daily-ish notes…

  • on weather decisions.

    Not every day is a day for outdoor sketching. I picked October as a month to challenge myself to draw every day, but October is not summer where I live… nor is it winter. In November, our city will almost certainly be covered in snow at some point; not ideal for sketching in the park. (Not impossible, just not ideal!) And yet October has a been a challenging month too. Cold winds, socked in rainy days, short daylight hours. All of it forces choices, creates tiny obstacles to creating.

  • on art walking.

    The thrill of going on a long walk with the intention of sketching something, somewhere along the way, that’s the classic artist vibe. For hundreds of years, before cameras, that was pretty much the whole job of a scientist it seems: go walk around and draw nature while you wrote your observations in a journal. Nowadays, sketches of hadron colliders and quantum entangled electrons are not quite as sketch-able as say, the stages of pinecone deployment or the lifecycle of the blue breasted woodpecker, but that just leaves sketching nature for the rest of us humble artists, doesn’t it?

  • on vegetation.

    I have this kind of unearned confidence when it comes to sketching vegetation. Y’know: the trees, shrubs, small plants that populate my urban sketches. I know this because I tend to follow the less-is-more rule when it comes to sketches where the focal point is the architecture—leaving the vegetation as a kind of quasi-cartoonish detail filling in the whitespace—versus when I actually try and draw, say, a copse of trees as I attempted this weekend. When I do the latter, my trees look generic and silly, even though they are the same kinds of trees I draw around buildings. I’m not sure if this means (a) I need to stop trying to draw pictures where the focal point is large vegetation or (b) I just need to practice my trees more. I’m leaning the second option.

  • of social performance.

    I have taken a long break from posting my art on social media. The problem isn’t engagement. People “like” my stuff. The problem was always about performance. Art so quickly becomes this show that I’m doing, rather than a craft that I am honing. It is a weird thing, trying to find the right balance. Trying to figure out where it becomes showing people what you made and being proud of it on one side… and posting for other reasons besides on the other. If you’ve found a balance, that’s awesome. I struggle.

  • of expeditioning locally.

    I wrote my blog yesterday, packed a small bag of art supplies, and went for a very long walk. My plan was to do at least three sketches. And I did. I sat at a table and sketched a scene at the local university. I sat on the lawn of our capital building and sketched the dome. Then I sat in a downtown cafe and sketched the scene across the street. I didn’t set out to anywhere in particular, but just prepared myself and went out.