Category: Art

Pencil Drawings

With winter weather closing in, limiting outdoor activities (at least for me), indoor activities make their appearance. After pushing away the giant stacks of jigsaw puzzles accumulated over the past year and a half, I’ve pulled out my drawing tools. Every artist who is serious about drawing acquires a monster stash of art supplies; graphite, charcoal and colored pencils, markers, crayons, art pens, erasers, blending stumps, rulers (yes, it’s okay to use rulers), sharpeners as well as boxes to store all this material in.

Art supplies

I play around with coloring books, but when it comes to serious sketching, I do my own artwork. I’m currently using graphite and charcoal pencils. I’m planning on branching out into colored pencil as well as pastel drawing and watercolor, but I think I’ll always be partial to graphite and charcoal.

I have always drawn free-hand ever since I developed enough coordination to pick up a crayon and apply it to paper. It’s something that’s always come naturally to me. Attempts to use the grids recommended by some artists feels too cramping for me. Other artists advise against this method as it can make you too dependent on the grid for getting your drawing’s proportions correct. I’m inclined to agree and the following sketches are all free-hand.

A good book, if you are interested in drawing accurate birds is The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds by John Muir Laws. It provides instructions for getting not only the basic anatomy of the bird itself but the pattern of feathers, how they are distributed on the body and accurate looking feet. Following his directions, I was able to draw a cardinal.

drawing of cardinal bird

A common complaint I see on reviews for art books is that the artist doesn’t give enough step-by-step instructions for illustrating a subject. While this may be true for some books, it’s important to realize it’s not the writer’s job to frog walk you, a budding artist, through every single step of a drawing. They are only showing you how they achieve their results. This is why you buy dozens of practice sketch books (I get the cheapie ones from Walmart) and draw over and over and over again to achieve the results you’re looking for. Like the old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall, you just have to practice a lot. It took several tries to get an recognizable bird of prey.

sketch of raptor

Or accurate looking shore birds.

various shore birds

sketch of herons

But again, it’s simply a matter of practice.

When including birds in your art work, it will not be necessary to draw in every single feather or leg scale but knowing how everything is placed can help in rendering more accurate images which please the eye and don’t look cartoonish. Once you get the basics down, then, if you want, you can graduate to using colored pencils, watercolors or pastels to make your artwork really pop.

Happy drawing!

artist drawing self

More Random Thoughts about Storytelling

In a previous posting a few years back I offered up some thoughts about storytelling. Having published a few short stories with the magazine Into The Ruins, I am in the process of writing another but find myself detoured by a magical realism novel wanting to get written.

This is not something I planned. It just happened. Anyone who’s a writer often gets asked the question ‘how do you come up with your ideas?’ by someone curious about the creative process. The answer that’s given often frustrates the questioner but it’s the only one we can come up with and it kind of goes like this:

“I dunno. They just come.”

And it’s true. Writing a story, drawing a picture, sculpting, dancing, any activity involving human creativity is not something methodically planned out like building a house. It’s an organic process spontaneously emerging from somewhere deep inside the creator. Like Topsy, it just grows. The magical realism novel (currently not yet named) began as idle daydreams, that grew more complex until I realized it was time to write them down.

You can’t force ideas to come. Anyone who gardens knows when you plant seeds, you need to wait for them to sprout. They don’t do it on demand, no matter how much you beg and plead and stamp your feet. If the seeds are not viable, nothing will ever come but if they are, then one day without any warning the sprout breaks the surface of the soil and grows of its own accord.

When it comes to creativity, everything is grist for the mill. Watching people interact, reading folklore, mythology, history, biographies, any snippet of conversation overheard, traveling around looking at different things. All this gets absorbed by your unconscious to be processed, stirred around, incubated, fermented and eventually regurgitated when you start writing (or drawing or sculpting or whatever). Images from dreams can provide inspiration since that all comes from the unconscious.

When you start creating, don’t let your inner critic get in the way. You know, that little voice that keeps saying ‘that’s dumb’, ‘that’s been done before’, ‘that’s not perfect enough’. Just sit down and start doing your thing without worrying if it’s any good or not. The time for editing is after you’ve written down or drawn stuff. Don’t let so-called writer’s block get in the way. There’s really no such animal.

Just sit down and write/draw/compose/sculpt or whatever.

IMadeDis

And if anyone asks you how you came up with your ideas, you know what to say.

More tools of an artist

In a previous posting I described one of the most basic tools of a beginning artist, the drawing pencil. Whether graphite or charcoal, the drawing pencil is the best way to begin sketching images of people and/or their surroundings. Along with pencils also come erasers and blenders. While we tend to associate erasers with eliminating mistakes, they can also serve as useful tools for enhancing your work.

The erasers most everyone is familiar with is the rubber eraser.

pink school eraser

I still have fond memories as a child of getting the first eraser of the school year along with new pencils and a ruler. Originally made of rubber, modern ‘rubber’ erasers are now made of a synthetic substitute. These types of erasers can be used in drawing but they tend to leave ‘crumbs’ behind which have the potential to mar your art work.

A better eraser is the vinyl eraser.

vinyl or plastic eraser

Because plastic erasers are harder, they are less likely to leave crumbs when used. It’s important to go easy with these types of erasers as they can damage paper. But the plus side is that you can even erase ink with them.

My personal favorite is the kneadable eraser.

kneaded eraser

Similar in feel to Silly Putty, the kneadable eraser can be molded into a variety of shapes, depending on what you are erasing. It leaves no crumbs but absorbs graphite and charcoal so will turn a very dark color after you have used it on a lot of drawings. It may harden up when left sitting for a long while, but will soften back up when you work it around in your hands.

Also useful are blenders, often called blending stumps or tortillons depending on how wide they are.

blending stumps

These are used to spread graphite and/or charcoal on the paper to achieve a smoother effect. You can use your fingertip or a q-tip but the blenders are more precise and less messy. Chamois cloth, which is a soft piece of leather, can also be used as a blender as well for larger areas.

All of the above tools are not to eliminate mistakes made but to enhance your artwork. A good example of this can be found on this tutorial which give instructions on how to draw realistic clouds.

Buy a couple pads of sketch paper and draw, blend, erase and smudge to your heart’s content.

Happy drawing!

Tools of an artist

As a kid one of my great enthusiasms was drawing. Crayons, markers, watercolors and pens streamed through my fingers as I doodled, cartooned and sketched countless reams of paper. Somewhere along the line though, that pastime faded away to the occasional doodle on paper margins. I’m not sure why that happened but the preoccupations of adulthood likely got in the way. However as I have gotten older, my interest in drawing has rekindled.

The tools available to an artist boggle the imagination. My go-to place for quality supplies is the Blick art supply web site. Their free catalog is an inch thick tomb displaying tons of brushes, pastels, oil, watercolors, pencils, charcoals, air brushes, paper pads and numerous other goodies to inspire the budding Rembrandt or Michelangelo wannabee. I could spend all day just thumbing through it and ogling the supplies but of course the whole point of having the catalog is to order something and then start creating.

The simplest drawing tool, as well as the best to start with, is the pencil. Drawing pencils come in two forms, graphite and charcoal. Graphite pencils are the ones we are most familiar with, especially in the form of the number two pencil. Artist pencils come in a range of grades based on their hardness, with the softest pencils graded B to pencils with harder graphite cores labeled H. The number two pencil everyone is familiar with falls in the midrange (HB). Which grade of pencil to use depends on your preference. I tend to settle on 2B and 2H when doing quick sketches. Graphite pencils can range from the hardest (9H) to very soft (9B) but you will discover you won’t use the full range. Once you have sketched a bit, you will find your favorites and stick with those. Art supply stores do sell pencils individually, so you can purchase the grade you prefer and not wind up with a pile of pencils you will rarely use if you buy them by the set.

One drawback to graphite pencils has to do with shine. Because graphite is a mineral, it will reflect light from a surface you may intend to be very dark. If you are looking to create dark values in your drawing, charcoal pencils are better. Charcoal pencils come in varying grades of hardness as do graphite pencils. Made from either grape vines or willow sticks burnt in an kiln without air, their organic composition allows them to absorb light so you don’t get the annoying sheen that you do with graphite.

For eager beaver do-it-yourselfers, you can create your own willow charcoal sticks but being somewhat indolent, I prefer buying them ready made for use. One drawback to using charcoal is the fact that it smudges very easily. A fixative spray can lay down a layer of protection as long as you don’t mind the smell or the slight change in appearance it can cause to your artwork. The decision of whether to spray or not to spray is a controversial topic among artists, with everyone having their own opinion. If you are not interested in long term storage, a cheap hairspray will do the job though the paper may yellow over time.

As for what brand of graphite or charcoal pencils to use, you can buy them quite cheaply at Walmart for quick sketching practice in the beginning. As your technique improves you can find better quality pencils online at a variety of sources. None of them are really budget busters and the quality is roughly the same with all of them. You will no doubt settle on a personal favorite and have at it.

Happy drawing!

Vintage Art

I have a fondness for vintage art work and own several clip art books from Dover Publications with a wide assortment of illustrations. They range from elegant to comical, all with their own special charm.

The above illustration is from one of the clip art books. I like to call it the amazing levitating mop for if you look closely, you will see the maid is not really holding onto it.

Recently on the blog site Ecosophia, the writer John Michael Greer complained about busybodies of every sort and put out a call to have the Order of Anti-Poke Noses revived. Apparently there actually was such an organization and one of its calling cards is shown above with a delightful vintage image of a ghastly harridan poking a long proboscis over a fence and sticking it into the business of a quietly courting couple.

Off and on over the years I also collected vintage postcards and advertising cards such as the following.

Balsam’s Hair Tonic promised you would not only gain a youthful appearance if you made use of their product but a happy family life as well.

The reverse of the card (a bit hard to read because it is shopworn) extols its virtues and also advertises an accompanying health tonic that will cure insomnia, dyspepsia, rheumatism, malaria (!), jaundice and a host of other ailments, all for a buck fifty. What a deal!

This is a postcard which doubles as a fortune telling card for single ladies. With lots of green color and four leaf clover images, how can you go wrong finding out who your future hubby might be? (Notice it assumes he will be a gentleman, though some of the choices of Circle III seem to be more for working class fellows.) Fortunately no one ever made use of it so it now occupies my collection.

I’m guessing this postcard falls under the humorous category, though the humor seems a bit dated to me, not surprising since it’s from the early twentieth century.

What lies behind the appeal of vintage images like these, or any vintage item for that matter? One line of thought seems to be that while some of it may be the inexpensiveness of second hand items, there may also be a psychological basis for it as well. It allows us to mentally connect with the past and serve as a source of comfort in unstable times. While I can’t say that is the reason I enjoy these images, they do harken back to a simpler time when things seemed a bit saner and much more human.

The little sketch I recently made of a ‘dippy hippie’ may not be quite vintage but does make me nostalgic for times now long gone. Will such times ever come again? I think so. Especially if you are willing make an effort to make it happen.

Peace.