Currently Browsing: The Drawing Life 205 articles

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Testing the Twone Sketchbook with Kraft Cardstock Covers

Do I actively seek out the most obscure commercially bound books containing non-art paper to test? No, it simply seems like that sometimes. I grew up with a small weekly allowance paid after the completion of standard house and family chores. That allowance had to stretch from candy to art materials. Let’s just say I […]

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Stubble—I Can’t Help Myself

I just have to maintain a daily diet of sketching stubble. It can be with the Tombow Fudenosuke pen like this sketch, or the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen or the Squeezy brush pens from Pentel, or ANY PEN. I just think stubble is fun to sketch. I suspect it is the 15 years I spent […]

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Another Potential Journaling Hiccup: The Perfect Time and Place

Blog readers and students often write to me about their hopes and deferred dreams for their journaling and their art life. They live with the hope that if they can “just get through to retirement,” or “Just get through this current crisis [fill in the blank as to what that is]” that the clouds will […]

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The Journal as Workbook

Below is a video which explains my view of the journal, and how I use my journal in my daily practice. Students in my “Drawing Practice: Drawing Live Subjects in Public” class asked me to share it publicly when I shut down my on-line teaching platform at the end of last year. They wanted to […]

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Journal Practice Hiccups?

  I always tell people any day is a great day to start a journal practice. Start.  But I know that many people think it important to have a milestone day like the first of the year for a starting point. If it gets them to start then I’m all for that. As a new […]

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Getting Something Down on the Page

This is a sketch from 2020. I was four months out from the second cataract surgery and I think I’d already had one secondary operation to zap some cloudiness. (But it didn’t resolve any of the double vision issues.) I was frustrated early one morning, unable to sleep. I scribbled. It felt great to get […]

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OK, I Guess Sometimes I Do Doodle…

A couple months ago I seemed to be living through my own Brendan Gleeson film festival. On this day I was sketching without glasses (if everything is double vision isn’t blurred vision an evening out or smoothing out of the lines?) without stopping the movie. That meant I had to hold things in my mind, […]

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Adventures with Unknown Paper

A few years ago I stopped in at Wet Paint and there was a box of 22 x 30 inch paper on the paper counter. “What’s this?” I asked. To make a long story short it was a mystery paper sent by a mill by mistake. When they called the mill to fix the order […]

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In Context: Ever Wonder What Happens to All Those Beard Portraits I Paint?

Here’s a quick sketch I made almost exactly a year ago. I was standing in the bedroom looking out through the next room into the studio at the wall of portraits I had hanging in the studio.  The beard portraits I do in my journals for fun can’t be cut out and framed. But I […]

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Sharpening a Pencil to an Ultra-fine Point

  If the above video doesn’t play, please view it directly on Vimeo at this link. I’ve often been asked how I get an ultra-fine point on my graphite pencils. Some time ago I promised to make a quick video to show people the process. I apologize to all my students who just had rely […]

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