It was too cold and too rainy yesterday to sketch outside. I suppose we all could have sketched in our cars but that defeats the whole purpose of getting together!
Lucky for us, one of our fellow artists has an old Victorian home overflowing with interesting objects set up in eye-catching vignettes. No matter where you look, there’s something to sketch… even some Christmas decorations.
I didn’t have time to add color to the larger spread and now I’m not sure I want to. I do have a reference photo but……..
Sometimes it’s better to leave well enough alone. Besides, that was yesterday. Surely I can find something to paint Today!
The year is young but my January seems to have a theme already. Portraits.
I’ve drawn people 4 of the first 5 days and I’ve really enjoyed capturing folks in a variety of sketchbooks using various media.
Platinum Carbon Black ink on prepainted background.
Child’s 4-color pencil on mixed media paper.
Ink and watercolor pencil on thin sketchbook paper.
Watersoluble ink and watercolor.
The more I practice, the more comfortable I am sketching random people but now’s the time to focus on drawing my friends and family more often. Most are strangely absent even though they mean so much to me. I think this is the year to rectify that.
Instead of doing a top 10 retrospective I’ve chosen a previously unpublished sketch from each month. These sketches are examples of my day in, day out journal work. It’s also some of the work I’m most proud of, not because of its quality but because it shows my persistence as I stretch to improve.
January: Portrait practice. I go where I know there’ll be a steady stream of victims models.
February: View out my back door. Used complementary colors and didn’t get mud!
March: Right place, right time with sketchbook at hand.
April: Working on the folds of those paper napkins.
June: Summer outdoor concert series has begun. Great people sketching opportunities.
July: Sketched all morning and was on my way home when I saw the pond full of waterlilies. I could have continued but the moment called to me… I stopped.
August: They were putting a new copper roof on the library. Documentation time.
September: Too many people in line to do more than put a few lines down on paper. Finished from the greenhouse web cam… lucky there’s no such thing as smell-o-vision.
October: Not only InkTober but our annual camping with jack-o-lantern carving.
November: Daily documentation. Cubs World Series and autumn clean up.
December: Portrait practice from TV as I toy with a kid’s four-color pencil.
It’s when both the right and the left pages fold out and you feel as if you’re going through the gate to the scene beyond. That’s what I wanted to achieve here, but first I needed to deal with the closed spread.
When all other ideas elude me, I paint my favorite models… pears.
I love how the plate and shadow bleeds off the spread and how the border stripe echoes the pears’ coloration.
But now it was time to tackle the fully open spread. When totally opened it measured 32 inches across, so wide that it was too daunting for me to just simply dive in. I took out my gridded notebook for some planning, and of course, more thumbnails.
I didn’t use any of these designs but you can see how I calculated the best focal points using the rule of thirds.
I mined one of my previous sketchbooks for a suitable landscape and as I painted I placed the skyline to blend with the edge of the plate. I may have been overthinking it but it turned out well.
32 inches of panorama.
Now that it’s done I’ve thought of a few other ways to handle a gatefold. Maybe next time I’ll handle each of the 4 panels separately, but unified by a single theme, like the seasons. Maybe I’ll draw a progression across the spread, like how a rose bud opens, blooms and finally withers.
So many options for me to try next, I know there’s more sketchbook modifying in my near future.
As I continued to work through my latest sketchbook I came upon another one of the fold out pages. I had pasted a few extra fold out pages into my sketchbook never realizing the extent of the design challenge I’d have.
This time I had no idea what to do. Days went by, then weeks. Finally I sat down and drew out a few of my ideas. This is the design I decided to use drawn to scale in a squared Moleskine notebook.
The very act of drawing the thumbnail design fueled my desire to finally deal with the spread.
I drew a few maple leaves, painted the background and cut out a circle instead of cutting around the spiky bits of the leaves as I had originally planned. It’s good to reconsider a questionable plan instead of slavishly following a design that could easily fail.
Time to paint those leaves… look! I added a leaf in the cut-out!
When the left page is folded out the lyrics to one of my favorite jazz standards, “Autumn Leaves”, are revealed.
If I hadn’t taken a few minutes to draw out some of my ideas I would still be looking at these pages wondering what to do.
Before we get to the new year which, surprisingly is less than two weeks away, I want to share a few of my sketchbook experiments from the fall.
Back when I started this journal in September I added a few fold out pages here and there. This is my first from September 8th. (I usually date my pages but I missed this one.)
I went to a local farm with a few artist friends and as they spread out to paint the rolling landscape I chose to capture the barn. The silo would fit perfectly on the left fold up once the page was expanded.
I positioned myself so the truck would be hidden when the page was closed.
I added some fancy lettering and continued the grass across the base to complete the page.
Page size and shape presents different challenges to my sense of composition. I have a few other fold out experiments to share so stay tuned!
After this week of upheaval I again tried to put my life and these times into perspective. Enter Carl Sagan and his Pale Blue Dot speech. Just hearing it again inspired me to reflect, revitalize and create a journal page honoring my… and I hope… our resilience.
Thank you Ken Takahashi and YouTube for this wonderful video.
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
For me, nothing helps more when faced with a loss than the simple and centering act of drawing.
I spent yesterday morning sitting on a curb, in the sun, trying to capture the receding buildings along a Vermont side street. It was immensely healing.
Followed by a quick lunch with friends… yes, my spirits are revived.
Dana Burrell... Art 