In Mid-Air

10/13/20 Maple Leaf neighborhood

Probably my longest-standing series of sketches has been trees that have been hacked, dismembered and otherwise poorly pruned to accommodate utility wires. Some have been humorous, while others have been ironic. This one must be among the most bizarre.

You can see its trunk at far right just behind the nearest car. But the branches shading the street have now grown their own pointy leader! From a block away, I thought the tree was floating in mid-air!

I could see that several wires were passing through the tree, so it’s likely that it will receive another hack job one of these days.

What Came After the Before Times

 

Back in July, I had talked about the first on-location sketchbook I filled during the pandemic. A few days ago, I filled the last page in my small, not-quite-daily-carry Field Notes Signature sketchbook. I don’t usually blog about sketchbooks just because I filled them, but like the one I finished in July, this Signature feels worth noting.

I started it on Dec. 26, 2019, to motivate my walk/sketch fitness program: The “carrot on the end of the stick” for fitness walking during inclement weather would be the opportunity to sketch. When I flip through its early pages, the book served this need well: I see several sketches made near Green Lake where I often walked in the winter, stopping at Starbucks along the way to warm my hands and grab a sketch before walking the rest of the way home.

Randomly, it also contains a sketch I had made during “half time,” as my friend jokingly called it, at an opera we attended in January. (She and I both know nothing about opera, but she had won free tickets and had invited me along.) Imagine attending an opera at McCaw Hall! That seems so far away now, both in time and in concept. We were all so innocent then.

2/25/20 Green Lake

1/22/20 Mc Caw Hall refreshment bar

On March 3, 2020, the small sketchbook was in my bag when we shopped at Costco for what turned out to be the last time. When I see the sketch I had made of a few people walking out with their shopping carts, I recall vividly that the toilet paper hoarding had just begun. The store had sold out of one brand, so we had waited with several other customers for a staff member to bring out another brand – and the pile had rapidly disappeared before our eyes.

3/3/20 Costco shoppers

3/11/20 My last sketch at Green Lake

Eight days later I made my last sketch at Green Lake (after that, I felt it was too crowded for comfort). The rest of the book is filled with sketches made no more than a mile from home in any direction – my current walking route. By June 4, I was utterly thrilled to capture a few gestures of a gardener trimming a hedge – I had so missed sketching people (and still do)! 

6/4/20 How I miss sketching people.

Before putting away the completed sketchbook, I did what I did in July: I slapped a masked Weather Bunny sticker on the cover. It’s now my ritual for marking sketchbooks I finish during the pandemic. This one, especially, is a poignant documentation of how the “Before Times” changed to the “during.”

Distortion

10/9/20 Gloria, 20-min. poses

During life drawing on Zoom, participants want the model to be close enough to the camera to see details, but if the model is too close, distortion is likely. In some of the seated poses, Gloria’s feet (closer to the camera) appeared huge while her head was tiny. In live life drawing, the same kind of foreshortening can happen, and it’s often the most challenging (and fun) kind of poses. But when the camera distorts the view even further, it can be frustrating.

10/9/20 10-min. pose

In the drawing at upper right, I realized halfway through the 20-minute pose that my proportions of the lower half of her figure were way off. Annoyed, I started thinking about whether I had time to fix it, but then I decided to exaggerate the distortion further, and then it became fun.

Video life drawing is never ideal, and yet I still prefer it to drawing from photos. On a two-dimensional screen, looking at a live pose shouldn’t be very different from a photo, but somehow it is. I can’t articulate why, though. I haven’t talked to anyone else who is doing this kind of life drawing, but it would be interesting to discuss this. If you’ve done both kinds of life drawing – in a studio and on a screen – what do you think? Is drawing from a live video pose different from a still photo?

10/9/20 5-min. poses

10/9/20 2-min. poses

10/9/20 10-min. pose

Egg-citing Edition of Plumbago

An egg-cellent edition of Plumbago

Who knew that some of my sketches – long ago composted – would live a second life in Plumbago Magazine?

An occasional ‘zine published by Andy Welfle (co-host of the Erasable podcast about pencils), Plumbago includes poetry, short fiction, essays, and comics – and sometimes sketches and writing by yours truly. The theme of the latest issue is “Tiny,” and it includes images of what may be my tiniest sketches – made on colored, hard-boiled eggs. Shortly after I made the sketches a couple of years ago, I ate most of the eggs (Roy, appearing on one of them, ate his own) and tossed the shells, so they were probably also the most ephemeral of all my sketches. The perfect-bound zine itself is also tiny – the same size as a pocket notebook.

Metro Market Maples

10/6/20 Metro Market parking lot, Wedgwood neighborhood

Metropolitan Market was one of our favorite food stores in the Before Time. Though pricey, it offers good produce, a great takeout/deli area, and locally made products that we can’t get anywhere else. Sadly, it doesn’t offer delivery or pickup services, so we haven’t shopped there since March 10 (feeling extremely uneasy, I remember that shopping trip vividly; it was the last time I shopped inside any store).   

Besides the food, another reason I enjoyed shopping there in the fall is that several slender maples are planted in the parking lot – a regular stop on my personal leaf-peeping tour. The color this season is much later than it has been in previous years. The sketch above was made on Oct. 6. Three years ago, I sketched the same trees, probably from the same street parking spot, on Oct. 16 (shown below; here’s the full blog post), and they all had much more red and hardly any green. I’ll go back in a few weeks to see if I can catch them in their full glory as I did in 2017.

10/16/17

Natalie

 

10/4/20 Natalie on Zoom (Her hair wasn't blue at the time, but it has been in the past, so my choice
of color wasn't completely unrealistic.)

When I proposed that we sketch each other while we chatted on Zoom, Natalie seemed reluctant, but when she saw my headgear, she couldn’t resist. I didn’t think I had captured her with as much resemblance as I have some of my other friends, but she thought I had, so that’s good enough for me.

I do find chatting on Zoom to be a surprisingly good platform for practicing portraits. In real life, people tend to become self-conscious when they know they are being sketched – even some sketchers. On video, however, the screen seems to put just enough distance between people that all self-consciousness drops away. In any case, I’m having a lot of fun catching up with friends as I get a little portrait practice.

Unexpected Education

 

dip pen

Usually before beginning InkTober each year, I come up with one or more learning goals for the month. I seem to try to improve my hatching nearly every year. Sometimes I unintentionally learn to appreciate a medium like the Bic ballpoint. And an especially memorable year was 2016, when I made it my goal to sketch from imagination – and Weather Bunny was born.

This year I went easy on myself because I already have the ongoing project of drawing my hand every day, and I wanted the challenge to stay fun, not be a burden. So instead of making a goal to learn something specific, I decided to simply use October as an opportunity to draw my hand using inks and pens that are new to me or that I haven’t used in a long time.

It turns out that I am already learning something significant that I hadn’t planned. Making broad strokes with Boku-Undo sumi ink or a brush pen takes only minutes to execute, but I have to spend a lot of time thinking before I ever hit the paper with the brush. It’s the exact opposite of a pencil or fine point pen, which takes much longer to execute, but I can do my thinking along the way instead of ahead. Using all different kinds of media on the same subject is teaching my brain to think in different ways.

Brush pen

I’m also having unexpected fun with this multi-colored Plum & Punch notebook. (I was asked where I got it; it was a gift, so I don’t know where it was purchased, but it’s a Hallmark product. I suspect it came out a while ago and may not be available any longer.) I didn’t test any inks on the paper ahead of time, so each day is a potential surprise. The coated paper stock is not intended for wet media; it makes juicy washes bead up. I am delighted by the effects this combo produces! If you read Roz Stendahl’s blog, you know that she believes there’s no such thing as the “best” or “ideal” paper. She often deliberately uses papers that are “inappropriate” for paint because she enjoys the effects and even the challenges of working with such papers. This month is a great time to experiment, find out what unfamiliar papers and inks can do, and especially have fun. Maybe even learn.

sumi ink

sumi ink

sumi ink

sumi ink

brush pen