Brushes

So a week or two ago we went down to San Francisco, for a tour of the Academy of Art University's animation facilities and for to wander out to American Apparel and Kinokuniya. I had a brushpen from the japanese stationery store, and it was awesome, but I used it a lot and it leaked everywhere (daily baths for all my writing utensils are not my idea of a fun time), and then it ran out. So we made this trip to go and get more brushpens, waterpens, and ... t-shirts.

Waterpens are great (if you've been reading Ronnie Del Carmen's blog, he's got some posts on the history of them, and who invented them, and everything - seeing him watercoloring effortlessly with his waterpen at the first Sketchcrawl I went out to made me want to run out and buy one.
So I did.
My paintings still don't turn out like his, though. I dunno why, because I've got the right brush...

But they're great, because you don't have to lug around a bottle of water if you want to go running around watercoloring stuff. The only problem is that sometimes you end up with too much water, especially if you're mixing colors, but I bring a for real brush to use when that starts happening.

ANYWAY. Brushpen and waterpen art.


This is a mushroom guy, and this is his giant mushroom house.




I work in the deli department of the grocery store now, so I see a lot of people go by... many of them look really funny. But it's bad form to pull your sketchbook out and draw when you're on the clock (well, except for if that's what your job actually is, which is what I'm working towards), so I have to stare at them unnervingly and try to memorize their faces.
The guy with the curly hair, he was a customer. The naked woman... not so much.

It would make the job more exciting, though...

Coming down for air

Things have a way of all happening at once, and sometimes they're sneaky and you don't even realize that anything's happening at all until you come home from work, drop your keys on the counter, and have no idea where you are...

Weekends ought to be a lot longer. Three or four days.

Just a few sketchpages to post. Sketchcrawl is coming up, on April 22 - I'm going on out to the San Francisco crawl, great fun. If there's one in your area, you should go, too.

'Cause then you'll be cool.







I personally would like a Pikachu rabbit.

Velcro and Deli

Delirium and Velcro, our cats. Deli enjoys purring and clawing her way up your back, and Velcro mainly sits in the sink. When she's not destroying the front door, or pulling pushpins out of the wall.

Virtual mentors

Another plug for the Invisible Ink Blog... this time about his most recent post. In the post he talks about how great artists copy, steal, rip and paste from other artists, and how that's a valuable learning tool.

I read that and it pissed me off. It's always been a kind of a thing for me, saying "I never copy, I'm never Directly Inspired by, what I produce is my own and if you can look at it and even think that I ripped somebody off, I'm going to burn it, because if I'm not producing Emma drawings, then I'm a hack."
Which is a really long thing to say every time you draw something.
Anyway, I read his post and it set off the knee-jerk reaction. Because, you know, ripping people off is what hacks do; it's ridiculous and it short-changes you because if your drawings are always just grafts onto the larger tree of someone else's work (check it out, a metaphor), how do you ever know what you yourself are capable of doing? I posted a comment to that effect on his blog, and he explained that it's not ripping the artist off, it's basically study.

That's a lightbulb moment. I lock all the other artists I love into the closet when I sit down to draw something, and that just busted the door off its hinges. I did a couple of pages of Mike Mignola studies, and a couple of pages of Bill Peet studies, and it's amazing to go through the process of figuring out why the shapes are drawn that way. You HAVE to do the study in some way approximating the way that the artist did it - it's no good to to pencil in the volumes before you start methodically inking your sketch from Bill Peet ref, you have to take a pen and draw it straight. So you have to figure out what those lines are there for, what got drawn first, what are the anchors and landmarks and what the drawing actually means. I was also catching a lot of my own habits, which I hadn't even realized I HAD... but trying to draw like someone else, my own inclination on where to put the eyebrows got in the way (even when I was looking straight at the source drawing).

So anyway, I'm not going to post my studies because that's ridiculous. Here's a tiger, instead.



Click on it, cause sizing it any further down made it lose all its awesomeness. And it won't all fit on the page! O NOES

Poof.

I sat down a couple of weeks ago to write a post... it was about how anything you draw is basically a combination of everything you've ever seen - I can look at any of my drawings and read the genetics of it back to the idea it first came from, whether it's mostly me or if there's a hand or foot or mouth that's just totally Trina Schart Hyman or whatever.

All these amazing artists, and they're disappearing all the time. Trina Schart Hyman died recently - last year? - and I really wish I'd have had a chance to talk to her before she went. She seemed like an interesting person, and her work has been a huge influence on me since I was four or five... second only to Ed Emberley, from whom I got my start on horses. A couple of triangles, a square, some lines for legs, and the flowingest tail you feel like drawing. It's like magic.

Yeah, so I was going to make a post on the DNA and ancestry of peoples' drawings, only then I had to go to work, or had to log off the computer to go make dinner, and lo and behold it's been three weeks and I haven't posted anything. So here are some drawings.