A Story Between Drawings

The completion of my first drawing in this series got me thinking…

MANY years ago a well know Nova Scotia artist, Don Pentz, met me as a young man. Don is a friend of my Mom and I had completed some drawings that showed promise, so she arranged the introduction. I was shy and uncertain of what I wanted to do in life, and approached the meeting with something a notch or two less than optimism. I was welcomed into the artist’s studio – I had never seen one before, and we sat by a window looking out on the Lahave River. Don looked at my drawings. To my surprise he expressed his surprise, noting that the work was good enough for a gallery and that while I still had plenty to learn, he was genuinely impressed at what I had done without training. He asked what I planned to do with my talent. Art was never something I had been encouraged to consider as a career. My teachers saw greater things for me and pressed their ideas home to the point where I took their vision as my own; I answered accordingly. What Don Pentz said in response has echoed through my life since then: “If you are an artist, you will come back to the art and there’s nothing you will be able to do avoid it.” He gave me a brief overview of his own life to that point as proof of his assertion. I was young and had not the ears to hear the sage wisdom in his story, or if I did, the wits to comprehend it.

The years that have passed since that meeting by the Lahave held moments that I now bring to the drawing table as I “come back to the art”. My work is richer for this in ways I may never fathom, but I can say that the passion and energy that pull me back to the paper and pencil comes from a deep well that I cannot ignore.

It’s a story I thought might strike a chord with some, so I offer it... between drawings.

Drawing 1: Completed!!

Okay... There's too much of the little kid in me to keep this under wrap.

I finished the first drawing last evening and I gotta say I'm happy with it - thrilled in fact!! As the first drawing in the series it's really the proof in the pudding, and the drawing came together completely as planned, which is always a welcome outcome.

Going by the number of progress pics and a couple extra times I didn't document, I sat down at the drawing board around 20 times as I rendered the piece. I didn't "clock" this one and thus don't have the "logged" hours, but really... this isn't about the clock, so I'll leave those hands on the wall to tell their story in another space.

In a wink to my day job that has me in front of a computer a lot, I've made the photo bar at the top of the blog a "progress bar". As I finish each composition I'll replace the colour picture with my drawing. For those technical folks reading this don't worry - there's no reboot at the end!

So here are the remaining progress pictures for Drawing 1, with the finished work at the bottom. If you get a kick out of clicking through these in succession let me know. It's like one of those old fashioned flip cartoons and I have to pull myself away from going through the loop over and over.

Hope you enjoy these as much as I did pushing the pencils over the page.

Thanks again for dropping by!

... Now it's back to the drawing board. :-)

Drawing 1: Realism... Why not just take a photo?

Does anyone remember the scene in the first Indiana Jones movie where the Middle Eastern sword master comes at Indie with a highly skilled set of broadsword flourishes and swoops only to have the hero pull a revolver on him? The irony could easily be applied to realistic artwork. Why go to all this trouble just to reproduce something by hand that a readily available technology could do faster and better? Well the answer depends on the artist and what they set out to do with their art.

While my drawings look realistic they are about something other than copying reality - they're about form, texture, and proportions. Pretty standard stuff in art lingo, but I guess the difference comes down to the execution. Art should capture some sort of essence that appeals to the eye of the viewer and pulls them in. The best way I've heard it described is that if you were walking by the work would you stop and take a closer look. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether what I do would fit that criteria.

The textures I draw contribute a lot to the realistic feel of the work. As I render them I try to think about the material and how its surface reflects its nature. In these drawings metal is the obvious thing that I'm thinking about, but therein lies the challenge - How does one differentiate between all that similar material? The subject helps with that, as there are many different surfaces that span the range of wear and tear and carry with them the marks of how they were made. This hits on some of that "essence" I mentioned.

The form and proportions work on another level than the textures. If you squint at the drawing and force the surface treatments to blur, the compositional elements should jump out as you get past the "reality" of the textures. Some artists strive to highlight form to the point of abstraction, where the textures are completely avoided. I like the added depth they bring to the works and so I go the other way and highlight them.

Here's a couple more pictures in the progression of the first drawing. I hope you can see some of what I commented starting to happen in the piece as it gets closer to completion.

Thanks for dropping by!!

Drawing 1: Almost Halfway

Today I'll post 4 progress photos and pass on the commentary - I'm "rotten" with a cold as they say back home, but I want to honor the weekly update cycle and share what I've been able to do thus far.

Feel free to add a comment or ask a question.

All the best until next week and stay healthy!!

Drawing 1: Getting Down to the Brass Tacks

Having worked out the finer composition points on the trace paper line drawing, I next cut a piece of Arches watercolour paper for the final work. I tape this down on my drawing table and lay out the piece one more time, transferring the compostion from the working draft rather than the photo. The aim is to provide a guide for the rendering of the work. The lines are made with a hard 5H pencil that holds its point and makes a light mark on the paper. These lines will be  almost completely erased and redrawn freehand as the drawing is completed.

Once I'm satisfied I have enough information on the paper to guide the work I take up the tape, roll up the trace paper draft and put it away, and layout my pencils to start the rendering process. It may surprise some folks that there is this much preliminary work before the actual "drawing" is started. It's all part of the creative process that works for me and it changes with time, so what I do today is different than how I worked 10 years ago. Hopefully I keep learning. :-)

So what's this drawing look like you ask?

Here's the first three installments:

Each photo represents a day's progress. I don't work on this fulltime, so it's whatever I was able to accomplish in the time I carved out for the work.

Being right handed, I start in the upper left corner and work across the page, finishing elements of the picture as I go. On occassion I go back and retouch something, but once I move on it's 99% done. Like most things, some parts take longer than others to complete, so there are days when I don't quite get as much done I'd hoped for. So far this piece is going very well though (knock on wood).

In my next posting I'll talk a bit about the realist style I use and how it's different than making a copy of a photo.

Catch you later!

Drawing 1: Composition and Layout

Figuring out what to draw can be done in an infinite number of ways. These days I work out the composition of my pieces on the computer, leveraging the digital photographs I take as the basis of the work. Here's the "photo" composition I ended up with for Drawing 1.

Having determined what the drawing will be taken from, I print it on an 8.5 X 11 sheet that becomes my reference from this point forward. In future posts I'll delve into the compositional approaches I'm using for this project. It helps to have some rules at times, and with 10 drawings in play, these guidelines will work to give a unified "voice" to the pieces.

The next step takes me to the drawing table, photograph in hand, where I lay down a sheet of light trace paper. On this paper I "lay out" the drawing, a process of taking the rough composition done on the computer and tuning it to become what will be the finished work. I use drafting tools - a parallel rule, set squares, french curves, and bow compasses, together with freehand sketching to draw the final composition on the trace paper as a line drawing. This is a trial and error stage that refines the ideas I had when the photo was created. Note that there's no tracing going on here - "trace" paper is just the name of the medium I'm working on. :-)

This is the finished layout for the first drawing:

It's a lot like an initial draft for a term paper: You'll see light lines all over this drawing that are evidence of the roughing out nature of this part of the process. I don't use a grid, although you'll see lines that may suggest that to you. This project uses the Golden Ratio as a basic compositional rule and the lines represent patterns that follow this rule. Elements of the drawing appear at key intersections and positions in accordance with the proportions of the ratio.

In the next installment I'll use the layout drawing to begin what will become the finished work on watercolour paper.

Thanks again for dropping by!

Getting Started

First time blogging...

First time for everything, so here goes  :-)

My thought is to use this space to track progress as I work on the 10 drawings that make up this project, and share the experience with whoever may wander along and look in the "window." Hopefully it'll be a bit more interesting than watching paint dry. Fingers crossed.

It may help to see what one of these drawings looks like. Here's the prototype work that sparked the project:

This drawing is executed in graphite on Arches watercolour paper. It's roughly 21" X 7.5" and took approximately 230 hours to complete. For the Decapod Project, I'll be doing pieces that are around 10" X 16". I'm hoping that the speed of completing each is a tad faster. I've already begun the first drawing and have started the rendering... it feels like it's going faster, so I'll take that and not ask too many questions here at the start.

My intention is to post updates weekly. The project is about the art and I'd like to avoid having the blog take over center stage.

I'll be including minor ramblings on technique and what my thoughts are about the drawings as I go. Everyone works differently - there's really many roads to the same place here, so I'll play it by ear and see where this takes me.

If you've actually just read this - Thanks for stopping by!! Comments and questions are welcome and oh yes - Happy New Year!!