Hindsight

Well, May has brought some HOT weather already. The spring passed by so quickly I hardly did any painting 🙁

But here’s a decent one I did in the Heather Garden at Fort Tryon Park.

I recently had the pleasure of being on a fabulous 12-day tour of Greece with Children’s Literature New England and The Examined Life. It was wonderful! Alison and I took about 3000 photos, to which I will not subject you except for a few of the highest highlights, and I did a few sketches and watercolors which you can see below. Alison has written a detailed blog post here. Enjoy!

At one point I was thinking about setting Romeo & Juliet in the Harlem Renaissance, and I watched some fun documentaries about it. I had a lot of fun sketching some of the great lindy routines they were doing in the dance scenes.

Wow, I can’t believe it took me 2.5 years since I moved to NY to get over to the sketch night at the Society of Illustrators. 2 models, 3 hours, Live music, $15, surrounded by great art. What’s not to like?

Alison and I just returned from a lovely 4-day weekend in Maine, where I attended a great little painting workshop with Henry Isaacs and Ashley Bryan. Henry is a landscape painter whose work I find absolutely stunning and inspiring. Ashley is inspiring to me both as a children’s book author/illustrator, a painter, and a radiant beacon of joy in the world. The workshop is organized and hosted by the Islesford Dock Gallery and Restaurant (Cynthia and Dan Lief are the wonderful proprietors). The gallery has excellent art, as I had seen on many previous visits to Islesford. The restaurant, as I discovered over the weekend, has really spectacular food — by any standard! We were fed so well I’d have to say the meals threatened to upstage the painting.

I will post a few of my paintings above the cut, and the rest below — along with a bunch of thoughts about painting that are bouncing around in my head.

Friday was a very foggy morning on the beach. Henry gave a great little demo and talk about seeing everything as solid, even the air, and treating it that way, rather than having a background with a subject in front of it. My first attempt at this was clumsy. I was using gouache, which is my favorite medium for landscape. It’s hard to cover a large surface with gouache though, and that caused some problems every time I tried to work larger than about 5×7″.

My second attempt used too complex a subject, and while I like this piece, it feels more like a drawing than a painting, and more like my habitual approach than what I was going for.

After that I did some pieces that caught parts of what I was after.

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My friend Theo asked me to go out and draw with her sometime and try to teach her how I sketch from life. That seemed like a bit of a tall order, but I was very willing to give it a shot, and I think it actually worked fairly well. I should mention that Theo does have quite a bit of art experience already, so we weren’t starting from scratch.

So anyway, we walked over to Harvard and found a spot to sit and draw. This piece took about 40 minutes, with a few breaks to explain things. Since some of my readers may be interested in this topic, I will attempt to capture some of what I told Theo, and walk through the process of how I choose a composition and do a drawing from life.

First I look around for something interesting to draw. For me, that often means an interesting overlapping or framing of shapes. In this case Theo pointed out a tree she liked, and I found a distance and angle from which that tree (The small one) was framed by two larger trees, with the entrance of the Natural History Museum behind it.

I often start out with a quick “thumbnail” composition, to figure out the framing and the main elements I’m interested in. In this case you can see I’m emphasizing the curve of the small tree, the trunk of the pine on the left, and the large branch of the oak coming in from the right, and you can see how I tried both horizontal and vertical framing.

At this point Theo did a thumbnail which she didn’t like, and I encouraged her to work over it with a different, heavier tool. One way to think of an artwork is as a record of a process, and leaving the mistakes there often makes it much more interesting.

Next I transfer the rough composition to the larger size of the “real” drawing (unless I have skipped the thumbnail step). These are Theo’s photos (thanks Theo!).

Then I start to add some values and details. Because life sketching usually needs to be done quickly (whether because of changing light, need to eat, other time constraints, or just to stay loose), I try to find some quick, scribbly marks that represent the different types of leaves for each tree.

I deliberately experiment a bit here, because sometimes the first/automatic marks I make are something habitual that doesn’t really reflect what I’m seeing. This will be especially true if you are a beginner or haven’t drawn for a while — you might revert to some canonical leaf/tree shape you have in your head, ignoring what’s really there. It still happens to us professionals too.

Here’s a closeup showing the scribbly oak leaves and the much smaller/lighter leaves on the small tree below it. Note that for some of the closer oak leaves, I’m drawing (roughly) their actual shape. Having a few examples lets the viewer extrapolate to figure out what the other leaves on that tree would look like.

Theo was writing down my comments while I talked so she didn’t get another photo until I was pretty well along. I’m trying to work the whole picture plane without obsessing about any small areas of it, keeping the marks loose but based on observation. That’s important! By the way, that’s a Cretacolor Nero (medium) pencil I’m working with, on a Holbein multi-drawing sketchbook.

Here’s the finished drawing at the point where I chose to leave it. I could of course add/refine more details, but this basically captures what I was after, and if I worked it further it might lose some of its freshness.

Hope that was useful. I’m happy to answer questions in the comments.

Last week I went to David Levithan’s YA author reading series at the Jefferson Market NYPL*, and quite enjoyed it. There were nine authors reading samples of their newest books, including my friend Tim Decker. I doodled some (probably bad) likenesses of the authors as they read.

Featured: Andrea Cremer, Tim Decker, Lisa Graff and Martin Leicht, Alissa Grosso, Deborah Heligman, Kody Keplinger, Emma McLaughlin, Rebecca Serle and Suzanne Weyn.

(*If you haven’t seen this branch, definitely check it out. It’s in an odd but super-cool building that apparently used to be a courthouse.)

I recently came across these in a sketchbook and realized I hadn’t posted them. Mind you, there’s a ton of stuff I forget, or don’t have time, to post — but these I had definitely meant to, so here you go.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I did this micro-adaptation of Hamlet for a bookstore mailer a few years ago, and thought I should share it here.

Yesterday I had a brunch with a bunch of Otherworld folks, after which I was planning to head over to draw at the open house at Dalvero Academy, which is run by friends and fellow Dave Passalacqua disciples Ronnie and Margaret. However, the trains were somewhat messed up, and the brunch ran late, and when I got outside I found myself standing at the edge of Central Park with the last brilliant pre-sunset light making the fall foliage (yes, we get that here) glow with brilliant colors, and I thought, sorry Ronnie, I’m just going to sit down and draw this.

Then I went home and scanned a bunch of stuff from this sketchbook — which, as it happens, I started right after moving to NY, and which contains a few nice sketches I don’t think I’ve shared yet. First, there’s The Cloisters:

And two views of the trees and gate house at Fort Tryon Park:

Then the crowd at a Weepies concert we went to:

Then some sketches from the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met:

And finally a couple of sketches from the African exhibit I went to around the same time (it appears this is still up through January).