Effort and Surrender: My 10th Year

9/25/11 Orcas Island (my first-ever urban sketch)

My yoga instructor Fran Gallo talks about effort and surrender. To practice yoga, our bodies must put forth effort, but then we surrender to the pose and let go of the outcome. This is a difficult concept for Westerners to practice because we are such a goal-oriented culture: the bottom line, the finish line, no pain/no gain.

9/27/12 Roosevelt neighborhood

Without consciously being aware of effort and surrender, I think I have always tried to approach my drawing practice in the same way as yoga: putting forth the effort, but letting go of the outcome. Of course, I always want my sketches to be as good as they can be, and I challenge myself to make the effort that will bring that result. But when I let go of the product as if it were a goal, I’m happier. It’s much easier to simply turn the page and make the next sketch.

9/20/13 Bozeman, MT

Ten years ago today, I took the first step on what I now believe will be my lifelong journey. For most of my adult life, I had wanted to learn to draw, and I wanted to draw well. Inspired by books, classes or the art of others, I would make a start, but after a while, I would stop. I repeated this cycle many times. Learning to draw is not easy, and when the results were not what I wanted them to be, it was discouraging. When I began to draw again on Sept. 21, 2011, it might have ended as yet another short-lived attempt to “learn to draw,” but this time I kept going. And I’ve been drawing ever since, every day.

9/27/14 Pike Place Market, Seattle

I didn’t know it at the time, but I think one thing helped me to keep drawing: I had discovered urban sketching, which is less about the act of drawing and more about telling the visual stories of our lives. The finished sketch might be a goal, but the story it tells is much larger than the sketchbook page. I was motivated to keep telling my stories, no matter how small or mundane. Urban sketching has taken me away from the goal of “drawing well.”

9/23/15 Ballard neighborhood

Paradoxically, learning to draw has become much more enjoyable during the past 10 years because the process itself is motivating. The more I draw, the more progress I see, and that encourages me to draw more.

9/21/16 Maple Leaf neighborhood

Shown here are 10 sketches, one from each year made around this time in September each year. I didn’t choose my “favorite” or “best” sketches; instead, I looked for examples that seemed typical of my style during that period. While my materials and techniques have changed, and hopefully my skills have changed too, you can probably see that my stories haven’t changed much. I’m still telling the same ones every day, one drawing at a time.

9/22/17 Chateau Ste Michelle, Woodinville

Finally, I can’t commemorate this milestone without mentioning this blog. Except for the first six months, my entire 10-year journey has been documented here (3,110 posts so far). Although my purpose in starting this blog was simply that – to document my own creative process in learning to draw – I am always happy when others who are on a similar journey say that they enjoy and have benefited from my blog. To those of you who have stayed with me for any part of that, and especially to those who have been with me from the beginning, I thank you dearly for your company on this road of discovery.

9/27/18 Green Lake

9/25/19 Maple Leaf neighborhood

9/21/20 Northgate neighborhood

9/13/21 Crown Hill neighborhood

Seattle Central Library

 

9/19/21 Seattle Central Library from 4th & Spring

Thankfully, Saturday’s squall dried up in time for yesterday’s USk Seattle outing at the Central public library, but the wind remained harsh. Even though it was 60 degrees, I bundled up like it was full-on winter and took on the library’s crazy angles. It was fun to see several other sketchers bravely taking it on, too!

Library from 5th & Madison

Seattle Central Library is a formidable architectural beast. I’ve sketched inside the library many times, but I’ve sketched its exterior only one other time back in 2017 from the Fourth and Madison corner. This time I walked one block north to Fourth and Spring (top of page). Knowing that I probably wouldn’t get all those angles right, I had only one goal: To scale it proportionally on my sketchbook page. I think I did, but my 2017 sketch is livelier.

In the mood for more torture, I walked up the hill to Fifth and Madison to sketch the library again, this time at thumbnail size. Although this sketch is wonkier, I like it more than the first try.

Tsutakawa fountain

With 20 minutes left until the throwdown, I looked around for something I could finish in that time: George Tsutakawa’s “Fountain of Wisdom” in front of the library’s Fourth Avenue entrance. The wind was so strong that the water was spraying sideways as much as flowing down!

As I write this on late Sunday afternoon, the pouring rain is back, this time punctuated by thunder. USk Seattle leads a charmed life.

I’m a Pencil of the Week Cover Girl

My cover of Pencil of the Week and a couple of remaining stubs I used to hand-color it!

Now that the issue has released, I can finally reveal a project I worked on all summer! More than six months ago, Ed Kemp contacted me about collaborating on an issue of the unique zine he writes and publishes, Pencil of the Week. Possibly the first-ever zine of pencil reviews, PotW offers Ed’s down-to-earth, bluntly stated, no-bull opinions of the many graphite pencils he uses daily on the job and elsewhere. A happy reader and subscriber for a while, I was thrilled when he proposed working on a project together!

Naturally, being of the colored pencil persuasion, I had suggested a special edition of reviews of red/blue bicolor editing pencils (you know how much I love those), which I knew he used. We went back and forth with ideas, and eventually I developed a cover design for issue No. 15.5. Since zines tend to be of a handmade nature (Ed handwrites all the pages, which he then photocopies, collates, folds and staples to produce each issue), I decided I would hand-color the first 64 covers. For copies he sells after those sell out, I also produced a color digital version that he can print from.

Testing reds and blues

In my excitement, one thing I had not considered until after I made the proposal was that typical copier paper is terrible to color on with colored pencils. It has almost no tooth, and unlike on smooth drawing papers, pigment seems to slide instead of adhering. I went to my local FedEx Office store for some paper samples. I also tested a number of different colored pencils in my collection to see which would be best on the less-than-ideal paper and to find just the right shades of blue and red. Prismacolor was my choice – for the right colors, the right softness with the paper, and ease of replacing singles (since I knew I would burn through several pencils).

Although I still wouldn’t recommend it for drawing with colored pencils, the 32-pound white seemed to have the most accommodating surface. I photocopied the line drawing onto the paper 2-up, and then the fun could begin! I spent many happy summer days out on our shady back deck coloring the covers.

Happy days on our shady deck.

64 hand-colored covers later, my part of the project is complete!

I just received my copies of 15.5, and it’s a blast to read Ed’s ranked reviews of 15 red/blue editing pencils, including the stunning surprise No. 1 – a red/blue I hadn’t tried! But Ed kindly sent me some, and it’s fantastic to use as well as beautiful!

Check out the red and blue staples! Edition numbers handwritten by Ed!

Which pencil is it? Order an issue to find out. 😉 If you hurry, you might still get a hand-colored cover. And each order of No. 15.5 comes with No. 15, too!

The K in CMYK

 

9/13/21 Crown Hill neighborhood

On an errand in the Crown Hill neighborhood, I thought I’d do some leaf peeping and sketching on the way home, but even without fall color, this stand of big old trees caught my eye.

In compositions like this, the Jeep and other cars are important contextual elements, but I don’t want whatever color I put on them to pull the eye away from the part that caught my eye. I tend to draw them in neutral gray, but sometimes that doesn’t seem strong enough. As I mentioned recently, I have been trying black lately as my neutral dark value color. I go back and forth on whether I like it, and in this case, I do. It occurs to me that the K in CMYK (which is the basis of the primary triad I have been experimenting with) represents black (it actually stands for key color), so maybe black makes sense.

Small Stories

 

9/3/21 Central Market

A man in a waiting room. A free toilet on the sidewalk (“Works great!” the sign reassures me). A live lobster in a tank at Central Market. The world is full of small stories for those who look for them with a sketchbook.

8/13/21 A doctor's waiting room

8/27/21 Maple Leaf

Back to the Zoo

 

9/10/21 Humboldt penguin

Animals have always been a favorite sketching subject. During my first couple years of sketching, I spent a lot of spring and summer days at the Woodland Park Zoo. Even in cold, wet weather, I headed straight for sheltered areas and some happy sketching time. I think the zoo is where I first began gaining experience in life drawing – life that moves quickly and doesn’t pose. Back then, I was still a bit self-conscious sketching on city sidewalks, but I felt relaxed at the zoo, where it seemed natural to spend time observing animals by sketching. As I grew more comfortable sketching in different urban environments, I spent less time at the zoo, but I still love drawing animals.

One day recently, I realized that it had been more than two years since I last sketched at the zoo. Now that school is back on, the weekday crowds are gone. We had let our membership lapse during the pandemic, but last week we renewed it and made our first post-vax visit.

Compared to the Before Times, I didn’t feel I could leisurely linger at exhibits as I used to because most visitors are courteously distancing, and we felt compelled to keep moving. Even so, I managed to grab these gestures quickly. Compared to jays and squirrels, these furry and feathered critters were sloth-like! I hope to make a few more visits before the weather goes bad.

Gray wolf

Great gray owl

Steller's sea eagle

I left most of the photography to Greg, but I did snap this one of a pair of
gray wolves. We saw three that day.

Backyard Diners

 

9/9/21 Steller's jay

Nearly every day this summer, we’ve been having our lunches out on the back deck. Most days, our neighborhood Steller’s jays join us: When they hear us through the open kitchen door prepping our lunches, they stand on the deck railing, quietly waiting. They know we’ll be out soon, peanuts in hand. We’ve seen as many as four at a time at our makeshift feeder.

Once in a while, our local squirrels try to get in on the action. We don’t make an effort to feed them, but they and the jays seem to coexist in a non-hostile manner, so we don’t mind if they grab a few peanuts for themselves.

9/9/21 Our local squirrel

Meanwhile, Greg and I are busily grabbing, too – I, my pencil; he, his camera. Some cold and rainy day this winter, I’ll probably use one of his photos to draw a squirrel or jay, wistfully remembering these lovely summer days that are likely to end soon.

9/9/21

9/11/21