How to use this Page

 And, I had a couple of new cheap sketchbooks that I'd got in some sale. It gave me an idea of what to do with them. I should say that they were quite big sketchbooks (over 70 double page spreads) and so I set another goal; TWO WEEKS.
Which would pretty much mean taking the sketchbook wherever I went (including Ikea) and drawing even more obsessively than normal.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Fwd: life drawing, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Add a Comment

these are asome sketches i found in some old sketchbooks i was looking at yesterday. they are about 25 books but i woould need weeks to scan and upload and it's not worth.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

these which follow are all life drawing, at a public place and the rest at the studio

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

this one was a work i was asked for some glasses make, though i don't know if they've ever used it.

sketches, a photo by dibujandoarte on Flickr.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Sketches from Drawn to the Night on Friday!

If you’re in #Detroit Metro and you like to draw, you should come out! (Bonus: best snacks ever included!) Events are once monthly in Plymouth!

https://www.facebook.com/events/484547991677737/?fref=ts

Add a Comment

Think of the artist at work—the fits and starts, the long, unhappy spells, the sudden epiphanies that shrink pitiably with the light of the next day, the not knowing, the not ever actually knowing, the blind and buoying faith, the fissures of faith.

Think of a partnership of many years—the slow or sudden love, the deep and necessary trust, the private needs that are not spoken, the small infractions that are, perhaps, lies and isn't any lie a betrayal, and doesn't every betrayal hover afterward, shift the scene and change the light? Doesn't every betrayal threaten a cascade of betrayals? Where will they come from? Will we be ready?

Think of friendship—the tricky, sticky slopes, the little envies, the perfect hours, the grave misjudgments, the accusations, the cowering aftermaths, the ones left wounded on the path. Think of how easy friendship seems, and how utterly fraught, and how nearly impossible to heal when it shatters.

Think of the spooling away of memories—of a mind lost to a disease, of a man and his memories remade, of conversations that have little footing in reality, even though, of course, they are reality, they are what is happening right then. The Alzheimer's father talks. The daughter listens. Nothing is irrefutable, except for how it feels in present time.

In her penetrating and perfectly calibrated first novel, Life Drawing, Robin Black plumbs the depths of art, love, friendship, and memory and surfaces with a book of transcendent clarity. Life Drawing is a book about consequences—the consequences of an affair, the consequences of instinctive but perhaps not well-placed trust, the consequences of honesty, and anger.

Gus, the artist, and Owen, her writer husband, have retreated to a quiet country home in a land of spectral greens; the pond before them is perfectly round. The two are at work on their respective canvases. They abide by conversational rules laid down to protect each other from the things that must not be said or discussed in the aftermath of the affair Gus had several years before. They are interrupted by a neighbor who has escaped a violent husband and whose daughter, Nina, will show up before too long. Gus has a father with Alzheimer's, whom she frequently visits. She has a student, a young woman, with whom she has formed a meaningful connection.

The book is taut, smart, a closed and inexorable world, a stunning page turner. We know from the outset that Owen is dead, and so we want to know why Owen is dead, but even more compelling, at least to this reader, are the questions: Does anyone survive the wounds they have inflicted? Is love bigger than the past?

We turn the pages because we trust Black to know. Because we believe that she has something to say—inside the novel but also outside of it—about how we live our lives. Black is an intensely intelligent writer—nothing superfluous here, every thread that rises needled back down to the open-weave cloth, every color in the tapestry checked for what it tells us about lived entanglements. Her book, deeply emotional and resonantly rendered, is, remarkably, complete. No stone unturned.

We who write, we who create, we who live—we know how elusive, how difficult, how nearly unattainable completion is. A completed conversation. A completed work of art. A completed story, told.

Life Drawing is complete.

I loved it as much as I loved Black's collection of short stories, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, which I read while I was in Berlin several years ago and reviewed here.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

 

When someone thinks of the name “Disney,” many things can come to mind; Some may think of their theme parks. Some their animated films. Some may look back on fond childhood memories. And others might think of a cartoon mouse that wears pants, gloves, and shoes. But when I hear “Disney,” my first thought is that of “quality.”

Disney has been pushing the boundaries of films, animation, and attraction technologies for many decades. But the one thing that ties them all together is the detail that goes into them. Take for example the movie The Little Mermaid. Before then, animated movies still hadn’t found a spot in the mainstream of feature films. After seeing that film, no one could deny that it was something great. The animals and characters alike were so well done, just as the sceneries.

Life drawing is the practice of using a model and drawing/sketching it out. Disney has done the practice consistently for many years. They’ve been known to have models come to the studio so they can sketch them and see how they move. Even a baby elephant or two has made it to their studios for study. And what of 3D movies? John Lasseter of Pixar and Disney Animation used a small camera to understand how things looked from a small perspective in his second Pixar feature A Bug’s Life. With this, he was able to have artists do preliminary drawings to later get the three dimensional effects to look realistic.

The current masters of Disney teachers pass on the importance of the practice to the next generation of Disney designers and animators. The four that showed for the panel today held at beautiful WonderCon Anaheim were Bob Kato, Karl Gnass, Mark McDonnell, and Dan Cooper, moderated by Fast Company’s Susan Karlin. Each of these artists have been doing what they do for a number of years, and have a number of books published on the practice of life drawing.

After a brief hiccup where an audience member (who in my personal opinion was celebrating 4/20 in hard fashion) kept interrupting to say how much he respected these men, Susan Karlin led the collective through their thoughts on the subject of life drawing. Karl Gnass explained that, “Life drawing is based understanding. When a show is over, that is your resource to go back to.” Bob Kato added, “Drawing is a language. A show may need a certain style, and you need to be able to speak it.”

The panel then further went into that life drawing allows the artist to understand how someone can move, can bend, how it ultimately works. Art ultimately references real life in its core. “If you’re designing without a foundation, you’re designing a lie from a lie; Something from an abstract idea. And the further you get from the truth, the more it gets distorted. Like the telephone game.”

Whether you draw, design, or whatever, you have to put the time into understanding what you are doing and how you want to convey that. “There are no shortcuts,” says the panel almost in unison. “There needs to be skill, life in it. You have to have an understanding of the infrastructure.”

Ultimately what it comes down to is that no matter if you’re going to be a 2D artist or a 3D one, life drawing helps to teach one how to give their creation life and emotion. Having this particular skill in your artistic toolbox will keep your work real.

~Nicholas Eskey

Display Comments Add a Comment

Last Saturday we, at Dr Sketchy Sheffield, held an event celebrating the art of tattoos. I'd been wanting to do a tattoo themed event ever since I took over the running of the branch with my co-co-ordinator Lara Gothique. The idea of drawing people who are covered in drawings really does it for me.

Plus, it was a great opportunity to get some male models on board. We haven't had anywhere enough guys modelling for us - although they were pretty hard to convince. Who'd have thought these inked up guys would be so shy?

We had a great mix of guys and girls. I did these black and white drawings at the event. I added colour at home, later.

The other great thing about being the artist, in our partnership, is that I get to set some drawing exercises. My exercise for this event was to draw the (model's) body through the tattoos alone. It was more difficult to do than I'd imagined, and I still ended up adding some body lines to my attempt (above).

Despite my car braking down en-route, and being totally stressed out by that by time I got there, I still managed to get a whole load of sketches done. Many more than this in fact, but the rest were on a larger A3 sketchbook - and I'll have to get them scanned by somebody with an A3 scanner.

Plus, if that's not impressive enough, where else do you get to draw a tattooed Reverend? I'm guessing nowhere. I may be wrong, but if I were a betting woman I'd put money on it.

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Display Comments Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Display Comments Add a Comment