Orion - The Practice, Saturday 6

I’ve been wanting to get Orion down for a long time now. I worked from a Hubble image because, while I see Orion often in my winter sky, I can’t see him right now. The sky is the opaque and glowing blue-grey of a snowy night (and I’m inside my apartment). The Hubble image is stunning, and I’d like to work more with it—maybe in a different medium, and with colors.

It’s the second week of February, and our Montana winter has arrived at last. No better time than now to catch the image of Orion—one of my favorite marks of winter.

Triceratops - The Practice, Thursday 6

Today I just put some ink down on a quick live study I took at the Museum of the Rockies a couple weeks ago.
The MOR has a wonderful collection of dinosaur skeletons, and I almost can’t go in there without a sketchbook. A date to the museum back when my boyfriend and I had just started seeing each other was no exception. I brought my sketchbook and stopped here and there to draw the cool things I saw. Brian enviously watched other couples strolling through, holding hands, irritated that I didn’t seem interested in that kind of romance. Little did he know what he was getting himself into…
This year, for our fourth anniversary, we went back to the museum. He brought a sketchbook too this time,
and I made sure to give him my hand a few times.

Snowy branches - The Practice, Wednesday 6

My prayers for snow have been getting answered, it seems. I woke up to this view out my window this morning, and just posted up straight away for a live capture.

It’s been a funny feeling lately. The light is changing and my body is responding—springtime feelings budding up without hesitation. But I’m missing the full dip into the deep, dark cold that we never fully made this winter. So I’m pulled—my body’s telling me ‘yes’ to spring, but my mind isn’t quite ready to let go of the winter we haven’t really had. Up here it’s not uncommon to get most of our snow through February and into March (and even beyond), so we might be in this tug-of-war between the spring sky and winter weather for a little while yet.

Black Faced Highland Sheep, finished - The Practice, Tuesday 6

For the last several days I’ve just chipped away at this guy, one slab of wool at a time.
At long last, here he is.

Pattern ROUGH Composite - The Practice, Tuesday/Wednesday 5

I started re-drawing a single essential tile for the snowflake pattern, with intent to modify the shape to my own purposes.

I immediately realized that it would make much more sense to wait until I start fitting the images into the pattern, and let that process determine any alterations to form. So the pattern as is will act as a very flexible structure, rather than a container.

I’ve said at least a couple times by now that I should start playing with plugging some of these image ‘ingredients’ into the pattern structure, in order to start getting an idea how the pieces might fit together. Yesterday I started plugging in the stag head just for shits n’ giggs. * Pardon the poor image quality on lower image—the file itself is enormous, and I just had to take a screenshot to give the general shape impression *

Today I take it a little further. What you see below is extremely crude. It won’t really be like this. I only want to give a very rough impression of how the parts can start coming together.

It’ll actually be something a lot more like this, with the images fully incorporated into the pattern —

My methods vary for incorporating the images and building the pattern. In the ink version above, I used a light table to trace, move, trace, move, trace every single image. It was an insane process, and the picture above only shows one corner of what is really a much larger piece.

In the painting, I drew and redrew until I had a pattern I liked with all images incorporated, hand-cut stencils for the whole tile (there were 3 separate tiles with the same pattern but different images), used the stencils to lay base layers of paint and get the shapes in the right spots, then went in by hand to paint in the details on each tile. Also an insane process—shown above is 1/16 tiles.

I will most likely keep experimenting with process on this one, and don’t yet know what route I’ll take to complete it. I do have a projector now, so I’ll likely make use of that somehow.

Snowflake Pattern, assembled - The Practice, Monday 5

I’ve finished and inked my snowflake from Thurs/Fri 3, and assembled it into a pattern in Ps/Ai. We’ll call this my prayer for snow, since it’s the end of January up here in Montana, and we still haven’t seen much. I hope for more through February and March. It’s becoming a bit easier to see how I could actually use this as a stuff inside of stuff framework. I think my best bet would be to break it into square tiles (as shown below the full pattern). I’ll probably redraw from there and play with the shapes and negative space, making it more my own, and probably adding a little something in that empty corner.

Black Faced Highland Sheep - The Practice, Monday - Wednesday 4

Once again I’ve managed to get myself into something much more complicated than it initially looked. This is my work from both today and yesterday, and will need another day or two at least to finish. The volume of the sheep is an optical mindf$@# and I went through at least a few gesture drawings before just saying screw it and jumping in with a pen. I believe it is a Black Faced Highland Sheep—it’s from a photo I took somewhere in Scotland (looks like the Isle of Mull most likely). I am planning on also drawing his little friend, who I can tell is going to be much easier.

Snowflake Pattern - The Practice, Saturday 3

Here I’ve started drawing the snowflake’s body onto the frame I built yesterday. As I’m getting into it, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t actually make a better ingredient than a base pattern. The positive space is so narrow that it would have to be HUGE to fit any significant imagery inside…unless I put all the imagery in the negative space instead… I might play with the shape and bulk of the body a bit, and see if I can come up with something of my own that would work better.

Snowflake Pattern Foundation + Tiny Twigs - The Practice, Thursday/Friday 3

In today’s work, I’m exploring some alternate options for pattern, as the one I currently have (Hampton Court Walls) is beautiful and very well might still get used, but is very complex. I wanted to play with something a bit more simple (and have 3 remaining pages in the patterns section of the sketchbook that I want to finish this month).

The basis is an embroidered snowflake that I came across on an apron at World Market around Christmastime (didn’t buy, just snapped a pic). The shape is really nice, and simple enough. It seems the designers were referencing a folk style, which I find interesting in a couple ways. For one, folk art is a weird and wonderful entity of itself. For two, a folk-type pattern on a mass-produced item at a corporate, consumer goods giant like World Market is kind of antithetical, isn’t it? Here’s another opportunity for the image to be a time-capsule of where we are/I am in the world and in history right now. As for the flake itself—it’s got enough body and the geometric form needed to make a good pattern once repeated. I’m also considering the opportunity to superimpose my imagery onto its spokes in some kind of a cyclical way.

So far I’ve just built the geometric base. Whenever it’s necessary for me to sit down and rummage through whatever math and geometry skills are left in my bones from high school, I usually enjoy it in a way. I never consider myself a ‘mathy’ person, and it has always been my least favorite in school (that repetitive homework..pull my hair out!). But, when a direct application for it is readily at hand, or when its true inherent beauty is highlighted, math is wonderful. And this is where I officially lend my support to the movement to reform math education.

At very bottom is my work from yesterday—a final bit done on my Tiny Twigs.

Tiny Twigs - The Practice, Tuesday/Wednesday 3

I’m finding that just sticking to drawing for at least 15 minutes everyday probably makes more sense for me than mandating that I finish each sketch in 15 minutes. Between yesterday and today, I’ve finished the twigs I started on Monday. I may draw out one or a few more of these.

I’m seeing them work in place of a botanical flourish in the overall piece. I should start playing with working some of these ingredients into a pattern soon, so we can all get an idea of where I’m going with this.

Tiny Twigs - The Practice, Monday 3

Today’s work is just a starter of some tiny twigs, poking out of the snow. I found them yesterday, snowshoeing for my first time with my friend Madison up in Bridger Canyon. They’re so delicate, and the lines are somehow graceful in their jaggedness—like tiny cracks in the ice, or capillaries.

Tree Roots - The Practice, Saturday 2

Boy. Not sure why I didn’t realize this one would take for.ever., but I clearly should have. I’ve been working on it basically all week, as this has been such a busy week that I should have been sticking with fifteeners. But I just wanted to get it done, so here it is.

Repetition of forms in nature fascinates me to no end. I wonder, what tendencies of physics and biology bring so many natural forms to move through space, and through all kinds of different substrates, in similar ways? These roots disperse themselves from the trunk through the soil like fingers radiating out from a hand…like the tentacles of a great octopus…like ganglia.

It was hard to keep it as lo-fi as this, even though it probably should have been even more so. The texture of the bark is just so cool, it was too hard to resist. I’d like to do a separate study of the bark, close up and in high fidelity.

Tree roots - The Practice, Sunday 3

This post is actually today’s work, which means I’m finally caught up. I talked a bit about gesture drawing in the last post (Hampton Court Walls 2/Saturday 2), and today’s work is a good continuation of that. Here is the more-or-less gesture-drawn base for my next sketch. It’s just some cool looking semi-exposed roots of a tree that I took a picture of while out for a walk on New Year’s Eve. I’ll either continue on to inking it today, and add to this post, or will do it as tomorrow’s work and put the finished result in its own post.

Hampton Court Walls 2 - The Practice, Saturday 2

Here is yesterday’s work, in which I completed the pattern started on Thursday 2. You’ll see that when I draw a complex pattern like this, I draw just the one essential ‘tile’, which by being flipped and repeated becomes the whole pattern. Here I’ve assembled the sketched components into a rough whole-pattern version, using Ps and Ai.

I also include progress shots here, starting from the beginning so that I can talk a little about the process. Drawing this pattern reminded me how grateful I am for one specific component of art school, despite my arrogant ambivalence to it at the time—gesture drawing from Drawing 101. Gesture drawing is all about the body, the volume, the space of a form, not the outlines. It’s a bit counter-intuitive to use in drawing a pattern that is nothing but outlines, but oh my God. This pattern would have been a nightmare to draw without the practice of gesture drawing (that’s not to say that it wasn’t still a nightmare at times, but it would have been a sleep-paralysis, lucid nightmare otherwise). Patterns like this are puzzles, because every piece has to fit together just so, in order for the thing to be able to repeat. Building the body of the forms early on was crucial. If you rely primarily on outlines to build something like this, the pattern will very quickly start warping, and will continue to warp more and more severely, until you are ready to set your sketchbook on fire.

Hampton Court Walls - The Practice, Thursday 2

I was flipping through photos, looking for a pattern to work on today, and I stopped on this one—I’m pretty sure I took the photo at Hampton Court in England. Something about the pattern obviously sparked enough of an intuitive response to stop me looking and start me drawing. Only once I slowed down enough to start drawing, though, did I start to understand why this one works for my winter project.

Right away, you can see that the organic forms are full of life—kind of trippy, gooey, magic life. But with time, something about it starts feeling like underground, like root bulbs, and microbes and things. It seems like winter is a time when a lot of life is taking place underground, while much above ground rests, freezes, sleeps, and dies.

This is work I did for The Practice on New Year’s Eve (two days ago) and obviously isn’t finished yet. Today’s piece is still to come.

Thoughts on The Process

For reasons I can’t yet put my finger on, I’ve always felt a dissociation, a skepticism, about the ‘Art World’ (the professional and academic sphere of fine art, that is). The decision to go to art school as an adult was a tricky one to make. I remember telling my sister-in-law that I was afraid of being overcooked. Something in me was worried that I’d start molding to the conventions of the art world. Then I decided to have enough faith in myself to try it, and if I was on the verge of overcooking, to sense it, and to get out. Which I did, after two years.

Something I’ve heard as a critique from educators and professionals in art is, “Your work is still very figural. You should really try moving away from that” (this has been said at least once to me, but I’ve heard it said to, and about, others as well). Abstraction is the right way to capital-A-Art. I resist this. I have experimented with many kinds of abstraction, have had some fun with it, and have had some cool results sometimes; but drawing a real thing as I see it just does something for me. It always has, and there’s nothing else like it.

Now, with or without help from the Art Powers That Be, I have second-guessed the living shit out of why I do it like this. What’s the point of taking hours to render the same image that my iPhone captured in a millisecond? What does it accomplish? What does it mean?

Every time I actually draw, I remember the answer to all those questions. It’s quite a phenomenon—stop drawing, forget, start drawing, remember, stop drawing, forget, and on and on.
The answer: there is a certain deeper understanding of any form, any subject, that I can only come to by drawing it. Going slow enough to literally process an image through my hands brings me to know it on a level that I could never reach otherwise. This is everything to me. This is why I genuinely don’t care if I ever make a dollar off my art, or if anyone outside of my family and friends ever sees it. The process is everything.

Christmas Birds, Golden Pothos 2 - The Practice, Wednesday 2

15 minutes to draw this one, another 15 or so to ink it…maybe it would make sense to set the baseline at 30 minutes instead of 15.

I’ve been wanting to catch one more of these little birdies that I drew on The Practice, Monday 1—and in particular, I wanted the one that’s framed by a pretty little swirl of leaves. I didn’t have quite enough space on my page for the full effect, but hopefully I’ll be able to piece it together later if need be.

A few forward-looking notes to self: I should start playing with patterns soon. I’ll look through pictures from London and Scotland last summer to see what I have there first. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and I’d like to start a new sketchbook on the New Year (one of the beautiful ones I bought in Miami that I’ve been dying to dive into). I’ve been just about at the tail end of my current one, and so between today and tomorrow I’d like to fill this baby out as much as possible. I’ve got 6 blank drawing pages left (4 of which are in the patterns section, so extra reason to get going on that), and another 19 pages in the writing section. Those are lower priority, but maybe I can find something to do with them. I also have 6 unfinished sketches that would be cool to tie up, of which 3 are high priority.

Sendak Serpent, inked - The Practice, Tuesday 2

I ended up at 45 minutes for this today, but in fairness I was simultaneously crate-digging for great disco tracks to help Bri with his New Year’s Day funky brunch DJ set. This is a continuation from work done (and discussed) on Monday 2.

Sendak Serpent - The Practice, Monday 2

I stuck to 15 minutes on the dot, and this is where I ended up. It’s a piece of an illustration in
E.T.A. Hoffman X Maurice Sendak’s The Nutcracker. A few things to talk about here:

1) One of my favorite things about Christmastime, and winter, and holidays in general, is all the story, weaving through time and constantly swirling into new forms. One story that has vaguely fascinated me for a long time, but that I’ve never really dived into until this year, is The Nutcracker. I had not known that E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote the original, and was excited to find that version of the story. Then my whole week was made when I found out that there’s a version out there with the original Hoffmann version of the story, illustrated by Maurice Sendak! I was also blown away to learn that Sendak worked on the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker, reviving a lot of that dark weirdness in the original story.

2) I am not squeamish about snagging elements from other art, media, entertainment, etc. and working it into my own stuff. The books I read, shows I watch, things I see on the news, and other artists’ art are all part of my daily lifescape, so I generally have no qualms about throwing them into my cultural and natural collages. After I get through with them, they are clearly part of something entirely new. Art is thievery—we’d be wise to get over it.

3) I live with a dull, aching obsession with exoticism—baggage and all. It seems to be an under-studied subject, at least in the English language—if you just switch its Wikipedia page from English to French, you automatically get a lot more information. I’ll expand on why I’m so fascinated by exoticism at another time, but for immediate context: I’m really interested in its place in Christmas. Exoticism at Christmas (much like exoticism in general), is visible, and can be smelled and tasted by all, but so far I can’t seem to find it being discussed explicitly. It’s alive in The Nutcracker for sure, and Sendak obviously picked up on it and brought it out through his illustration of the book.

Inked - The Practice, Thursday and Friday 1

I have a little catching up to do. Thursday and Friday were Christmas Eve and Christmas, and mom and sis were staying at my house to celebrate, so I’ll give myself a break here. Over the weekend, I did at least finish inking my Celtic bookmark tracing from Wednesday 1, and nearly finish inking the silver stag from Sunday 1. The stag is now only missing ink on his side flourishes.