Lovely bit of sitting in the sun for a short while after breakfast this morning relaxing by doing some quick freehand sketches from pictures in a magazine. I was experimenting with a pen I love but don’t use much at all – One of those nice inky brush pens by Pentel. Gives some interesting lines that take some getting used to since it is quite a different mark-making tool than the pens I […] Click to continue reading this post
As you know I am a big fan of sketching, and tire easily of the remark people make that they “can’t draw” – an almost meaningless thing society trains most people to think and say, with the result that they miss out on a most wonderful part of life. Sketching is a wonderful way of slowing down and really looking at the world around you and recording your impressions. If you can write you certainly can draw. It is a learned skill, and the most important part of it is learning to look*. But anyway, I was pleased to see this nice way of getting people of all ages involved in sketching for fun at the book festival! So I reached in and grabbed a photo for you.
It was the departmental retreat this weekend, and we all went off on a boat to an island! On the voyage back I decided to practice a little sketching, and found myself surrounded by good subjects, because a lot of people were sitting still during the crossing (it was a small boat). Since the boat was rocking […] Click to continue reading this post
Some of you are wondering what I’m working on while on retreat. Well, actually there’s a nice coincidence here. I’m working on the graphic book that you may have heard me talk about a bit. “The Project” as I sometimes call it. I’ve been doing things on various aspects of it, such as reworking the description of it for various people to look at, writing new bits, and spending a bit of time pulling together various bits of the prototype story I used to start all of this back in 2010. The prototype bits have all of my experimentation and development of style and technique all over them, and so there are pages that needed a bit of rework (to say the least). So, on Monday, […] Click to continue reading this post
While on a hiding retreat in another town or city, I like to seek out a local group that might be doing a “drop in and draw” session. You show up, pay your money, and there’s a safe environment (in a studio, a back room, upstairs of a pub, etc) for a model and artists to work on the wonderful business of capturing the human form in various media. I’m a reasonably private person so I like to keep the anonymity level reasonably high, but it does not only work. People are of course on the watch out to protect the group from perceived problems, so they ask questions. Others are just trying to make friends, and so they ask questions too. I just like to be polite and friendly, share the odd joke or remark, but mostly keep my mouth shut and listen to the various small talk that breaks out during breaks. Most of all, I want to get on with the business of drawing.
I went to one on Monday. This time around it was sort of amusing to me at one point when one of the organisers of the group asked me why I’d come down from LA to their small seaside town drawing group and I said I was hiding. I could sense alarm immediately (I can imagine the pictures he might have had in his mind even before I said “hiding”) and so I then went further, by way of reassurance, and said something vague but standard about wanting to get out […] Click to continue reading this post
When calling to mind the Los Angeles Philharmonic, everyone’s (and all the posters’) focus is on Gustavo Dudamel, (or, the Dude, as I call him), all unruly hair and visible enthusiasm and so forth, and that’s great. He’s an excellent conductor. However, one of the unsung (as far as I know*) visibly spectacular performers of the LA Philharmonic is the excellent principal viola player whose name I do not know [update: see below*] who puts on the most remarkable physical performance every time I go (and presumably those other times too). Actually, the violist who sits next to her is also remarkable, since she manages without being distracted by her neighbour to maintain a very upright and solid, firmly planted, legs wide stance, in part providing a canvas upon which the viola player I first mentioned can splash bright splashes of movement all over the place! 
She rocks, sways, jerks, and contorts (sometimes even during quiet slow bits)- doing the craziest things with her legs, head, and bow arm, and so much of the time looks like she is about to spectacularly fall off her chair and wipe out at least half the viola section! This is why her colleague right next to her is also remarkable, as she acts as this wonderful un-distractable “straight man” to the physical pyrotechnics helping make them all the more remarkable by contrast. Last night I tried to capture some of the energy of the hyper-energetic viola player in a quick sketch (during […] Click to continue reading this post
Apparently it was Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day yesterday, so some might say I missed it. But as you know, I think that every day should be Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, so it is not too late! Have a look a website for it I found (here). What can you do? You don’t have to organise a huge event (although feel free to). It can all start small. Maybe for that next gift, consider (if you don’t already) buying your little girl (or someone else’s) a set of LEGO or an electronics kit (or other hands on building toys) instead of the (fill-in-the-blank-standard-girl-toy) everyone else is getting her. Go ahead and make it a pink kit, if you want, since that’s what society seems to want. Who cares what colour it is? Apart from buying, even just chatting a bit with a child about engineering in our lives, and all the people who can (and do) contribute to it would be a great thing to do.
Here’s a short film from our own Viterbi school of engineering:
After a long weekend of a two-day meeting of an American Physical Society committee (hosted in LA this time, so I did not have to travel far), I decided last night to go and do a drop-in-and-draw session at an art studio, to clear my mind.
The model was excellent, with a smashing hairdo and good body-awareness that made for interesting poses. I was in the mood to disappear and listen to Hendrix for three hours while focusing on the simple task of representing what was in front of me. So I did.
I’m horribly slow again. Lack of regular practice (on full figures), of course. The good news is that I have been able to hold on to some of the more important foundations that allow me to lay things out, and see forms and shapes. But it does mean that I don’t get to get to some of the finishing processes that I intuitively prepare for in the earlier parts of the drawing.
As you know from many posts of mine on the subject (see e.g. here and here) I actually like incomplete drawings where you can see a lot of the process […] Click to continue reading this post
My mum has been visiting for the holidays. For her recent birthday I decided that instead of making a birthday card from a photo of one the roses from my garden (as I usually do) I would make her a drawing/painting of one on a card instead. The paper of the card has a ridged texture and I imagined that this would be an interesting component of the final piece. Using a photo of one of my roses as reference on screen in front of me, I sketched onto the paper […] Click to continue reading this post
There is always a mixed set of emotions for me when I come to change notebooks. It means that I stop carrying around pages and pages of ideas, impressions, sketches, and other things from the last few months that I can accidentally stumble upon. Instead, I start a whole new blank book that does not connect back to anything. I must fill new pages (which I love doing) that will become those favourites I will look back on. So I always like to start off with a drawing that I’ll like to look back on. It helps set the tone for the pages to come in the many months. (See an earlier post about this matter here.)
Yesterday gave me a nice opportunity. I took my mum (who is visiting for a while) to the beach in Santa Monica and we walked together on the sand for a little while. I then sat on the sand and did a sketch while she continued walking and looking around. My focus was the Santa Monica pier, and I wanted to […] Click to continue reading this post
Holiday time is upon us, and in this part of it, it is coming up on Christmas time. Really fast, it seems. The semester sort of petered out mid-week for me with the submission of the final grades for my graduate electromagnetism class (everybody did really well… fantastic group of students this year), and one last two hour committee meeting for another of those committees I can’t tell you about. I’ve found some time to think about some physics, and work on a new page for the book, among other things. There’s a panel […] Click to continue reading this post
Finished the inks and threw some (digital) paints over the lunch group. I think it’s time to move on to another part of The Project. I’ve spent far too long fiddling with the light in this.
Actually, this new tool is pretty old school, and I love it! There are times when I want to have a change of venue while doing rather detailed work for The Project… perhaps go sit in a cafe for a change, instead of at the drawing desk. But when not at the drawing desk, I could not use the lovely large illuminated magnifying glass […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, since yesterday was all about eating here in the USA (Thanksgiving, in case you missed that), I thought I’d share a partially inked panel from The Project, of a meal in progress. I got a bit of quiet time to work on it this evening, while listening to Jimi Hendrix and then Freddie Hubbard. They helped a lot. It is at times like this I wonder what insanity has come over me […] Click to continue reading this post
Sunday saw me spend a bit of relaxing time in the morning at a breakfast bar sketching a colourful pan of tomatoes, apples, and a yellow pepper. I spend ten minutes doing a quick pen and ink outline sketch of all the elements, which was fun and pleasingly simple enough.
But then I decided to lay on some colour and so pulled the sketch into Brushes on […] Click to continue reading this post
