected hundreds of backyard bug photos over the years. This has come useful in the last few days as the weather turned bitterly cold and the only insects to be found are the occasional housefly who doesn't know better than to knock himself against the icy window pane. Bugs are beautiful subjects and present an amazing opportunity for artists of watercolour. Some will tell you that flowers are the way to go, but the diversity of the insect world is equally as vast and colourful, and leaps beyond blossoms in complexity and interesting reference material. Recreating intricate body designs, dazzling hues and sheens, detailed hairs and eyes, or the feathery hint of translucent wings is a challenge that can be rewarding for any who attempt to paint a bug. From butterflies to beetles, dragonflies, bees, and ladybugs, even a swarm of ants can make an interesting subject.

    The obvious solution (that took me a mere two weeks to spark upon with a golden eureka moment) was something dutifully scientific.

    This afternoon, having paged through ten years of photos and plucked fifty or so macro pics of various kinds of local arthropods, I painted the first of many pages in my new notebook: a ladybug sitting upon the bark of a tree in my backyard.

    I added the name in both English and Latin as a finishing touch.

    And I love the result. Paintings of nature. Of insects. Maybe plants. Possibly even some flowers here and there. Ultimately a kind of quasi-scientific collection of art linking me back to that otherwise unused university degree. Darwin might have been proud.