Urban Sketchers' Day Out

Today Urban Sketchers Los Angeles went more the back-to-nature route, meeting up at 10 a.m. at Placerita Canyon Nature Center up near Newhall to do a little hiking and sketching and painting. My hiking consisted of 300 yards straight uphill, followed by 300 yards straight back down that same hill, knees protesting the downhill direction. The rest of the two hours, I sketched.

I wasn't thrilled with my results; for one thing it was warm enough that all the little swarmy bugs came out to play, and oh do they love water and sweat, so I spent more time swatting than drawing!

First I tried a detailed pen drawing of a small area built for birds, with a bubbling fountain of rocks at its center (the very dark part is moss on the rocks, due to the moisture), and sat still long enough that I was able to capture two hummingbirds and a very loud blue jay there. (See if you can find them in the picture.) I watercolored it, then took the aforementioned abbreviated hike, and then sat back down to try a more expressionistic, paint-only oak tree.

Also not terribly successful; I enjoyed rendering the almost-black trunks, but had trouble conveying the foliage. But...it passed the time and brought me to within two pages of finishing out my current sketchbook, so it's all good. Another day, another drawing.

Contour, Portraits

More practice art for this week—contour drawings I did as demonstrations in my class at Los Angeles Public Library:

And portraits of the two founders of Sketchbook Skool, Koosje and Danny, assayed during this week's live online "Portrait Party":

I think I have finally figured out my biggest problem with doing portraits: I start at the top of the head. It seems like the logical place to start; I mean, if you were going to draw, say, that bell pepper up there, you would probably start with the stem, right? But when it comes to doing portraits, I draw the top of the head, or the hair, in the correct proportion to what I'm seeing, but then the features of the person somehow grow LARGER when I draw them, and by the time I'm done with the head, the top of it is disproportionately too small for the rest of it. Koosje's doesn't stick out as too different, but Danny is definitely wearing a hairline and forehead way smaller than his face requires! So from now on, I'm going to try drawing the features FIRST, and then go back for the head and the jaw. We'll see if that works.

Hopefully there will be more art on here soon; I'm planning a trek with the L.A. Urban Sketchers to see wildflowers.

Breakfast vignettes

Between getting ready for my first Young Adult Literature class at UCLA yesterday and prepping for my first contour drawing workshop this coming Saturday, I have spent a lot of time this week at the computer, plus running errands to Dick Blick and Office Depot to buy supplies and get printouts, so I don't have much artwork to show.

I went to breakfast last week with Kirsten at More Than Waffles and managed a 5-minute sketch of the lamp hanging in the window I was facing during the scant minutes I had to wait for her to arrive; and I did a little capture of the early-morning folk in the UCLA cafeteria area, one whom I surmise (from his dress) might be a groundskeeper or other kind of workman there, and the other a student waiting for class to start.

The fellow in the plaid shirt noticed me sketching the other guy and was antsy and self-conscious when I seemed to turn my attention towards him afterwards, so I could only take quick glimpses. Some people really don't like it when you draw them! Others, of course, are flattered and want to see the end result, which almost never looks like them and is therefore a disappointment, usually producing effusive but vague compliments and a hasty retreat. I don't know which I prefer!

Honestly, the preoccupation of modern folk with their cell phones yields some of the best motionless and oblivious models one could want, except for the repetitiveness of the scene.

Uniball pen, Moleskine sketchbook, various watercolors.

Continuous Contour

I'm teaching my first library workshop next Saturday, April 6, at LAPL West Valley Branch, on continuous line contour drawing. And while I practice contour drawing almost exclusively these days, the idea of doing it in a continuous line is the precursor that allowed me to learn to really see objects and people. I learned this method from the talented Brenda Swenson, and plan to pass it on as her legacy, although she is not, of course, the first to teach or practice contour drawing, nor will she be the last. She is, however, one of the best!

When you use the traditional drawing method of reducing everything down to "shapes"—an oval, a triangle, a rectangle—and then join them together and soften them out with sketch lines, transitional lines, there is this generic feel to your drawing, because every object or human you draw begins in the same way, with an approximation arrived at by overlapping and combining standard shapes.

Contour drawing teaches you to look carefully instead at the outline of the object, building, or person, and also at what intrudes into the outline, and to follow that line faithfully until you arrive at a true, albeit maybe slightly out of kilter, image. Once you have mastered it, it feels like a more organic way of drawing; you no longer sketch and erase, sketch and erase, you just commit. That is why so many contour drawers use a pen, because it makes it almost impossible to be sketchy.

But learning contour drawing has to start with unlearning your preconceived notions about objects, in order to simply look at and duplicate what is in front of you. And having to do it all in one continuous line also makes you think in terms of what is essential to include and what could perhaps be expressed by an open space without damaging the full effect. It's fun!

For my class, I will bring a variety of objects, from the simplicity of things like carrots, apples, and oranges, to the complexity of jars, bottles, and teacups, and perhaps we will have a go at some portraiture while we're at it. So today, I went back and practiced my continuous line. And of course, I can't resist adding in a little watercolor, 'cause that's my jam! (pun intended)

Uniball pen, Bee sketch pad, various watercolors (mostly M. Graham and Daniel Smith).

(Disclaimer: The lettering, of course, was added after the fact.)

People reading, the series continues

In my last blog post about my "people reading" series, I complained about the self-conscious looks on the faces of those you see reading in photos. A friend promised she would send me a picture that would be like no other I had reviewed for my series. She definitely nailed it! Here is a picture of "Kirsti reading a magazine." Sitting on her kitchen floor. Drinking wine. And wearing a chicken hat.

Thanks, girl. You're right, there will never be another like this.

Uni-ball, watercolor.

Presence

I don't often copy so closely from a photograph, and certainly not from one taken by someone else; the etiquette in working from photos when you paint is that you work from your own, using them as a reference rather than slavishly copying them. And if you paint something from a photo belonging to someone else, you ask permission.

My friend Susan Sabo is a professional photographer and a dog lover, and these two things have combined in a wonderful way. Not only does she shoot great portraiture of people's dogs (many times including the people themselves), but she also uses her considerable skills to photograph dogs at her local shelter in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and then the shelter posts the photos to help them find homes for the dogs.

Even before she became a photographer, though, Susan was always concerned for the welfare of shelter dogs; she and her daughter, back when Jenna was a teenager, made it a project to go weekly to the shelter in Sherman Oaks, California, to pick up blankets and towels used and soiled by the dogs, launder them all, and return them fresh and ready for re-use. She periodically canvassed her friends to donate towels, blankets, and sheets for the dogs' use, and was always outspoken in her efforts to get others to be active supporters of shelter animals. It was her casual reference to S.T.A.R.T. (Shelter Transport Animal Rescue Team) that led me to regularly sponsor a "seat on the bus" for dogs being shipped from euthanizing facilities here in Los Angeles up to no-kill shelters, foster homes, and new permanent homes in Oregon and Washington, where there isn't the glut of abandoned animals we have in Los Angeles.

Some of her best work, however, is her spontaneous shots of her own beloved dogs. She posted one recently on Facebook as a reminder that winter won't last forever, and I found this shot of T (alias Señor Escabeche) and Mouse so appealing that I couldn't resist making a little drawing. I totally messed up the perspective of the fence receding at a nice angle, and I simplified the background, leaving out a couple of buildings and a whole lot of shrubbery, but I think I caught the essentials. Although it wasn't so noticeable in the photo, once I made the painting I realized that the title HAD to be "He casts a long shadow." If you asked Susan, I think she would definitely agree. Susan, please forgive me for appropriating your photo.

Odds and ends

Not a lot of artwork made in the past couple of weeks, but here's what I did do:

Breakfast out on Saturday, at Farmer Boy. I had never been there before, and got a kick out of the wall art picturing a regular-size farmer digging giant potatoes the size of boulders.

Two book covers, to go with a book review on my readers' advisory site, http://bookadept.com/blog. I enjoyed these books a lot, but now it's a long wait for #3 in the trilogy, so if you don't like waiting (or rereading), put it off until next summer!

And today's sketch, of several of the innumerable ornate brick buildings on the UCLA campus. I had to take some paperwork to personnel and sign it, and since I had paid for three hours of parking but my errand only took 30 minutes, I sat down and sketched for a while. It was such a pleasure, after weeks of rain and extra-chilly temperatures, to sit outside in shirt sleeves and sketch in 75-degree sun!

I despair at ever being to convey all these solid walls of vari-colored brick, let alone get the perspective right, but I'll keep trying.