works of wanderlust

Tag: urban sketch

  • 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?

  • urban sketch, one

    Crossposted on Notes for a Sketch

    It has been a few years since I plunked myself into the blank pages of a sketchbook for my reprisal into the plein air arts. It was an adventure that took me down a rabbit hole of watercolours and personal expression through ink and pigment that has been hard to quantify in the context of the last few years.

    I waned in my artistic efforts this past year or so for two reasons.

    One, simply, distraction and stress.  Bumbling between efforts of professional self-actualization is a chore, let me tell you.

    But two, performance pressure. I got too caught up in the gig-ification efforts of my sketchy self. I saw all these people documenting their personal artistic journey’s online and felt like I could, should, would do the same. But then art becomes performance almost instantly. My art becomes a posting frenzy to get stuff online and getting stuff online becomes the driver for art and trying to post things that are (a) good enough to post and (b) interesting to my nascent audience became this emotionally all-consuming feedback loop of anxiety about quantifying and artistic output and all that jazz. It was no longer about making art but rather about producing content. It is the sad story of our age, to be honest, and hardly unique to me.

    So I admit. I took a little break.

    But we’re leaving for Japan in a couple months, and I would be so regretful if I went there without a sketchbook and the intention to lock in some art on my travels. Bothering with the whole paints and brushes bit is a bit of hesitation, though, so what I’m left with is honing some simpler sketching efforts. 

    I just completed a running streak. I ran every day for sixteen days in a row. I admit this is hardly a record, even for myself, but there is value in locking in on a repetitive daily goal with the intention of building a practice and a foundation of skill or endurance. There is absolutely nothing saying that I can’t do the same thing with my sketching, right?  And with October just a few dozen hours away, looking towards the month as a daily sketching challenge I could easily see myself getting out into the plein airs of the city with such intention to match a running goal, but with a pen and paper.

    So, a new series on this blog. Urban Sketch.

    This is not put here with the intention of returning the world of artistic performance, no. Rather, to use words as  I often use them—for personal reflection, logging, and being mindful of the whys behind my whats. 

    I’m going to try and draw every day in October. I had intended to go to the art store today, and I still will because I do really need to refresh my watercolour paper for the winter season, but I’m going to go with the intention of getting back into that artists mindset, too. And I’ll write more about it here, of course, as the months wear on.

  • 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: