This week in Drawings

 Hello again dear comrades, I'm sorry I missed last week, I'll try to post something extra this week to make up for it. I was doing pretty good with my goal of posting some good drawings each week and drawing everyday, but combine a week of poor inspiration and with bad habit-keeping and you get the perfect storm for no posts. Hopefully it won't happen again. So for this week, here are some drawings!

Here is a little piece I did for the Crowd Star Art Department's Secret Santa Event. My Friend, Jose Fuentes found this on his desk last Friday Morning. I hope he liked it. It's watercolor on coldpress. I am mostly okay with how it came out, though if I could do it again I would have spent more time planning the color. still it made a fun exercise and I enjoyed making it.

Here is another random drawing loosely inspired by ancient American architecture and sculpture. I spent a long time shading this one with the weird swirly hatching, It was really fun but I should spend more time on composition and structure before I get all squirrely on stylistic details... cause the end result is this... wobbly thing that wasn't really well-planned enough to justify the care spent in rendering it. I'm sensing a theme here #fucking planning.

Here are some other random drawings, just for fun.
I spend a lot of time worrying that I'm doing a lot of the same thing over and over again, exempli gratia: faces fucking carved into stone. They appeal to me as a subject matter because they are fun to stylize and place in environments. There is ample room for symbolism in the shapes that constitute their designs and also in the decorative motifs that adorn them. But also because they are commonly the crowning megalithic markings of ruined civilizations. The reasons megalithic ruins and civilizations-lost inspire me are many and sufficiently so to form another blog post entirely... But that's for another time. As for the worrying, I am trying to do less of it. I figure that even if I draw the same subject matter over and over again, at the very least, I am making more art.

 More art than I would if I were sweating over a blank sketchbook thinking of the "Stuff I Have Already Drawn and Everyone is Going to Think I'm a Hack if I Keep Drawing this Shit" list. So onward I go. That's all for this post, until next time.

Sketches

 My awesome co-worker, Daisy Church, recently returned from China and gave me this little souvenir! So I decided to go ahead and use it for my daily life drawing exercises. Thanks Daisy!  

Ashley Boyd: A friend who goes on daily drawings with me

A view from the outdoor patio of the Mojo Cafe on Divis

Downtown Burlingame

More Burlingame

One can't always have good compositions I suppose.

The wobbly Crowdstar building... I think it's been drinking again.

The next stone face piece... I haven't had much time to work on it but I look forward to it!

 This is a spin-off of one of the ideas from my Calm Her album project... Not quite what I'm trying to get to, but I liked this drawing despite that.

I've been watching a lot of Ancient Astronauts at work, that show is like crack. I watch it because it is fucking hilarious and chock full of crazy, but mostly because it's also chock full of fantastic shots of ruined ancient civilizations... the aesthetics of the Inca, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations are stuck in my head now.
Expect to see more next week, but that's all for this week, thanks for coming by.

A Sketch Update

On Life Drawing and other things.

16 Minute drawing of something?

A 15 Minute, highly inaccurate, drawing of Angel Island

     Nearly all of the artists I know personally are rather diffident about their skills in the craft. Most at some level, will admit to feeling fraudulent, inept, or inadequate some or even most of the time. While there are, in stark contrast, a relative few godly ones that I know, who approach their art with undying self-assurance. I am, with certainty, not one of their class; I'm relatively uncertain if I will ever be able to be one of them. I don't know if that is a potentiality within my character... but what I do want, more than anything, is to be as good as they are.

Whether I even know it or not, but to make art as masterfully as they do... as any artist in such ranks. I know that a lifetime of diligent effort is required to even hope for such an accomplishment. And I have so far, been worse than lazy in this pursuit, my only excuse is that the fear of failure is a powerful force. So in an attempt to thwart the fear of failure, I am confronting it. (or at least I think I am)

A 40 Minute drawing from a photograph

A 20 minute incomplete drawing of trees

    All of the artists who I admire claim that drawing from life is the most powerful foundational skill in their repertoire. I hate life drawing; it has always been a miserable pursuit for me. I do not enjoy any aspect of it: I dread being timed, I get overwhelmed by the detail in my subject, by the looming inevitability of failure at every pencil stroke, and then there are the the god awful results I get every time I do it. Even in school after doing months of life drawings in class after class, I still made nothing but awful drawings. while I watched every student around me improve I seemed to not. But with that said, I love so very much what real, talented artists do with life drawing. Whenever I see good life drawing or an artist who is skilled in life drawing draw from their mind's eye: I am awestruck and inspired, and I want so desperately to be capable of what they do. So I am trying to face my fear, address my deficit, and draw from life. It is little surprise then, that the last few weeks of drawing from life every day has put me in a very dark mood.

A 30 Minute wobbly drawing of Burlingame

Each exercise reinforces in my mind just how awful I am, when in the time provided I often fail to even sketch the entire frame of view... and what little does make it onto the page seems to somehow be done with less proficiency than the day before. But I tell myself to keep trying, and now I have a sketchbook almost filled entirely with false starts and wonky, childish scribblings. Even the drawings I try to do just for myself, as therapy from doing life drawings seem to be getting worse. I'm not giving up... but I'm not getting any better either, and I likely won't for a long while yet, if I ever do, lord knows I've seen lots of artists just stagnate and never improve or change at all.

30 Minutes of graphite diarrhea

A 30 Minute perfect rendering of another dimension

I'm trying to disabuse myself from the quick-results-based mindset that I have and learn to enjoy the long, tracts of artistic plateau that await me. I hope that one day, sooner than I expect now, I will rediscover this blog entry, and remember the scared, petulant little shit-bag who wrote it as a distant fever-dream memory... That then I will be a better artist, able to draw and render more, and to do it quickly, confidently, and prolifically. Until then, here are some bizarre scrawlings from the clumsy hands of an idiot... a twenty-six year old who has been making art his whole life but possesses the abilities of a neophyte.

A Sketch Update

So here are a bunch of tiny watercolor passes I did for the stone face paintings. Trying to find a color scheme that I liked. I had a much harder time of this with the fiery one. But eventually it paid off. I like this process... it's kind of like a warm-up for the actual painting.

Here are some random drawings I was doing last week too, some rivers and stones. Nothing profound, just doodles. That's all for this week! Enjoy!

God of Rage

Another Gouache Painting

So this theme is so much fun I may do a few of them. I do have a bunch of these little 5x5 claybords. The last painting was supposed to be a sort of "God of Despair", depicting a melancholic stone face: overgrown with vines, weathered, and forgotten. In contrast, this one is a stone face depicting rage or hate: a stone face illuminated by a swirling banner of flames. I figured it would be fun to break the ideas into two visual elements: the stone face, and some kind of analog element to parallel the theme. I say it's not a bad way to get into a style of painting mostly new to me.

Some Sketches

Some Other Co-Workers

Some Co-Workers

A Lady

This Tree's Not Fat, It's Big-Boned!

Tattoos

Sketches for the Statue Gouache Painting

God of Despair

I haven't painted traditionally in years. Years! and even then, the last time I painted, it had been a while, and they were pretty terrible.... Seriously, if you go back far enough on this blog you'll see some of the creepiest paintings anywhere. But lately, I caught some kind of bug and decided to give it another go. I've been practicing every night this week trying to re-learn the media I was once familiar with. It took a while to get anything I liked out of my head onto paper, but persistence paid off. This is a little Gouache on 5''x5'' Claybord I just painted tonight (after many failed attempts). I thought I'd put it where people could see it. I hope you like it half as much as I enjoyed making it. The idea is that he's a long forgotten deity represented in stone: his façade, long forgotten, is weathered and worn by ages of elements, and he laments in the weeds that grow over him. Sad... or maybe he was an asshole and he deserved it, I don't know ... gods can be that way sometimes.

Some Sketches

 Trying to update more often, here are some sketches from... lately-ish.

More Pug

I watched my friend's pug, Pig Pug for a week recently

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After reading Hark! A Vagrant I drew my own 'Fat Pony'

Real talk, Chopin. Real talk.

A coworker with a very Rankin-Bass feel.

I don't know...

 Stay tuned, kids! more scribbles to come... I hope.

Cliffs

As an insomniac I spend a lot of time outdoors in the night and it struck me that I had not attempted to illustrate a nocturnal scene before. Biking along the San Francisco Coastline by moonlight actually looks more like this piece than you might guess. I've pulled a lot of my color choices from those experiences and exaggerated them a bit to end up here. But the moon shining down on a dark azure landscape, the calm sea gleaming like turquoise in the distance, and coiling clouds veiling the harbor...that is not too far removed from reality. 
I sought after a soft, tranquil mood in this piece and I wanted the landscape to speak more than any figures as the subject. But I've learned a lot in terms of color relationships in this piece. The complementary color of the bonfire in the distance is not powerful enough for me, it gets lost in the competitive value din created by the cliff-faces. But knowing that will help me later on in my future work. It feels really good to finally have had some time to finish this piece. I started it much earlier in the year, before Sonia's album cover actually, but between that project and having to bring work home with me, I had to put it on the back burner along with Ozymandias and another few projects. Hopefully this spell of productivity will last a little bit longer than those in the past. Thanks for reading, I hope to post more work soon!