Two weeks gone

A lot has happened since I posted last. The reason for that is this.... I threw my back out last Friday morning and have been stuck in bed way more than I would like this week. But, that aside, I've actually made some good sketches the past couple of weeks and I have also finished a sketchbook. So here are some of the last two weeks high points from my last sketchbook. Enjoy! 

And here is a quick flip through video of my last sketchbook if you want a little look at the whole messy thing:

http://youtu.be/WsSti1RXj-Y

I've started a new Moleskine watercolor sketchbook and have also been doing more drawing and painting on loose sheets in recent weeks. I'll keep you posted on that as there is more to share. Hopefully I will be able to spend more time making art and less time lying on my back in bed this week. Only good thing about lying around in bed was catching up on watching The Night Manager, which is fantastic so far.... Did a little sketching during it too. 

Slow Motion

Sometimes I feel like I have a slow week artistically. Some part of my brain needs a rest to process or something and when I sit down to draw it's slow and exhausting. It's the polar opposite feeling from weeks when I just can't stop drawing and fill page after page. This was a slow week. I did draw every day but it felt like I had to push myself through it, like the feeling of walking through water, every time. As it does when I walk through water, it felt good, but like I had to use my muscles a bit harder than normal. I don't entirely know why some days or weeks are slow. It's not something that happens often, maybe a few days out of the whole month. I tend to think of it as my drawing mind needing a bit of a rest and I don't push too hard on myself to create anything great during those slow times, as long as I'm not all out quitting on making things artistically. 

I took a lot of short walks this week in search of my drawing mojo... But though I saw things that could have been fun to draw, I felt that some drawings couldn't be done in the time I had or that I needed to come back when the light was different. Maybe it's making excuses. Maybe not.... It feels more to me like needing rest before pushing harder again. Today, so far, it feels like my drawing brain is more awake... I started a drawing of some tulip tree branches and flowers (above) and it just worked and didn't feel like a hard push. So maybe the rest is over. 

An interesting side note is that last night I spent about an hour or so talking to another artist, an old friend who's recently moved back to this area and who I haven't seen in a while. Talking about how I work I realized that I have actually developed working habits in the past few years... It's not really haphazard and sort of thrown together. I actually have a preferred palette of colors. I have tools that I prefer and that I use again and again. Not that I don't try new things sometimes but, I feel proficient using some tools and I can just make them do what I expect and want. It was an interesting realization because I used to feel that I wasn't sure what my preferences were and I tried a lot of different ways of working and tools to work with. I think that little discussion and realization helped bump me out of my slow feeling week a bit and gave me some confidence to keep practicing. 

In yoga they always talk about how you have to show up on the mat, even if you aren't feeling it, you show up, you practice, you keep doing the movements until it feels good and right again. Drawing and making art in general isn't particularly different. I show up with my sketchbag of goodies and I open it up and pull out a few chosen tools and my sketchbook and I get to work. It matters more that I keep going and keep using those muscles than it does whether my practice this particular day is amazing. One lousy day or week of drawings puts off a beginner sometimes, but once you've been practicing a while it's easier to remember that you have had these lulls before, and that if you just keep coming back you will realize one day that you just had an amazing day and it's not slow like molasses today. You have to keep coming back to be able to have those moments of realization. Just keep putting the pen on the paper. Come back to the yoga mat and stand tall and feel your feet connect to the ground. Feel the texture of the paper as your pen skids across the surface. Breathe out as you bend at the waist and plant your hands firmly on the floor and step back. Go through the movements. Draw. Move. Keep your muscles warm so that they don't cramp up. 

Fast and confident

I've been trying this week to draw as quickly as possible in small moments here and there. You see, this week is school vacation week, and all three of my kids are home and wanting my complete and total attention every moment of every day. So this is going to be a short post, for a week short on time for art of my own. 

My daughter has been playing with a new set of acrylic paints this week. Watching her has had a great impact on my drawing and painting this week. She is still young enough to be completely sure of herself as she boldly puts down colors and fills all the white space with color. There isn't any hesitation. No thinking about how to draw it or what color to paint it. She moves boldly and impulsively. So I have been working on being more bold and confident in my motions as draw. 

These drawings aren't very polished. They aren't perfect. But they were fast, and I feel more confident after a week drawing like this that I can draw quickly and be satisfied with it.... It doesn't always have to take a long time or be as perfect as possible. A little bit of Impressionism in drawings can be a good thing! I've been re-reading Mark Taro Holmes book The Urban Sketcher also and remembering some of his great techniques for fitting in drawing in quick moments and with a fast and fluid unstopping line. Sometimes it's good to step out of a rut you've been stuck in and try something you haven't done lately. 

 

Decisions

I get asked pretty frequently by people just starting out drawing or by people who come up to me wherever I'm working in my sketchbook, "How do you decide what to draw?" And also I hear from new sketchers, "I don't know what to draw, there's nothing interesting where I live." Well, to me those are the same problem and my answer is, I draw what I find interesting today, draw what I like, draw things that make me happy. But, if I still feel stuck here's a list of things that I do to decide what to draw. 

1)I draw whatever is in front of me. So if I'm sitting watching some TV in the evening and I want to do some drawing? Draw the people on TV. (Above are some drawings I did while watching Outlander recently).  Or I'm at the coffee shop and I want to draw, so I draw the coffee cup, the people around me, the coffee makers, the muffins in the glass case by the register. I just draw wherever I am. Or if I'm out to dinner, I draw the bread basket, the guy slumped at the bar, the bartender wiping the glasses dry.  Whatever is there in front of me, I pick some small element to draw. I usually don't don't try to draw the whole scene. I feel like I'm the editor here and I can choose just one element to draw. Sometimes drawing the whole scene can be overwhelming, so I break it down and choose just a small part of it. If I go to the beach I draw all the shells my kids pick up and bring home (as I did at the top of this post), or if I'm agoing for a walk in the woods, I pick up cool stuff to draw when I get home: a couple weird acorns, a pine cone, some interesting rocks. There's always something that will be fun to draw in whatever place I'm in. 

2) I draw stuff I like. I like shoes. So I draw shoes (as above). I like the weird shape of fire hydrants, so I draw them. I like macarons, so I draw them. I like rabbits, I draw them. I like my kids and my husband... They show up pretty frequently in my sketchbooks. I like art supplies, coffee, tea, the juxtaposition of things that are contrasting colors, Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Outlander, I like books, pens, glass bottles, art from many different time periods, things that are visually amusing.... So those are things that I draw. 

3) I copy artists that I am inspired by. I love Van Gogh, I've copied my favorite painting by him a few times in oil and in watercolor now. I've copied drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci, Titian, lots of illustrators that I admire.  Sometimes I copy in a totally different medium than the artist used just because I like the composition of a painting or the expression of someone in a portrait. Below is a ink drawing of Mrs Graham from the Gainsborough portrait... It's an oil paintin. I copied it in ink. I just liked the side eye expression she had in the painting. Copying works by other artists is a really fun way to relax artistically, it's slightly more involved than coloring in a coloring book, but it pretty much leaves the figuring out composition and lighting etc to another artist and I feel it frees me up to just work on technique. 

4) I draw from photos. It's the end of the day, I'm tired but still want to draw, I grab my iPad and search through Pinterest or Flickr or any number of other picture heavy sites for something I want to draw. I don't usually draw it just like the photo. I don't have to copy photorealisticaly (though sometimes that's a fun exercise when I have the time), I just use the photo as a reference and an inspiration. Below I drew an actress from different photos just to draw the same person from different angles with different lighting etc. There's nothing wrong from practicing drawing from a photo. I do it when I'm not feeling inspired by the mess on the kitchen table or the pile of laundry on the sofa. I find a photo that I feel inspired by and draw from that. Sometimes it feels like more fun to draw an elephant or a snail than it does to draw what is right in front of me. So I go with that. It's better to be drawing than to feel artistically stuck.  

5) I draw myself and my family. I am always there to draw and it's great practice drawing people. Sometimes I don't feel like doing a self portrait, so I draw m hands or feet. Or I draw my kids. I draw my husband. They are always around and available to draw. It's an interesting challenge drawing people I know well. I get more critical of my drawings if I don't feel like they have come out well when it's a drawing of me or a family member. It pushes me to draw more carefully and observe more carefully, which is always a good thing, I think. 

To me the biggest thing about deciding what to draw is to not make excuses if I don't have my sketchbook or I don't know what to draw. I can always draw something. I can always draw with the ballpoint in my pocket on the placemat at the diner. I can draw my kids while I sit at the playground watching them play. Or my shoes while I wait for your tea to steep. There's always something to draw. Sometimes my problem isn't that I don't know what to draw, it's that there are so many things that it's like visual overload and I have a hard time choosing just one thing to put my drawing time and energy into. But if I don't just start a drawing then I waste that time on trying to decide and waiting for "inspiration". I don't always feel super inspired when I start a drawing. Often I don't feel inspired until I get partway through a drawing or painting. Sometimes inspiration isn't the goal. Just making something, observing something, is more the point of a drawing than the inspiration. 

So that's my answer to how I decide what to draw.... The short answer is, I look around and find something that I like the look of. Then I draw it. 

Too much and not enough

Some days, when sleep overnight wasn't what I would have wished for, children waking me up at odd hours in the dark, or a late night of the "just one more chapter" game that all avid readers play sometimes, on those days, I feel like there isn't enough coffee in the world to wake me up. And, anyway, if I drink too much coffee, I'm just jittery but not more awake. It's a problem I face often. 

So, exhaustion is a problem for me, for sure. And it shows up in my art. 

Frequently. 

I usually just push through it. A cup of coffee or strong tea, a bit of self discipline, and another cup of tea or coffee later in the day. I manage to wake myself up enough to get to work on things, to get the kids to school, to make some art, to get dinner on the table. But as I make myself tea in the afternoon I often wonder: how much is too much exhaustion? Too much drained energy? How much is enough sleep each night to not have several days a week of feeling like I am dragging myself through the day? Will I ever get back to that feeling of being able to wake up fully when I get up that I had until my mid twenties and that disappeared when daughter number two came on the scene? Would I make more or better art if I felt awake? Or would I just keep drawing my coffee cups and coffee pots just because they are there to draw? I've been up since 3:30 when daughter number 3, who is 5 years old, woke up and turned on her light and informed us that it was time to get up. A half hour later, after being told firmly that we have to sleep in the middle of the night, she was back to sleep, and I was wide awake and couldn't fall back to sleep myself. Why is it that at 3:30 in the morning I felt so awake that I couldn't sleep, but too tired to actually get up? Why don't I feel wide awake 2 hours later? I'm too tired to answer these questions. That probably means it's time to go make some coffee. 

Friday musings

I recently completed an artistic challenge. I challenged myself to make art in my sketchbook every day for 60 days. I did it as a personal artistic challenge as part of My Peak Challenge. You can find out more about MPC here 

http://www.mpc2016.com/ 

MPC is basically a challenge to get healthier and more physically fit, but also to challenge yourself to break out of your comfort zone in whatever way you feel you need to in order to be your best self. 

During the fall and early winter I had been struggling to figure out how making art fit into my life. How to juggle or balance taking care of my kids, the house, my own personal needs, and make time to make art. So out of this struggle I came up with my 60 day challenge. 

I decided that one of the things that was holding me back was simply the idea that me making art was less important than all the other things that need to be done every day. I could easily put off making art until tomorrow, for instance, but I couldn't easily put off feeding the kids their dinner until tomorrow. The problem with that kind of thinking was that I have been completely miserable when I get stuck in that attitude. So I decided to take the advice of Pablo Picasso, one of my least favorite popular artists, and to remind myself that, while I don't particularly like Picasso's art, I admire his volume of work and his work ethic. So as I picked up my drawing tools and my sketchbook each day I reminded myself of Picasso's words: 

"Inspiration exsists, but it has to find you working." 

In the end that shift from thinking of making art as the thing I could put off to thinking of art as my real work, the only work I have ever really loved, helped me to see a path ahead of me that I actually feel good about instead of just worrying that I would never find the time. 

If you are interested in looking at more of my 60 days project (minus a few that I just didn't feel like showing!) you can find most of the sketchbook pages in my 60 day challenge album at Flickr 

https://flickr.com/photos/7517647@N08/sets/72157666493395382

If you want to follow my art on Facebook, here is a link to my page 

https://m.facebook.com/Nora-Allsup-Gardner-Art-1713339342284252/

The most orange flower in the world

It all started this afternoon with a flower in Lucy's garden. My daughter Lucy told me to go look because it is the brightest orangey red flower ever. So I did. And it was. So I grabbed my sketchbook and did a quick watercolor sketch.  But then, I just couldn't get that orange out of my head. It was stuck there like a melody that won't let go. 

So I pulled my outdoor oil kit out and set up to do a quick painting from my sketch and a few pictures I took, while I sat on the deck and listened to some music. I'm still getting back into the swing of things with oils, but I am not unhappy with this little 6x6 oil on panel study of Lucy's most orange flower in the world :)