Category: Challenges

Un-EDM Challenge

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I have just returned from a busy 48 hours in San Francisco and took along a very small sketchbook, about two inches square, in which I documented my various free moments. Above are some of the pages torn out of the book. Most were drawn in  a minute or two with my Lamy fountain pen (yes, I can take it when I fly as long as I don’t write with it when we are in the air. The pressure might make it explode or drip). The seventh one was interrupted by something or other.

Click on the grid of drawings to open it in a separate window, then click it again to make it bigger.

EDM #42: Draw something you are thankful for

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I am thankful for my girl, Jenny. And thankful that she’s finally coming home this week.

I am less thankful for:

how hard this watercolor was to do, for overworking it to try to get the likeness right. and for the fact that I made her look dour when she is anything but. Ah well. Maybe I’ll do better when I can draw her from real life again.

EDM #41: Draw a landmark of your city

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(Click to enlarge drawing)

This challenge was a bit more of a challenge just because my city is full of landmarks — sure, I could have drawn the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty or the Chrysler building or Times Square or Rockefeller Center or Chinatown … but instead I decided to look at a new part of the skyline that’s being defined every day.

I came upon this particular view while riding my bicycle down the west side of Manhattan near Tribeca. I was thinking about the fact that the once-called Freedom Tower is finally becoming a part of our skyline. The World Trade Center towers were at the bottom of my street and now they’re being replaced by this new shape. It’s a slightly more interesting looking building that the Twin Towers were— they had a lot of symbolic value but not much in the way of aesthetics. However, this new building is so black and imposing. I hope that it ends up blending in with the rest of the city around it.

I parked my bike and sat down on the pavement next to the railing along the Hudson river. I was on my way to meet a friend for lunch and the sun was high in the sky and the buildings were bluish gray in the distance. I pulled my Moleskine out of my back pocket and uncapped my Safari pen. Perhaps it was the angle, or the heat, or the hard stone beneath my buttocks, but my line came out light and sketchy and delivered a drawing that looks more like an architectural proposal than my usual style. Later, back at my desk, I added a little bit of watercolor using whatever was already in my palette, and noted all of the things in the landscape that were worthy of labeling with my dip pen.

I never forget how lucky I am to live in New York City. On every corner there’s something fantastic to draw.

EDM #40: Draw something with folds

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I spent almost as much time picking a subject for this drawing as I did with a pen in my hand. I ran through all sorts of options: a stack of towels, a rumpled bed, a rain-soaked shirt hanging on a hook. In each case, I could immediately see the finished drawing in my head. Boring.

I discussed it with Jack, offering up some of my more offbeat ideas. How about Tim’s ear flipped back? He warned me: when you get too clever, you miss the point of the assignment. The point seemed to me to be about shading and texture which is something I usually obsess about anyway. Screw it, I’ll just do something fun and wrinkly. I browsed through some picture books and found my model in a book of Alexander Lieberman photos.

I often think that drawing people from photos, particularly well-known people, can leave you with something that should be pinned up in a star-struck high school girl’s room or on display by one of those sketch artists who draws tourists’ portraits on the street. It’s lifeless, flat and mawkishly off as a likeness.

My way to avoid that is to draw the photo upside down.

I generally do the main contours first with a heavier pen, then argue with myself about if I should just leave it that way. Invariably, my crosshatching monkey wins the battle and I add shadow and texture with a finer pen. Indeed, I spent most of the half hour thinking about Crumb who make me sweat with envy when I crosshatch.

The funnest part is flipping the drawing around when I am done. The whole time my inner critic is chattering about how off the drawing must be because I am drawing it upside down, but the longer I hold firm and just keep drawing the more thrilling and strong the results are. It’s invariably more accurate and objective than if I drew it right way up. Look closely and you can see a few places where I had to do course corrections, like in the middle of the ear, the neck, the left cheek, but overall it’s pretty nicely modelled and the lighting effect on the left is quite good. And Igor does have folds.

This drawing took about half an hour and is larger than normal, drawn in my 9 x 2 Fabriano — which is almost full so I can soon start on my new Stillman & Birn perfect bound books that just arrived in the mail last week.

EDM #39: Draw your toothbrush

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It was so nice to draw in watercolor again to layer and adjust and tweak and blot these vivid, glowing colors. And the proportions of my subject led me back to my watercolor moleskine with its broad horizontal dimensions. If you want to see a masterful use of this shaped page, check out Ian Sidaway‘s blog. He often draws in a wide landscape book  and I learn so much from his compositions.

Ironically, last weekend I was looking through my very well-thumbed, thirty-year-old copy of How to Draw and Paint and realized that many of my favorite pieces in this wonderful book were done by Ian. Cooler still, he’s going to be in my next book “An Illustrated Journey”!

EDM #37: Draw some keys

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I’ve decided that, while I like gouache in many ways, for intense lush color, there’s nothing like my Doc Martins. So I laid down a few layers of watercolor, coat upon coat of three different shades of purple and blue, then let it dry long enough for the paper to flatten out again (an uncharacteristically patient act that meant I couldn’t upload this drawing yesterday morning as I would have liked).  Then I sketched in my keys with a yellow pencil and painted it in with gouache. Finally, I labeled it with a dip pen and white paint.

What the drawing lacks in the sort of character and quirk my recent painting of the Jefferson Market had, this one makes up for in careful observation and realism. Me like it.

EDM #36: Draw out in public

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Jack and I went to draw on 6th Avenue in the Village, sitting on the steps of a sandwich shop to draw the Jefferson Market library. I began with what one could charitably call preparatory sketches but which I refer to as false starts or disasters. I was just not seeing the whole and was locked into tiny details of the tower. So I tried doing a quick contour drawing (in the lower left), just following the edges of the building without looking at my page, and that began to feel like the way to go.

I drew the whole building in under ten minutes, barely looking at the paper. Then back in my studio added some gouache to the sky and some watercolor to add dimension. I’m pretty happy with the results and surprised I got here from where I started, It has a nice rickety, energized feeling that captures my inner state.

EDM# 35: Draw a bicycle or a part of one

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I painted this yesterday but tried to take my time in developing it rather than rush to scan and upload it. I made it with gouache and drew (most of) it freehand with a brush.  I am replacing my habits developed over years of watercoloring with the approach I used when I was a teenager and first started painting in acrylic. I find gouache quite challenging because I can’t layer color which so often helps me hid my mistakes. With this opaque medium, I have to lay down the color and be satisfied with it before adding the next and it can be quite annoying. I’ll try to explain more about this by showing you a couple of steps I took.

First I painted my vestibule, using flat colors and with little indication of lighting. This was fairly straightforward once I had  a grip on the perspective and I just mixed up a color and then created  a lighter version to make the lighter part of the wall or floor. Probably the hardest color to mix was the parquet floor in lower left just because I had to figure out how to make a darker brown using only yellow and an ochre and blue.

When it was good and dry, I lightly sketched in the bicycle. Then I painted it in with black and white gouache. As you can see, the red wall started to leach into the white of the tires, so I let it dry and added another coat of white which helped a bit but not completely. I wanted to add a bit of the shadow that the bike threw on the wall but  didn’t want to paint around the bike to add a darker red so instead I tried to lighten the rest of the wall with a bit of watered-down white.

I don’t know if this painting is done completely. I should go in and erase the white pencil lines, darken the tires and hit the white one more time to get rid of the pink — and maybe I shall. I also fought the impulse to scrawl a caption on the floor with my dip pen (both Jack and Tommy Kane urged me to just leave the damned things as it is) and I remain of two minds about it.

Before I began painting, I spent a fair amount of time looking at the work of Taliah Lempert, an artist I have always admired, who does nothing but drawn and paint and make prints of bikes. Her work is really lovely and instructive.

EDM #33: Draw an eye

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When I was ten and lived with my grandfather, I remember pouring over his medical textbooks, engrossed in the excitingly horrific illustrations that exposed the inner workings of our viscera. Sliced open chest cavities, skulls that doffed their caps, cross sections of reproductive systems, all depicted in airbrushed perfection and meticulously labeled— they were my first form of porn.

I made this particular drawing during my lunch break, in my meeting notebook, with ball point pens, crayons, highlighters and a Sharpie. It’s the sort of violent image that’s still quite deliciously enticing to the prepubescent boy crouched inside me, snickering. I probably drew the same sort of thing in my fourth grade notebook.

EDM #32: Draw something metallic

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This is the work of my fine Lamy Safari and a hint of sumi ink. But most of the credit goes to  patience, to slowing way, way down and just enjoying the calm that enveloped me and my desk. I drew this last night as Jack was at a concert in Brooklyn and my dogs were working on rawhide bones at my feet. The Dixon Brothers (Howard and Dorsey) sang about Jesus, whiskey and penury from my speakers and the air conditioner hummed in the corner. I studied each reflection in the corkscrew, breaking it down to three or four tones and carefully recording them.

I knew where I had fudged a line here and there, despite my care and slow pace, and I could still here that recriminating voice muttering in a corner of my skull. Whatever the hectoring spectre was that hung over me recently (addressed so lovingly and helpfully by all of your comments about my last post), it was still lurking when I recapped my pen so I started drawing a grid in the background and then filling in squares. Still unsatisfied, I pulled out my calligraphy nib. Then I just left my book on my desk and went to bed to read. I’d enjoyed the process but was still unsure about the drawing. And the muttering.

This morning, I passed through my study on the way to get some iced coffee and saw the page and thought “not bad.” Maybe some shoemaker’s elves worked on it over night or maybe the self-doubt has lifted.

In your comments, some of you suggested that the limitations of the EDM Challenges could be to blame, that having proscribed assignments was making me stiff and restricted. I think that’s probably true but it’s also part of the process. For me, now, being forced to work on one mundane drawing after the next is driving me deeper inside drawing, making me do something specific each day, filling the page, making marks, and thinking about art each and every day. Sometimes it’s painful and raises demons, sometimes it’s a mess, but I think it’s the only way to fight back the excuses and just keep at it until I breakthrough to something new.

Watching the Olympics is reinforcing my commitment. Imagine working day after day since you were a little kid on balancing on a beam or running 100 meters and then having all of that work and sacrifice come down to a single instance on a  single day in a far-off land in front of billions of eyeballs. It’s pretty extraordinary. And the miracle, the fluidity of the moment is only possible because of all the discipline, the repetition, the working through pain and boredom that preceded it.

We all want to be able to draw beautifully every time. The myth of ‘talent’ is that we are either born with it or not, just like sprinters are genetically determined to have long legs, swimmers to have broad chests, hurdlers to have elaborate hairstyles. But the fact that I will never be Michelangelo or Picasso or Phelps isn’t going to stop  me from being Gregory, from being as good at being me as I can be. Greatness isn’t necessary to proceed. And the occasional low score from the judges wont make me hang up my leotard.

I’m not going for the gold. Just for the stainless steel.