Sketchbook ~ texting

texting | pencil

Sketchbook ~ Hood Point

Stump at Hood Point | watercolour & pencil

Spent a couple of sunny hours down at the beach yesterday, sketching with a friend. The resulting painting wasn’t very successful, but it was the start of a good exercise.The beach is full of driftwood, including this huge stump, so there is endless subject matter.

How to Procrastinate #1

Charlemange @ Notre Dame | watercolour, pencil, ink & pencil crayon | 4″ x 6″

1. When cleaning the studio become distracted by poorly executed, failed and abandoned sketches or paintings and make feeble attempt to resurrect or fix them.

(I had all sorts of grand plans to paint my own postcards while on my travels last summer. I managed to paint, write and post 2. I got caught in a rain shower with this one, the third, so it ended up a bit destroyed – paint flowed into carefully planned negative spaces, wouldn’t dry fast enough in the damp and smeared during transport, and an attempt to save it with an over-drawing in ink just made things worse.)

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Charlemange @ Notre Dame | holga pinhole | fuji pro 400h

Charlemange is way off in the distance in the center. The busy square emptied out when the shower hit and everyone ran for cover. This is just afterward, when they started to come back.

Birds, Bees & Monkeys

Macaques & Koi (detail) | thumbnail drawing – pencil on cartridge paper/digital

I’ve updated the sketchbook part of my website with a few more drawings from a recently canceled project. I’ll probably take them a little further on my own and use them for style and medium experiments.

WIP ~ Thumbnails

pencil & ink on paper

Sketchbook ~ little birds

pencil on printer paper

Sketchbook ~ leafless across the street

bare tree and puddle across the street | brush & ink

Most of the trees around are now leafless. Time always feels to me that it accelerates, or at least the passage of time becomes more apparent, when the leaves are falling. But now that the trees are bare, everything slows down again. Except for the dark. That comes quicker.

Sketchbook ~ Daphne

Daphne | Chunghwa ink and brush pen

I used to draw a lot of things straight out of my head. I was in grade school and it was usually during math class. Something about art school in college knocked that out of me and I got tangled up in the need for reference, the need to try to make it right and I lost the ability to draw my stream of conciousness and became horrifically self-conscious about the whole thing. I find it really frustrating now – sitting down to draw and finding there is nothing there. I think in images continually – dream in them too – to the point of exhaustion, but they flee as soon as I pick up a drawing tool. I’m trying to fix that. I’m also trying to be ok with bad drawing – hoping that once I’ve fixed the thought process behind it, the drawing will come.