Category Archives: art

While Relaxing…

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It has been a very busy week, and I’ve been trying to find time to relax somewhere in all the hubbub. I’ve not been fully successful in it all, but I’ve been trying to do a bit of drawing practice where I can as part of the relaxation, but then sometimes I get carried away with my experimentation and turn a simple sketch into a more elaborate thing. It is good practice for The Project, but is it relaxing? I am not sure. It sure is more productive than watching a random TV show, I suppose…

I dropped in at a studio to do a bit of drawing of a model some nights back after a long time away. These “drop in and draw” sessions are good ways of helping me do a hard self-reset on certain aspects of technique, and wake up certain types of seeing, as I’ve mentioned here before. They are an excellent complement to the drawings I do on the bus, subway, in cafes, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bus Moment

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Always great when someone closes their eyes for a bit on the bus right in front of me. Gives me a chance to look really closely while drawing and finish up some of the details.

This guy’s old-school hair was my favourite thing of all. HB Pencil on the bus, and then this morning I inked it with india ink. The inking was fun as I bought some new nibs, and remembered what a really nice flow can be like. I splashed a bit of digital paint onto it at the end, by way of variety.

The SCSS over at UCLA was great yesterday. Four excellent talks, and great conversation and discussion the whole day. I also got a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Market Inks

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Well, to be accurate, I did the inking later on. I liked a quick pencil sketch I did at the Hollywood farmer’s market on Sunday. Not far from when I did that previous market scene.

There was a woman who’d set up a stand to do painting of children’s faces with clown-type makeup. Seemed like easy prey to get some interesting sketches.

As it happens I only got one because people had the unfortunate habit of standing […] Click to continue reading this post →

My Other People

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On my last day at the KITP in Santa Barbara (this visit) last week I decided, for old times’ sake, to go for a walk along the beach, to the pier, while reading two papers I wanted to think about. It seemed preferable to sitting inside at my desk, and it was a lovely day. I took my notebook/sketchbook just in case I wanted to make notes or sketch something interesting. It also seemed important to go along that beach at a proper slow pace since I’ve not been along there for many years, and it holds a lot of memories for me. (It is, for example, the beach I used to visit late at night – through midnight and beyond – regularly, to teach myself to play the trumpet… part of a story I may have shared with you once before.)

Anyway, while wandering along, and just before the pier, I noticed a group of people all sitting together out on the sand. I looked up from my papers to see what they were up to and realized that they were doing exactly what I thought I might do – they […] Click to continue reading this post →

Markets and Musings

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I’m back in Los Angeles from my visit to the workshop (see earlier), have a bit of a cold, and am tired. I’ve been thinking a lot about various issues in quantum field theory, surrounding quantum entanglement, non-equilibrium processes, Fermi surfaces, and a lot more like that. I’ve also been teaching about real QED processes in the class today – they are now able (I hope) to compute real cross-sections for things like electron-electron scattering, and electron-positron scattering! Very rewarding actually.

Anyway, I’m tired, so I decided to spend a little time relaxing by experimenting with watercolours of a sort. The digital kind. This is a sketch I did in my little square notebook at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market last week, and back then I’d started to use colour pencils to do some colour on it and got a bit bored… So I did a bit more […] Click to continue reading this post →

Breakfast Guy

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I’ve no idea who he was, but he made for an interesting subject for several minutes*, sitting eating his breakfast with his (I think) wife. I was staying at a hotel and having breakfast, just North of Santa Barbara. The person I set out wanting to draw (very interesting face) was sitting right opposite me, at the same table as me, looking over regularly, and so it seemed a bad idea to try to sketch him. Also, he turned out to be a physicist also visiting at the KITP for a workshop, and so it could have ended up quite awkward.

It was a pretty good week at the workshop. I had a number of interesting conversations with young people trying out ideas and calculations, who’ve actually read (!) various papers of mine, and so had questions and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Head Lines

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Well, here I am, almost at the end of Saturday, and rather behind on where I wanted to be. Somehow, a half-day shoot for a TV show turned into an all day marathon, due to a series of mishaps and so forth. The first part of the shoot was fun (it involved me in a pool hall, occasionally potting balls and so forth), but not the second. But I soldiered on, managing to explain a bunch of concepts about quantum mechanics, spacetime, and quantum gravity. We’ll see what comes of it. It’s all for science, and for you…

So much of the afternoon had been set aside of writing, and for maybe a little drawing, and it’s all mostly gone now and the only thing I feel left in the mood for is […] Click to continue reading this post →

Swings and Roundabouts

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Odd.

On Monday evening, I could not draw a thing correctly. Seriously, if you had put a cylinder in front of me square on, I’d have not been able to draw a recognizable representation of it.

This morning, on the bus, I noticed this interesting face inviting me to draw it (the gentleman currently in possession of it was dozing for some of the trip), and in a short time this sketch (click to enlarge) popped out from under my pencil. Funny old world…

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Subtraction

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I made a bit of time last night to drop into a studio (where there’s a model doing various poses) and do a bit of drawing to get my hand back in. She’s a great model who understands her body and uses the light well, so one sees forms quite readily through her work. I decided to try something I’d not tried before, given the strong subject matter. (It is a known technique I’d read about before, but I’d yet to deploy it.) I took a soft pencil and darkened the paper first (rubbing with a tissue to smooth a bit) and then did my sketch on top of that. (In future I’ll use those graphite sticks I have sitting in my desk and never use.) I built the layout as I usually do, needing to use a softer pencil this time to see the lines, leading to a lot more fluidity in my strokes… Then I began to refine shapes and form in two ways…. darkening a bit here and there with a slightly softer pencil and -most importantly- lightening shade by using an eraser (sharpened pink mostly… blue kneaded more rarely).

The point here is that I do a lot of subtraction in the later parts of my sketches anyway, but in the 25 minutes of the pose, especially when I am rusty (as I am now) I […] Click to continue reading this post →

Grabbing Faces

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One of the other things I love about public transport is that you get to look at a range of people, and do quick (and preferably discrete) sketches of them. sometimes you only get a few minutes before things change, and you’ve got to deal with the bumping bus or train messing with your line choices. Fun!

Today I felt in the mood, and had two pages left in my current moleskine to fill, and so I decided to go for the subway instead of the bus, in search of prey. (Er, prey=faces/bodies/gestures/poses.) I’m careful to try not to make people aware I’m staring at them, and so pick a good distances, and preferably hide the book and pen, or try to pretend to be writing a shopping list, and looking off into space…

It does not always work, and certainly is sort of hit and miss and depends upon my mood. Most results are awful, since I either don’t have time, or get jogged, or am too chicken to take a good look to get a line right. But it’s good practice for holding things in my head… Anyway, guess what? I got on the train and – hey! There was a […] Click to continue reading this post →

Colour Face Study

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Been a long time since I did a face study of a real face. I mean one that exists out there in the world. This is not a live portrait, but instead a face from a magazine. I just thought it’d be a nice change from the face studies I’ve been doing (see several recent posts) that involve making them up completely, or turning them through various angles…skills I’ve been interested in a lot for The Project… A passable copy from a photo propped up in front of one is not so hard, with a little practice, since (among other reasons) the subject is very still and most of the 2D translation is already done. These are different skills from portraiture, I think, or pure expression of a face from the imagination, but useful and instructive to keep sharp, all the same. A close study of a real face from whatever source helps one remember what real faces look like when designing them from the […] Click to continue reading this post →