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Studies: When You Don’t Have Paper with You
I admit that there are rare occasions when I leave the house without my journal. And without a decent camera even. (My iPhone may be capable of photographic excellence, but I’ve not been able to eek any out of it for either macro shots or bringing distant objects closer!) This page spread is the result […]
A Sweet Dog to Wrap Up the Week
I think drawing a dog is always a good way to wrap up the week. Or the day. Even if you don’t have a dog at home (and I don’t any more) find a friend with an interesting dog, or go to the dog park, or, in a pinch, if you can’t get out, find […]
What Filling a Grid in Our Journals Tells Us
I’ve been sharing a bunch of journal grids lately on the blog. Let’s get right to it—filling a grid in your journal tells you at a glance what is catching your eye in the world. For me, in this grid, it’s obviously noses. Now if you look at one of your grids and you see […]
Thumbnails, Stylization, Directions We Go with Our Drawings
Here’s a journal spread from the end of last year. I’m still going in the same direction with my drawings. On the verso page I have a thumbnail and some thoughts about thumbnails and finish on sketches. On the recto page I have some quick sketches where I’m thinking about shadow shapes and contour, which […]
In Context: Beyond Likeness
I make a lot of notes about the blog posts I want to write. A couple days ago I drew this cat. One of my notes was sitting there on my desk. Together they seem to say succinctly what I wanted to say about “why draw?” and the search for likeness in portraits. I’ll stop […]
In Context: Where Are You Steering?
The page text is today’s text. But if you need a hint: Think—intention.
Still That Secondary Triad
Sometimes I make myself laugh, catch myself by surprise. I look at this and see I kept working with that Secondary Colors triad. In this sketch from February there’s still the green, the orange, and the purple (which was a mix of quin pink and phthalo blue), with a little bit of that pink on […]
Leftover Paint
Sometimes I’m just in a mood. I might have a lot of paint leftover on the palette, I might start drawing with a tool I don’t usually draw with and want to cover it up; I might… On this day it was a little bit of all of that—just exploring and experimenting. When the red […]
Journal Pages Just Happen: That’s Part of the Fun
One evening I found myself really digging in and overworking the black wool on the head of a sheep. It was one of those scribbly moments. A sheep flashed on the TV and I blocked it in (I’ve drawn hundreds and hundreds of sheep so I wanted to see if I could do a memory […]
Visiting Minnesota—A Drawing Student’s Question
Recently a former Sketchbook Skool Student wrote to me asking me what to see when she was in Minnesota. (Evidently she was traveling here to go up north in Wisconsin for a drawing class at one of the resorts.) Of course whenever you ask someone a question like that you are taking into account their […]