I got a little sketch practice here and there where I could during the trip. On the return journey for example, I found a nice opportunity as we were preparing to land after the short flight from Aspen to Denver.
Bob Melisso, my co-Producer/Director was reading a magazine, and so was still for long(ish) moments at a time – enough for me to do a quick sketch of him in profile. It was reasonably successful. It was his birthday recently, so this made a sort of present. He seemed to like it…
One of the key things I keep trying to maintain and improve by drawing regularly is speed. I’ve shown you drawings of various sorts here, but maybe not enough of the experiments I try to do relatively quickly. When things are working well and my eye is in, so to speak, shapes and lines jump out at me and beg to be put on to the paper, and a convincing form appears, giving a sense of the pose that was being done at the time. This can be someone on the train, or it can be a model in a studio I’ve dropped in to draw for a while.
I sort of love incomplete drawings that are a mixture of schematic structures, implied flow, more finished forms, and so forth. The results can be quite fun to look at. Above is a bunch I did last week. Click for a much larger view. (I apologize for the copyright watermark in everything, but I’m tired of the business people have on the […] Click to continue reading this post
On the Red Line on Saturday (on my way to test out the Expo line – see earlier post) there was an unusual spectacle in one of the carriages. This woman had some headphones halfway on, and was singing Beatles songs at the top of her voice! She was at the start of “All My Loving” when I got on (I’ve written some of the lyrics down to remind me of the moment). After their initial surprise, people were doing that typical “I don’t see anything unusual” look, trying not to notice her by looking everywhere but in her direction.
I imagine they thought she was crazy. Perhaps she was, or perhaps she was just having an odd day, but for sure she was also just enjoying herself immensely, not […] Click to continue reading this post
I’m supposed to be writing a talk, but it’s too early to start on it. I’ve been woken up early (5:00am) and kept awake by ideas swirling around in my head, and a mockingbird’s singing – it is nesting in a tree near the house, and I think I may be doomed to listen to it every night until the Fall…
Tuesday of last week saw me hiding and working on The Project. This time, it involved a bit of stalking. Last year I wrote a story which mostly takes place in a family home, between a brother and sister. I had a very particular shape for the house in my mind. They move from room to room, and spend a bit of time on a patio at the front. This time, I decided to build the entire house and populate it with all that I needed so that I can use it as reference to design the backgrounds for the story. Some weeks before I’d started looking a bit more closely at some houses I’d seen in the area as models. It is almost like the house which existed in my head was out there somewhere in the city, and I just had to find it. Somehow it was intended to be a typical smaller Los Angeles single family home, and if I looked for it, there it would be. I saw a number of houses on my walks that looked suitable enough, and was going to choose one of them and make modifications… and then one day I found it.
I’d been walking past it every day for several weeks, and had not really been in the right mode of thought when doing so, and so had not looked at it in the right way. Also, I’d been distracted by a rather larger and grander (too grand) house almost across the street from it. As soon as I thought about what I’d designed last year, and so rejected the house across the street, I realized that this one was the house I’d been looking for all along. So I took a couple of hurried surreptitious reference photos (while walking past pretending to be fiddling with my phone), and went home and laid out some of the dimensions I’d guessed for it.
I worked up some made up floor plans (based on my story’s needs and my memory of the interior of houses like this that I remember, and then I decided to build it […] Click to continue reading this post
This was a fun assignment. I’m giving a talk (“Graphic Adventures in Science Outreach”) on Friday to my colleagues and friends at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and they asked me to send a graphic to them to use for the poster. So I spent a bit of time digging into my database of drawings for The Project and threw something together pretty quickly. I rather like it. (You will maybe recognize that drawing from an earlier post – I added in an earlier stage, and then a drawing of a hand I’d done for something else…) By the way, it is not an event open to the general public and is by invitation only, so just showing up won’t get you in.
(Well, it’s not really the correct use of the term in the title, but I’m going to stick with it.) It has been a busy last several days, and so I’ve been quiet here. The last couple of days I’ve been at a conference in Pasadena. I’ve been enjoying the conference. There has been a host of interesting talks, and interesting people to talk to, including old friends I’m getting to catch up with a bit. It has been quite tiring though. I evidently don’t have the stamina I used to have for a schedule of eight talks in a day. Perhaps I never did.
On Thursday I managed to get an hour of David Gross’ time to sit down with me and […] Click to continue reading this post
So this morning I splashed on some flat colour on the woman’s side of things.
I did not finish the guy and so have left him out. (Click for a larger view.)
And there you have it… a little bit of the production cycle on The Project over the last several posts.
I decided when I got home to spend the evening doing a bit of refining of the previously mentioned roughs and start trying out a new inking idea (working on
A process update, since some of you are curious about The Project.
While hiding in the desert on walkabout recently, I finished writing a story I’d been working on (one of a few I worked on), and started thumbnailing parts of it and refining the pagination of it. Thumbnails are just little sketches of how a page might be laid out, maybe focusing on how the eye might move about the page, how the words and pictures might flow, etc. There were some pages I was immediately interested to try out, and so I did larger versions of them in rough here and there (and for some other stories too)…. For one of them, I have a really exciting exchange (about symmetry and beauty) over a notepad, and I sketched over oatmeal one breakfast time a mannequin construction of the layout. (See earlier for introduction to my mannequin friends.)
Well, on Thursday and Friday I finished the rough pencils for the whole page, featuring those two figures, now given flesh and bone. Today I did the main figures for another page, with a variation on that pose of the mannequin drawing from the desert. (Vellum helps here.) I thought I’d share (click for larger view):
They’ll be refined later on, with things like scaling of various bits and pieces fixed […] Click to continue reading this post
Got a bit of work done on The Project yesterday. Some pencilling, inking and coloring – all on one busy page. I don’t want to show you the whole thing, so here is a corner of one large panel (click for larger view).
There’s a party going on…
It is an interesting process, designing backgrounds… So here I’m thinking of what everyone is wearing, how to place them in the field of view, what colours they are wearing and so forth so as not to distract from the principals, how the wait staff might be dressed, what drinks they might be carrying, and so on and on.
[…] Click to continue reading this post
On the Gold line from Pasadena to downtown on Saturday I was looking to relax a bit after a long morning of work over a meeting I had with some colleagues. I got out my pencil and notepad and was happy to find that just over the way at the perfect distance (not to close, not too far) was a fellow who was looking out of the window and obligingly keeping his head more or less in the same orientation, or bringing it back to a similar position if he looked away from time to time. So I got some good looks and built the drawing on the right, over 20 minutes or so. As a bonus, […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a snap of a sketch I started while sitting in the Village Vanguard (New York) the other night while listening to the Mark Turner (ts) quartet play. On trumpet was Avishai Cohen, who was really excellent. This quick sketch, very incomplete, was assembled from several glimpses of him when he’d return to this pose, or more or less… Anyway, it was a fun exercise (I’d started another larger sketch of the whole band, but decided it went off balance after a while and so did not complete it). […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it has been well over two months since I popped into the studio I sometimes visit to to a “drop in and draw” session. (I’ve spoken about the value of such practice here before.) Although I’ve been drawing a bit here and there on the bus and subway to keep practicing, and also doing some work on some pages of The Project (actually, some pretty detailed finish work on a few pages I’m quite happy with), I was not sure whether I’d have the right chops to do a good job at the session, and expected that if I went I’d have a frustrating -but of course valuable- evening of knocking off some rust and oiling the wheels again. So I went along yesterday.
Strangely, it felt like it was going to be a good session as I approached, and as I settled down and began to try to capture the 2 minute poses, and then the 5 minute poses, I felt like I was flowing along pretty well. It helped that the model on duty is […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it has been a while since I’ve posted any sketches, but that does not mean that I’ve not been doing any. I’ve had a visitor and have not been on my usual routine, and so I’ve got a bit out of practice for not doing so many, but I still snatch the opportunity to sketch when I can. Here are a few faces and fragments of faces I grabbed on the bus and subway in recent weeks. (Click for a larger view.) I just used a ballpoint pen, and a sideways glance or few…
I’m trying to decide whether […] Click to continue reading this post
This weekend I stayed over at the house of some dear friends, spending a bit of time out of town. I was up early this morning, and while I waited for everyone to get into full gear, I had a bit of time on my own to do a sketch of what was sitting in front of me after I finished my coffee and toast. (Click for larger view.)
I got my sketchpad and pencil first, and then decided that it was a while since I’d done anything directly on the iPad, and not since I’d got the new iFaraday stylus I got […] Click to continue reading this post
