Urban Sketchers is one of my favourite new blogs to see. A few years ago I spent four weeks doing sketches on buses when I went to have bloods done at the hospital every Monday morning. Like this woman I felt very alone. Since then I’ve been fortunate to start making friends and feel a whole let less alone - I have so much to be grateful for.
Posemaniacs.com I keep forgetting the name of this site so posting it here to hopefully be able to find it again when I need it.
a rough guide for illustrators, gallery artists, cartoonists, comics artists, concept artists and other visual artists who want to present a professional representation of their work on the web.
Drawing is the point of contact in which idea begins to approximate form. There is a kind of transcendent energy in the sketchbook, or the tissue, or even the napkin upon which the simplest of doodles begins its long, twisted road to realization. It’s all grist for the mill, and the studio is its incubation chamber: not the studio with the white board and the IT guy and the phones ringing and the incessant emails, but the studio in which the ideas seek, and ultimately start to find, their burgeoning, fledgling form. Cezanne once wrote that the painter must enclose himself within his work, and it is true that such investment — physical, spiritual, and deeply intentional — is, in fact, what making work is all about. But as the public’s media appetite moves further away from the dreamy landscape of imagination (think Reality TV and confessional memoirs) the danger for design, I think, is imminent. Sure, design serves a pragmatic need, but that doesn’t mean its point of departure needs to position itself so firmly in the realm of logic, does it? Drawing, as the primary gesture of making, reopens the doors of the imagination and recasts the process as something completely different. Scary, because you don’t always know where you’re going. But somehow, you know when you get there.
There’s time, later for logic, for editing, for justifying all that type, for putting up those responsible roadblocks that we all must, on some level, choose to embrace. The studio, at least a little piece of it, is not the place for such duty-bound thinking. Somewhere, somehow, it must be the place for thinking through making.
But don’t take my word for it: the only way you’ll know for sure is if you turn off your phone, pick up a pencil and try it yourself.
Design Observer: The Art of Thinking Through Making Jessica Helfand
Standing, 06.02.12, graphite on paper, 11 X 20 in.
Reclining Male, 06.02.12, graphite on paper, 15 X 15 in.
Sometimes I like to just post the drawings and let them speak for themselves, but I’m often asked to justify the way I draw — I draw “messy” because life is messy, complicated, energetic, and interconnected — how could I draw any other way?
Life Drawing, 06.02.14, Graphite on paper, 14 X 22 inches Enlarge
Life Drawing, 06.01.17, conté on paper, 14 X 22 in.
The other night one of my fellow life drawing students asked me about learning to draw. I suggested she get some figure drawing books from the library. She replied that she had read lots of books and they don’t seem to help. I told her, “Don’t read them. Draw the pictures.” In my experience, this teaches the hand and eye structure, anatomy, and proportion. The only way to learn to draw is to practice. I should also have mentioned that practice continues for the rest of one’s life.
Wedding Dress, 06.01.10, oil stick on paper, 18 X 20 in.
Last night’s life drawing and a quotation I like about life drawing:
The human figure has played a huge role in art this century, perhaps more so now than ever before. While video and electronic processes may seem radically distant from ‘traditional’ art, they are simply tools, and much of the art being produced by young artists today has as its subject the same preoccupation that art has always addressed: the human being and what it is to be one. How to Draw The Human Figure: A Complete Guide, John Raynes and Jody Raynes
Last week’s challenge was to draw a challenge from the past year that you didn’t try before. I don’t actually have a medicine cabinet so I drew my “medicine box” which, thankfully, is nearly empty now.
