More summer reading sketches

Each weekend, I'm slowly working through the drawings I need for the brochure and all the flyers for "Teen Meetup in the Burb." Last weekend, I only managed time for one, which I had intended for our finale, an Open Mic and Karaoke event, but I may paint something else, as I received all kinds of second guessing about the gender of the person holding the microphone and decided maybe I'd better do one with no one in it! I will probably use this for the brochure, since it reads well small, and do the other picture for the flyer--I'm planning an empty stool and a microphone sitting in a spotlight.

I finished two more this weekend--one for the Sketch Journal we are asking the kids to keep for six weeks, and the other for our music program--the band Flood Zone, who will be playing in the park one night at our smallest branch.

The sketchbook one was a bit tricky--I had to draw a picture of a picture I drew in my sketchbook, along with the whole sketchbook! I picked the Farmers' Market picture as being simple and colorful and a good example of sketching while you're out and about, and also included the opposite page, which had my grocery list for said Farmers' Market, plus some commentary about a funny encounter, and a few notes about colors so when I got home, I could watercolor my drawing. We are teaching a short seminar to get the teens started on their sketchbooks, as well as a small sketch crawl meetup for them. We will go out as a group and sketch around downtown Burbank for two hours. I'm really looking forward to this!

We have wanted to feature a band at summer reading for some time, but didn't know anybody who had one until now. The guy on the right in the beanie is Allen, a former book club member who graduated high school last year and went on to music college, and has recently joined this band. This was a really challenging one to paint--all I had as reference material was an exceedingly dark screen grab from a concert they did, and between the dark stage, the laser lights, and the bobbing heads standing down in front of the stage, it was hard to get a good one! So I greatly simplified these instruments, as well as altering the stage set-up to pull all the band members in closer together. I sent the jpg to Allen tonight, and he seemed happy with it, though, so I think we'll go with it. I should have asked first to find out that Flood Zone is two words, but he was okay with that too, fortunately. Otherwise, I'd have to exercise some seriously atrophied Photoshop skills to put a space in there!

More to come this week…

Another idea

This was from a photo that we actually used for summer reading about five years ago. It was taken by John Reiff Williams, a professional photographer and the husband of my colleague, Anarda. But since I am doing drawings for all the flyers this year, and since the theme is "Teen Meetup in the Burb," I thought this one might work, so I did a pen drawing/watercolor of it. I'll have to check with John to make sure he doesn't mind! Since he took it to use for summer reading, I'm hoping he won't!

Teen Summer Reading Club

Every year, my colleague Anarda and I struggle with the theme and artwork for our teen summer reading program at the library. The kids' programs are easy--hire a magician, a clown, a puppeteer, put their pictures on the flyer, and 200 kids (and their parents) show up. It's different when it comes to teens. You have to find something that's cool without being niche, or you have to take something that's not cool and make it cool somehow. And doing this as two women in our 50s? Yeah, it's a challenge. Some years, the themes provided by the state library or the American Library Association are good. But usually we think they're lame, and go our own way. Last year we did science fiction (Set Forth! New Worlds Await You…), which was a flexible and inclusive theme, and got pretty good results. But we shot ourselves in the foot (feet?) because this year's provided theme is superheroes, and we already included them as part of our sci fi extravaganza last year, so we were stuck--we had to come up with something on our own. So, we did what young adult librarians are supposed to do--we asked the teens.

We did a focus group and ran some ideas by teens of various ages. They seemed to like our ideas (in a rather tepid manner), but then I said the magic words: "It would be kind of like a meetup." Apparently, in teen world, meetups are cool, meetups are sophisticated, meetups are now where it's at. It's all about the lingo. So we promptly adopted this thinking and made our theme "Teen Meetup in the Burb." (We work for the Burbank Public Library.)

Wanting to stick with a casual, spontaneous feel, like actual meetups, I decided that I would draw the illustrations to go on the flyers. We are going to have a weekly "Book Cafe," at which the kids bring the books they're reading, book-talk them, have coffeehouse-type refreshments, and hang out; we're doing a makerspace meetup, meetups for movies, two writing workshops, a meetup in the park with a band, a sketch crawl meetup…and as our finale, Open Mic Night and Karaoke.

So of course the minute I decided to illustrate all of these activities, I froze and couldn't think of any ideas, and when I did, I couldn't execute them the way I wanted them. I was pretty happy with my movie marquee, but Anarda says my cafe chairs are too girly (and I noticed that the perspective on the left-hand chair is pretty wonky), and the sketch I did today (the mug with the books) was overworked into a completely different style, with little spontaneous pen detail showing.

Sigh. I think I might have to take a day off work and just power through a bunch more of these until I get it right. Or maybe two days…?

Parthenay

I started this painting of a scene from France at Keiko Tanabe's workshop with a plan to paint it in the style we were attempting to learn there. Five hours of work later, I realize that I did not succeed in that goal, and that in fact I could not succeed because I still don't have an understanding of how to paint like that. I understand the theory; but in practice? I'm still painting like me.

In this one, that nearly defeated me, because the amount of itsy, confusing detail in this reference photo is overwhelming. Keiko would have determined the salient details, simplified vastly, and produced a masterful work that completely resembled this scene without literally being this scene. I didn't do that. I drew everything. I got halfway through this painting and put it aside for a few days, and I almost decided not to finish it because I couldn't face all that. (I don't know how people like John Salminen plan out and work on a painting for 40 hours straight, reveling in the placement of beautiful minutiae--that's definitely not me either!)

Parthenay: 12x16, watercolor

I'm not saying it's a bad thing that I paint like me, or that this is a bad painting. It does have its problems: I forgot about saving all the whites I wanted to keep. I didn't decide soon enough where my light source was coming from (the photo was taken on a cloudy day that produced few shadows or clues), so there are some awkward results here and there when I remembered or forgot to think about that. I definitely need practice painting foliage that looks realistic! And I am apparently an absolute literalist when it comes to color. For the life of me, I can't look at a picture, as Keiko does, and see tone and value. What appeals to me about a reference photo or a scene is its colors!

Given all that, what is the purpose, then, of taking a workshop such as Keiko's, if you don't really learn to do what she does? Or if you discover you have no affinity for it, or, worse, that you have the affinity but not the ability? As I found out while making this painting, it can be discouraging, or it can be revelatory. (Or, in this case, both.) What this painting revealed to me is that yes, I can make this kind of painting adequately, or even fairly well, but also that I have a long way to go.

I'm not saying that I want to learn to slavishly copy the style of someone else because I admire their work; but my admiration of their work has made me understand that my own body of work is so small that I haven't had the time to work out the kinks. I don't yet know all that I can do, because I haven't done it. When I said to Keiko at the workshop, after my notable failure to produce a believable drawing of a car out of my head, that I would have to take my sketchbook to work with me so I could sit in the parking lot on my lunch hour and draw cars until you could tell a Prius from a Jeep, she absently remarked, "Yes, at one point I realized I did not like painting water and it was because I didn't know how to do it, so I painted only water for six months." That would be six months of daily paintings.

It would be easy for me to say, Yes, but I work a full-time job, so I can't do that. The truth is, though, that you do what matters. Last night, for instance, I had the choice between watching TV or finishing my painting, and I chose to finish the painting. I could make that choice every night, and have, perhaps not a daily painting, but certainly a lot more than I am accomplishing now on the weekends, when I am done running errands or reading a novel. I make the excuse (about reading, and television, and putzing around in shops) that I need to recuperate from the week that's past and gear up for the week to come, but you have to ask the question: What is better for one's psyche than doing something creative? The more you do, the better you get; the better you get, the more fun you have. So there is a mountain range I need to climb, and the first few slopes are called reluctance, lethargy, and fear, but the peaks are wonder, delight, expression, fulfillment. Time to do a little more hiking.

Last day with Keiko, part 2

Keiko Tanabe is all about the value sketch. She says of herself that she is primarily tonal, not a colorist. Since she wants us to focus on our "plan" for painting a picture, she advocates taking away the color and doing a small value sketch, with either a dry medium (pencil, charcoal) or with one color paint (she uses neutral tint) so we can see clearly where our lightest lights to darkest darks will go. You can use most any color to do a value sketch, but using a darker one (gray, purple, blue) is smartest, of course.

So--I brought in my 12x16-inch drawing of this scene from Parthenay (which I made at 6 a.m. before class!), all ready to paint, and after approving the drawing she fatefully said, "But you're going to do a value sketch first, right?" What could I say? (No? gulp...) So I spent most of the morning on my sketch (which is about 6x9) and then on refining my full-size drawing further. Here is the sketch, and I'm not sure I learned that much from it, but I'll keep doing one before I paint for a while and see if it really does improve my paintings. I do know that planning ahead instead of jumping right in can help; but I'm so impatient with the drawing and so in love with color…

Next I put in a first wash of everything that was blue or gray, and everything that could have blue or gray as a first wash under it because it would be darker than that.

That's all I got done at the last day of the workshop. I will continue to work on this scene at home (already put in two more hours today!) and will post it when it's finished, good or bad.

I have a feeling that this painting will turn out looking more like one of mine than one of Keiko's--it's so intricate and full of details that it will be hard for me to do something quick and loose like she does--but that's okay. I'll try another one in her style soon.

She commented to me when she saw the reference photo that she had painted this scene en plein air while in Chiche (France, at Bandouille, where I went in 2013)--I'd really like to see her rendition (but perhaps not until after I have finished my painstaking and exceedingly slow version, so as not to get too discouraged!).

Last day with Keiko, part 1

On our last day, we had a special request from one student for Keiko to show us how she does a "wet" scene--i.e., a street scene shiny with rain, that shows all the reflections. She used a portion of the same photo from which we worked the day before, but greatly simplified it and moved the vanishing point way up the page, so that there was a huge street area. It looked a little odd when sketched out, because of that vast empty space, but all became clear once she painted it--you need all that empty space to accommodate some nice dramatic reflections!

Here is her planning thumbnail:

Here is Keiko, working on the demo. In this first picture, you can see her palette, and how small it is! Although she knows when and where to put in a pop of color, it is calculated. Mostly, she mixes her own colors from a palette of about six: Burnt umber, burnt sienna, ultramarine, cobalt turquoise, cadmium orange, and a yellow (don't know what) were the only colors she used this weekend, plus neutral tint, and her go-to mixes seem to be variations on purple and blue, those colors that can easily go pale or dark. She says that she is a painter of light and shadow, not of color.

This is how we see what she is doing--with a mirror positioned above her. I found it a little disconcerting, since everything she did was backwards in the mirror, and then when I went to do my own, I had the image reversed in my head and had to really focus to get it back to where it belonged!

And here is the finished painting, which took about 40 minutes (not including the drawing, which she had already prepared).

After lunch, Keiko did one last demo for us, including a favorite scene of hers, which is some variation of a cafe scene with umbrellas. She gave us all photographs of this one so we could paint our own later if we liked, and then proceeded to show us how greatly she simplifies the scene and re-crafts it to fit her purposes. She liked the building and the street, but wanted the cafe in place of all the fussy-looking detail in front of the shops on the right, so she just put one there! This entire painting was done, from drawing through final shadows, in 50 minutes.

I can certainly see the advantage of learning and developing the speed and the discriminating eye of Keiko Tanabe! If you do a great job, you have a fantastic painting in an hour; if you mess it up, you've only spent an hour on it and still have time for another! I'm not there (and may never be), but it's something to think about. I love her results. This was a great workshop.

Proposed for today

Here are my two choices for today--we'll see how it goes! Both taken by me, from my trip to France, one from a village and one from the tour bus in Paris (that's what I like about it--the angle).