
I missed doing this challenge a couple of weeks so, when I saw this wall of guitars in Roanoke, I had to draw them in the semi-darkness as we wolfed down groaning plates of ribs.
Year: 2012
EDM #29: draw something architectural
I looked through some of my old travel journals and realized that what I have been missing in my recent drawings is the interaction between different drawings, the flow of events as I capture them, different drawings done in different places butted up against each other. I’ve been doing these morning edm drawings in a specially designated book, one per page and I have lost a lot of that antic energy I like. So on our trip to Appalachia, Jack and I are both drawing in smaller moleskines and I’m using a smaller pen (usually a PITT XS). I have my super tiny paint set and a water brush. It’s a whole new set of challenges using a finite set of art supplies and tiny ones at that and it is making things new again. All that is of course multiplied by being in a new place and seeing things through fresh eyes.
Some of it is very annoying, particularly trying to use my phone, my iPad and any available wifi to post these drawings to my blog but it’s all party of the adventure.
An introduction
A new member to the EDM group on Yahoo wrote a lovely introduction I wanted to share:
Hello,
I’m writing from Italy, a small city from the south of Italy.
Arts or the thousand ways to make arts were always inside the genes of my family. All my uncles from my mother’s side were almost pro music players. And I played a lot of jazz and the bass.
All of them were having also some strange genes and i have cousins that are chefs, my mother is superb in many crafts, my sister try to work in USA as comic colorist. She was lucky to attend an art school, so she is great.
I started doodling since I was a kid going around in the garden scratching my legs. In my adolescence I stop drawing and I attempted to be a professional painting restorer and I studied arts. I always collected art materials and so my lovely wife. I’m lucky she’s my first supporter.
But the ways of life are so strange and I became something else, dunno if more rewarding but currently I work for an international organization.
It was down there this fire, buried, my will to make some art as pleasure for myself. In the meantime, due my work, my missions in Africa I felt alone. very alone. The work was and it’s still very hard. The heat the humidity and mosquitoes can stress any people, believe me.
But I love my job… but sometimes get stressful shades.
My only relief in missions was only my wife’s voice on the phone and a sketchpad with a pencil. I made a lot of ugly drawings, some designs. Doodles. Lines with the will to be something more.
It was funny to see how time was passing with some good music. And i felt good if not better.
Months after I blown more on that fire burning inside me, and It was like to be rebirth, seriously. My wife also gifted to me a new bike.
Bingo. With the excuse to go to buy a toothpaste I go around my very small city (yes also to buy the toothpaste… :))) and I stop where I find something interesting.
My goodness, I feel everything interesting. Even if I stay at home I can draw everything is inside in an infinite doodle or in a lifetime long drawing. I feel and I like to draw everything from the lips of my wife to the coffee machine. From the ears of my cat to the old dustbin on my balcony. I can sit in the living room as drunk and I can pass any minute of my Saturday night with ease without even touching water, drawing and painting with a smile.
I can draw the toilet paper or a bowl of fruits or an ugly portrait of soap opera character with the same happiness.
That simple, I will never get bored. Something like a drug, an obsession for every single dust of the life.
So very later on I made also a blog where I show some of my crude sketching.
And I called everything is worth to be sketched because to me it’s like that. Apart from the results… eehehehehhe
Thanks to the fate I met also some inspiring books for myself mad thoughts. They are the books of Danny Gregory, all of them, that like a bomb exploded freeing me more and more. Me and my lovely wife. So grateful.
Thanks to letting me in this group, and sorry for the long presentation.
Cheers,
Stefano
Visit his blog here
EDM # 28: Draw an appliance
I laid down this base color in tribute to avocado green, harvest gold and almond, the kitchen colors of my youth. Now everything seems to be black, white and stainless steel. Drawn with a bamboo pen and india ink.
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Jack and I are heading out on a road trip along the Crooked Trail today. I will be drawing on the trip and hope to continue tackling the challenges each day but I doubt I’ll be able to scan and upload for the next week or so. If I get decent wi-fi, I’ll try, so stay tuned.
EDM #27: Draw a book
Sorry, for the self-congratulation but I’ve never drawn this before. It was nice to be sitting in my air-conditioned studio with all my gear around me. I drew it with both Lamy safari nibs, then painted it with Dr. Martin’s and did the background in gouache and the writing with a dip pen and white ink.
I love seeing people’s versions of my work. Below is a lovely rendition by Matthew Midgeley.If you’ve ever drawn one of my books, I would so love to see it.

Love this one by Jinho Jung:
EDM #26: Draw anything you like.
I drew this under a misting fan in an outdoor restaurant in Dallas where the temperature was heading to 106 degrees. Overwhelmed and distracted by this intense heat, I scratched feeble white charcoal pencil lines. Others, more hardy, jogged and cycled up and down the Katy trail in the background. I had prepared the page with gouache back in New York on Friday, anticipating a certain browness to the proceedings, but naive as to the desultory effects of the actual weather.
While I was unable to do much drawing in Dallas, I did manage to take some photos of Dealey Plaza and the Texas Bok Depository, a grim and effecting place that I have read so much about since I was a teenager. It was smaller than I had imagined and I felt a terrible sadness that I had only ever experienced at Gettysburg and Ground Zero. an ordinary street corner that my imagination and memory populate with powerful tragedy.





EDM #25: Draw a glass (the kind you drink from)

It’s funny with a drawing sometimes how you can start out with something in mind and then find yourself in a completely different place. Sometimes that’s because you couldn’t pull off what you intended but sometimes it’s because something inside just pulled you off in another direction. I thought it would be nice to do a very flat sort of painting today, sort of like the foot I did last week, a base of blue with some sharp white highlights, very graphic and chiseled like my beer mug. Then I would draw on top with a thick pen, a Sharpie or a bamboo.
I mixed up some bright blue gouache and loaded up my brush. Then I fell into an observation of all the highlights and the different blues that reflected through the prisms of the glass… A few minutes later, I had ended up here, with essentially a watercolor painting without lines, not very gouachey and not at all the graphic, screen printed thing that had been in my mind.
I considered doing the heavy line drawing on top of the painting, just to hold on to some of my vision but before i uncapped my inkwell, I asked Jack his opinion and he insisted I leave it just as it is. So i did.
I like to try out different techniques and media, but sometimes I can’t escape my inner me, a person who gets into the details, who’s more prone to fiddle, who isn’t inclined to the simple, who likes the process more than the result. I can wrestle myself off my usual path, but in the end, I yam what I yam.
EDM #24: Draw a piece of fruit

This is my second painting of the day. My first is now in the dustbin — a failed experiment in painting with raspberry juice which I’ve discovered does not get darker as you layer it but just stays sticky and anemic.
Instead I tried using gouache more like oil or acrylic paint, mixing it thick and creamy and building up opaque layers from dark to light. I love the intensity of the color but the process is still a series of challenges — which is after all the point of this series of challenges. A lesson a day.
Pause
I’m out of commission today. Please use this opportunity to watch my interview with Jane LaFazio in its entirety. Or better yet, get ahead of me by drawing tomorrow’s challenge, a piece of fruit.
More than you could possibly want to know about me.
Last week, the lovely and inspiring Jane LaFazio sent me a bunch of questions for an interview and I decided to turn them into a little film, shot in my home and the places I frequent about town. It’s a little long, 20 minutes or so, but vaguely amusing:
You can see Jane’s comments about it here;
http://janeville.blogspot.com/2012/07/interviews-as-inspiration-danny-gregory.html





