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April 06 2012
(Almost) Last Pages of a Sketchbook
The last pages themselves will have to wait some time to be scanned – I handed in this sketchbook as part of my portfolio to the Prince’s Drawing School. I drew the last pages when I was already in London for the portfolio drop off…
March 27 2012
Studies in Memory and Repetition
I’m trying to dig deeper into my visual memory and to sharpen my perception of values. I’m experimenting with ways to make a more active use of my memory in my drawings, for example by coloring them from memory, or not drawing on location as much as just look at location, and then go home and draw from memory, or to make one drawing on location and another one back home, either with or without looking at the one made on location.
The ideas for this come from a few different sources – Loriann Signori’s blog, Nicolaïdes‘ The Natural Way to Draw (which I still regard as the best book on drawing I ever laid my eyes on), and some remarks on Turner’s sketching technique (he is said to often have only made pencil sketches on location, and filled in the colors from memory or imagination when he was back in his room).
Also, I tend to go drawing early in the morning, and it can still be damn cold at that time, and doing the washes at home gives me warmth and more control. Funny enough, the increased control that comes from working on a table and having two free hands means I can let the washes move around more freely, use more water.
P.S. Last year I wrote this lengthy posting about finding that some of my favorite watercolors by artists like Turner, Wyeth, Hopper and Sargent were done, or at least could have been done, with very few different paints, achieving their splendor through the subtle gradations of those very few paints. I am still intrigued by this – you can see in the second Turner copy above that it only uses two colors, a yellow and a blue/violet. I guess I’ll be digging for a long time.
March 22 2012
Spring Drawings from the Pencil Side
From my current sketchbook, all except the first from the side for dry media. Time and again I find that I do love pencil, even if the ink stuff is so much flashier on first sight. There is a deepness to pencil, the variety of tonal values possible in one and the same stroke, the possibilities of softness and precision. Oh, and I always wish that this phase of spring, where most trees are still bare but there are buds everywhere would last longer. So much to draw, so little time! Once all the leaves have unfolded they become so much less interesting to me.
March 15 2012
More March Sketches and a Double Sketchbook
Page 10.
These are from the same sketchbook as the last posting, but it is a twofold sketchbook: It is half made from very bright, almost blueish Dorée 200 drawing paper, whose color I love, which is a good paper for dry media, and I have a 50 m roll lying around under my desk which will last me forever (and only cost around 70 €). This paper also sucks beyond the telling of it for watercolor or even slight ink washes, and the brush pen doesn’t go on quite as smooth as I would like. So the other half of the book is made of my favourite drawing paper ever, the Fabriano Disegno F4, which is a tiny bit warmer in its color, also very smooth, and although it isn’t advertised for wet media at all, takes them surprisingly well. In fact, for most things I prefer it to ‘real’ watercolor paper even if working heavily with watercolor. It is also way more expensive than the Dorée, and I’m buying it in loose sheets these days because I can’t afford the big packs. Oh well. Anyway, I’m using this book starting from both sides (the page numbers with ‘b’ are from the Disegno side, the regular numbers from the Dorée side), and will meet myself in the middle somewhere. I still like the format. I can actually imagine sticking to this square size for a couple of years.
These landscape sketches are inspired by the wonderful drawings of Fred, by the way, like this one. So many possibilities lie in his treatment of wash and bleeding, so much still to learn for me! But some of it might have to wait for next winter, when the landscape gets empty again and the trees bare.
P.S. If you click on page 05b you’ll see some strange textures in the brown on the right side. That’s what happens when a wash freezes on the page. I love it, I just wish I could play around with that effect more without freezing myself. I’ve drawn this place many times before, and encountered the same problem last winter, as you can see here. And of course I forgot to buy a heating pad in time, and now spring is just around the corner and I don’t feel like I’ll use it often enough to buy one now. I think I should make a note in my calendar, maybe for October or so: “get a heating pad and fingerless gloves.”
March 07 2012
First Post Travel Sketchbook
My travel sketchbooks were of various sizes and formats, not one exactly like any of the others. When I came back I started producing drawings for my exhibition on single sheets of paper so they could be framed, also it was cold and I wasn’t spending much time out and about, so for a while I didn’t have a sketchbook at all. Now I’ve made a new one, and I think I’ve found a format that will be ‘home’ for a while: more or less square, big enough to splash around with some color and layer drawings, but not too big to hold in my hand in the windy outsides…
March 06 2012
People on Public Transport in February
Sketch of people on public transport
P.S. This drawing is for sale here.
March 03 2012
Short Notice
Today and tomorrow you can find me and my drawings at the Kunstmarkt on the Museumsinsel in Berlin.
February 24 2012
Pictures from the Opening
(All photos by Deborah Wargon, except no 2, 8 and 9 by Simon Kowalewski.)
P.S. The exhibition goes on until 2 April.
February 14 2012
Exhibition Preview 2: Pondering Arrangements
So after a night of no sleep most of the drawings are framed now, and some already hanging. I’m wondering how to hang the rest – all the same size aluminum frames (ca. 25 x 21 cm), but how to arrange? I want to group them according to miniseries – here you can see all the drawings of tradescantia purpurea in color, and some dead tulips in color. Another group is going to be ink drawings, another one simple pencil drawings, a small group (3 x) silver points. The views of Berlin and public transport drawings, including this one, will hang in the back room (smoking area), the main room being completely dedicated to plant drawings.
First I though I may even have too many drawings—now I have a healthy respect for the size of the rooms… Which brings me back to my question. The way I see it I have two main tendencies I can follow: either I try to spread everything out evenly, so no bit of wall looks empty, but with the risk of visual boredom (I’m not much of a fan of very regular arrangements), or I nest them together, risking the ‘obviously blank wall’.
Of course both these tendencies can be done in a regular or a irregular manner: when the drawings are evenly spaced they don’t have to line up, and when they are clustered together they can be arranged in a grid, maybe forming a bigger ‘meta image’ rectangle.
Ah, I wish I could spend a couple of days just rearranging and testing stuff, and not having to hammer the nails in the wall myself;-)
Oh, and don’t worry about my lack of sleep. I’m probably going to go to bed soon, and sleep A LOT before I get up again tomorrow. Framing 30 + drawings and preparing the bigger ones was just too boring to do while fully awake. Perfect for that strange in between of late night and early morning, though. Now that some are already hanging I’m much more relaxed, too.
P.S. Missed the exhibition details? All the info is here.
Some framed public transport drawings
February 03 2012
Lots of People on Public Transport in January
I’ve been looking for a way to make my public transport drawings ‘exhibitable’, take them out o sketchbooks somehow, mostly by using folded single sheets of different sizes, like here. This is another attempt, not just putting the people on a single sheet, but trying to convey the feeling of looking through a whole sketchbook, while it still being a flat piece that I can hang on a wall and that could possibly be framed. It is 1,50 m long and about 24 cm high, and I really recommend that you click on it and look at the full resolution file, there is way more to see here than fits in a 620 px width!
I’m happy how this turned out, and I think it will have a good place hanging in a café. I hope somebody will look up sometime and get lost in my big little drawing, and then be surprised how late it already is…
January 25 2012
January 04 2012
December 09 2011
Nocturnes
Classless@Eschloraque, gouache on prepared paper
I’ve been experimenting with ways to sketch in the dark, sketch in bars, clubs at parties etc. It is a very fundamental challenge – I only see big forms and cannot make out the specifics of facial features that I rely on in my subway sketches, plus I can usually not make out the tip of my pen or brush the way I can in daylight. In a way it is like drawing with glasses on, made of milk glass, or running with weights. I’m not actually satisfied with any of these attempts, but I think I might come to an interesting place if I manage to keep it up for a while. I find it hard to judge an experiment like this before I have tried it at least somewhere in the 40–80 sketches range, because it takes a lot of orienting and testing the ground to become comfortable enough to actually play with it and see how far it can go.
The only white I’ve found satisfying on the dark paper I prepared (because in the dark it is the lights that make out the forms more than the shadows) is a white Edding 751, but it dries very slowly and sticky and is just in general not a drawing tool that feels good to me. Not sure what to do about it, though.
Left & middle: Meridian Brothers @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt, white marker and white Derwent Drawing pencil on prepared paper, right: club night in gouache.
Spektrophon @ White Trash Fast Food, on the left in gouache, right in white marker.
When I went to meet the other Berlin urban sketchers to be recorded sketching for local TV I realized I had forgotten to take a sketchbook or paper (I don’t have a current sketchbook since I came home from Istanbul), so I used the backside of one of those as my impromptu leporello book.
Sketches during recordings made of urban sketchers Berlin for Berlin TV station RBB.
November 11 2011
Some finished Watercolors
These are all from earlier this year – I was in such a frenzy of final exams, the Open Air Gallery and last minute travel preparations (is there another kind?) that although I did find the time to make these drawings, I never got around to photographing (they are matted and mostly too big for my scanner) and blogging them. Until now:
Dead Tulip I
Dead Tulip II
Painted Nettle
Oberbaumbrücke detail
Holteistrasse Ecke Boxhagener
Gärtnerstrasse
Westhafen
Most of them are quite a bit brighter than they look here (they are on white, not grey paper)—there doesn’t seem to be a time of day in November in when my apartment is bright enough for photographing artwork, and artificial light and photoshop games never seem to turn out right. The drawings vary in size – the flower drawings are almost miniatures, with the window of the mat measuring just 6 x 16 cm, while the windows for ‘Oberbaumbrücke’ and ‘Westhafen’ measure 30 x 40 cm. All of them are now up in my etsy store (70–200 € per drawing):
http://www.etsy.com/shop/OonaL.
November 04 2011
First Berlin Sketches this Fall
Looking at my travel drawings I get the impression that at least since July I’ve been exploring different ways to combine lines and colors, playing around with different drawing processes. This was without a doubt fueled by the workshop ‘Lining over Color’ I did with Richard Camara during the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Lisbon, although I feel that it goes back a bit further than that. You’ll see that the sketches in this posting differ wildly, too, in how they employ line versus color, although I drew them all within less than a week.
November 01 2011
The First Drawing in the First of my Travel Sketchbooks
On the table of my last meal in Berlin, sushi & mango lassi
June 16 2011
Monochrome studies
I’m working on my values (after somewhat painfully realizing how important they are) in between producing ‘finished’ drawings for the Open Air Gallery (only two more weekends to prepare! Mats are expensive!). I’m also looking at my books a lot, trying to soak every bit of advice from those pictures before I leave, as I won’t be able to take them with me for consultation on the way.
Study Materials. From left to right and top to bottom: Rembrandt, Carl Blechen, John Ruskin, Robert Crumb, James Jean, William Turner, Whistler, and Paul Madonna.
Here I laid out some books on the floor to look at how different artists have drawn architecture in more or less monochromatic drawings, comparing different qualities of line and ways of organizing values, hoping something will rub off;-)
And, of course, I’m panicking a tiny bit more every day as the date of takeoff comes closer. I feel compelled to end lots of sentences with exclamation marks, as everything is so new! And exciting! And I’ve never done anything like it and I have no idea what I’m doing really and OMG my life is never going to be the same again! But then, that is of course always true.
June 01 2011
Location Sketches
Insbrucker Platz (Ringbahn)
Wühlischstraße, 20 May.
RAW Area, 22 May.
Grünberger Straße, 31 May.
I have drawn this place before, and wasn’t satisfied at all.
Grünberger Straße, 16 April.
This week’s lines-only attempt feels much better. I’m in an analytic mood, trying to shake my sketching habits up a bit, mostly because I’ve been not feeling quite right about my watercolors for a couple of weeks now. I need to get my values right or my colors will erratically suck without me being able to do anything about it, I’m afraid, but I’ve been procrastinating on that. The desire to just make pretty pictures can be a trap—colors are seductive, at least before I have them applied. Every time I try to skip some exercise that I feel would help get me further, I end up producing crap, and wishing I had done the hard/annoying/necessary exercise instead. It just takes longer. This is not to say that the drawings above are completely without merrit—my criterium for judging my own drawings is not if they are any good or not, but rather how much the distance between what I wanted to do and what I did pains me when I look at them. I do rather like the line drawings above, though, and will probably put some washes on them over the weekend, to dig my heels into the study of values some more.
Also, sometimes I would like to be Paul Madonna for a couple of drawing days.
May 24 2011
May 19 2011
Last Day’s People Sketches
The sight-size problem again: Knowing that the charcoal is a bit clumsier than pencil, I tried to draw bigger. And tried again, and again, and again. When I started the last pair of eyes, I managed to stay in my target dimension for the left eye, but when I reached the right eye, I was already reverting back to my default.
Trying to go big in charcoal again. See that disporportionately tiny hand - that is me again falling back to my default proportion.
Derwent drawing pencil in ink blue.
Derwent drawing pencil in ink blue.
Another sketch of the same woman.
Derwent drawing pencil in sepia.
Pencil.
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