daily-ish notes…

  • on #martch last.

    It’s 7am as I write this last post of my month of daily drawing and unless something goes terribly wrong today and I can’t find thirty minutes or so to dabble out even a simple sketch, I think I’m going to be able to announce on April 1 (no fooling) that my daily doodles have been successful.

    I still need to catch up and post photos of all that art in my gallery but trust me, I’ve draw at least something every single day this month.

    A conclusion post is in order, of course, full of observations and lessons from the daily effort of putting something into a sketchbook, but the simplest takeaway for me today, as I get ready to do my last sketch of the month, is that drawing daily has forced me to draw even when I haven’t been “in the mood” or “feeling inspired” and has more than once resulted in an image that I never would have painted but has turned out to be something I’m proud that I did, and fascinated by the results.

    Thirty down, one to go. See you in April.

  • of human perspective, part 2.

    I just read an article about an upgrade to a video game I play. The game now includes ray tracing. In essence, it changes the way light is rendered by the 3d processing engine to enhance the dynamic blah blah blah… technology!

    I watched the video and couldn’t see the difference. Honestly.

    I’ve written previously on folks who lose their mind over technology specs and overlook the art the technology is meant to support.

    I once had a friend who wanted to see my dSLR and was insanely excited that it had (for the time) a great megapixel count. He didn’t look at a single photo I’d taken on it. Didn’t care. It was about what the camera could do, not what I could do with it.

    And just like the video game, some people get excited about the technology of the game and not the gameplay.

    So, when I sketch I try to keep in mind that I’m the type of person who gets excited about the art not the paintbrushes.

  • on fountain pens, part 2.

    I ordered a couple fountain pens last week, and since they’ve arrived I’ve been dabbling in doodling with my new toys.

    Specifically, I ordered two LAMY Safari pens, a yellow one with an extra fine nib and a black one with a medium nib.

    Fountain pens feel different on the page than the felt-tipped markers or roller-ball gel pens I’ve been using for the last couple of years. There is a more tactile effect to their contact with the paper, a subtle scratchiness and that moment of flow as you see the ink setting into the page and drying a millimeter or two behind the leading trail of your sketching path. There is a unique satisfaction to their flow on the page, and I’m enjoying them immensely.

  • on messes.

    I had thirty minutes at lunch today to do my daily sketch, so I went for a walk and found nice place to sit in the atrium of the local theatre where there a ton of benches and plants and natural light. A thousand little scribbles turned into a mess of vegetation and some hurried painting started to push through into a plain old mess.

    It didn’t turn out terrible, but messy is tough and there is a fine line between art and jumble.

  • masked off.

    I’ve been experimenting with masking.

    No, it’s not anything unique or new, but I’ve been playing around with the notion of a crisp white border around my painting. A box made of masking tape defines the rectangle of paintable area on the page. Sometimes the border is thin. Sometimes it is very wide, so wide that the picture is floating in the middle third of the page. Sometimes I lock the image into that space, and sometimes I let the sketch slip outside the boundaries in a controlled way.

    Masking has proven to be an interesting addition to my toolkit.