Drawing Sessions

One of the tougher things about sticking to a plan of learning to draw from model sessions is how the poses and models tend to fall into repetitive patterns or otherwise grow tired - especially on an uninstructed, prop-free and open Wednesday life drawing session, where things are a little more restricted than in a relatively fast-paced Gesture session. To have some fun with an old game, I've decided to start working on characters, using the model only for pose inspiration. Here's a caricatured IT guy loosely based on someone from my past:

Drawing Sessions

Made it to Wednesday but not Tuesday this week, felt surprisingly loose considering how I've been getting limited practice at home lately.






Question of the day: How is it that cell phone providers like Verizon can get away with charging so much for batteries? The Verizon store wanted to give me a "deal" by "giving" me 25% off their regular price for a phone battery... which was $40! 5 minutes on Amazon, and I found a well-rated replacement for just $7 + shipping. Accessories must be to Cell phone providers what cables are for Best Buy.


Obama 2008!

Drawing Sessions

Recent storms brought in the best snow I've ever seen at Lake Tahoe this past weekend (lots of tree riding at Squaw!); unfortunately it also brought blinding 120mph gusts of wind, which closed the roads out of the mountains and stranded Mark, Mahyar and I for an unexpected Sunday night at the Cal Neva bar. We woke up at 4am Monday morning to chase a small window of potential freeway re-openings, and made it back to Oakland in time for work.

As for drawing: I got a pretty good note in class to look more for the abstract shape of a pose before committing to even the limbs of a character. Will try to push for that more in the next session...

Gesture Drawing

Coachella's lineup was announced today... I'm thinking about it, but leaning away this year. Roger Waters would be cool, but for the $500 it takes for me to make the trip, this new lineup just seems to fall a little short. Keeping me in the game is a review of some of my favorite 2007 shows streaming fresh off the 'nano: Rodrigo y Gabriela, Of Montreal, Hot Chip, Metric, and Gotan Project.

Meanwhile, back at gesture drawing:

Drawing Sessions (From the Stack)

I usually bring all my drawings home from class and toss them in a growing stack of newsprint paper. When I have time, I take a few pages from the top of the stack, re-drawing poses in a sketchbook and taking a second look at successes and failures. Here are a few interesting ones from December that had been buried...

Drawing Sessions

Drawing Sessions

While I've spent most of my weeknights lately battling a major outbreak of buzzing flies in my house, I have to admit there's a strange satisfaction once you reach a letter of flyswatter aptitude where you can take down the little pests in mid-air, on their own turf. Anyhow, here are a few drawings from class in my first week back:

Google Reader & Homepage

This might not be news to everyone, but just a quick shout out for everyone else: I've only recently been able to sit down and fully explore the cool new Google Web apps available, and I have to recommend that you Google users out there at home give Reader and Homepage a spin (available through the menus at the top of Gmail and Google search). As a pair these have largely streamlined my daily web browsing: I get RSS summaries of all the websites, blogs, and columns I read as they're updated, and my homepage lists my email, chat, weather, stocks, and news. The new and evolving Reader sharing feature, by which you can see your friends' favorite articles and web findings, is a lot more fun than Digg.com - so get on there, Google friends! You can also see my shared items to the right on this blog if you use a different reader.

Only downside is that I've already subscribed to too many things! That, and the fact that Google now knows far too much about me and could probably replace me entirely by 2021 when it releases "Google Replicant".

Comic: Family Tech Support

Do you live far from your parents, finding yourself doing a little tech support regularly on your visits? Usually it isn't anything impossibly complex, but the generational gap when it comes to computers is always amusing, so when I found my afternoon free yesterday I decided to draw up a quick comic:

It was fun to try this, though the process was glacially slow since I'm not used to doing it! I used a generic Dad caricature for the sake of getting the drawings done quickly.

Sketchbook

In lieu of a shiny 3G iphone from the future, I'm trying to get in the habit of carrying a sketchbook... here are a few quick pages I threw down while waiting on planes/trains on the way to New York. Riding the Hudson Line opened up this whole train of thought on Yetis, Sewer Rats and Demons... a little odd, yes, but I'm going somewhere with it. Really.

Gesture Drawing (Rudy Giuliani)

Just got back from a nice 10-day trip home to New York. On the return flight, I recalled a Gesture Drawing session from a few months back where I tried cartooning "Mr. 9/11" himself into the model's poses. The model was not informed of this insult. Here are a couple of painted results:

Drawing - "Dancer"

One of my goals for the new year is to make drawing more of a habit, hopefully finding a more entertaining purpose for keeping at it than class alone. A co-worker of mine suggested that a good way to improve after a drawing session is to revisit the day's work, and re-draw everything with a fresh critical eye. So this series of drawings is an attempt to breathe some life into what was originally a particularly lousy day of gesture drawing class for me, using the original drawings from class as inspiration for fresh ones that pushed the poses further and had a little more detail.

One Month Off

For the next four weeks, I'll be free from work, unimpeded from writing, reading and sketching all day, working on my pro basketball career, or busting some dewey decimals at the local library. Though I'll be in New York between December 18-28, my real intention is not to travel or rest, but to take some time to focus on defining new goals and enabling more satisfaction in everyday life. Look for a much-needed resurgence in Art posts coming this way!

For now, check out this TEDTalk on creativity and education; A fringe product of very intense academia myself, I'm inclined to agree with much of what the speaker has to say. Most notably, I do now realize that the biggest challenge I face in every day is not only accepting but embracing and enjoying the idea of screwing up in the interest of trying new things... This sort of perfectionism - which I think a lot of former strong students experience - is exactly what our education system too often demands.