Here’s a little video I made about how to approach drawing complex things. If you can’t make it to my workshop today, this may inspire you to do some drawing this weekend nonetheless.
What do you think?
Category: Art
Examples, instruction, advice, recommendations, and more.
The Avidor’s Big Adventure.
A little video report on two artists who are hitting the road and drawing the world.
Finding your groove
The need to make something can be a tenacious itch, clawing to be released into the world. You can try to forget it — like an early summer mosquito bite — refusing to scratch it, aiming your mind elsewhere, hoping it will just go away.
If you suppress it too often, maybe you’ll succeed in dulling your senses, in refusing to heed that inner call. You’ll have managed to wrap yourself in a cocoon, impervious, detached. Congratulations, you can focus on what’s “important,” undistracted — for now.
Sometimes, the reason you ignore that call is because you haven’t yet found the right way to scratch it. Not every medium is right for every artist. For some reason, maybe it’s physical or aesthetic, we may need to keep shopping for a while ‘till we find the right instrument. Bassoon players are somehow different from conga drummers, dancers are different from print makers. (I think it’s sort of strange that in high school band, teachers will often assign instruments to kids, rather than letting them find their perfect musical partner). You need to find your perfect groove.
A few years ago, I visited Creative Growth in Oakland, CA. It’s an amazing hive of artistic activity, all coming from people with various disabilities. I will never forget the energy in that room, with dozens of artists working all day, every day, making paintings, subjects, ceramics, mosaics, prints… it was overwhelming and beautiful. Creatively, these people seemed to have no disabilities or challenges; they’d all found their groove.
When we visited the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore recently, I re-encountered an artist who I’d met at Creative Growth years before. Judith Scott was born deaf, mute and with an IQ of 30. She was also a twin. When she was seven, she was sent away to an institution. She was separated from her sister (who was not disabled), and because of her low IQ, she wasn’t given any training of any kind. So she just sat and festered, neglected, alone.
After thirty-five years in the institution, her sister Joyce managed to spring Judith from the institution and bring her home to live with her. Soon Judith started going to Creative Growth. But at the start, she could not connect. She had no apparent interest in drawing or painting, drawing aimless scribbles and little more. She didn’t speak so no one knew what she needed to take off.
Then, one day, Judith wandered into a class given by a textile artist named Sylvia Seventy. She saw the skeins of yarn and spools of thread and suddenly found her passion. But, instead of following the projects that Sylvia was leading the rest of the class through, Judith began to make her own sort of art, something radical and new. She wrapped objects in yarns and cloth, binding them together into cocoons and nests and complex interconnecting forms. Much of her art seems to be about connection and twins, binding together networks and forms into a powerful and non-verbal emotional message. I can look at her piece for ages, following the colors and lines, and somehow feeling something so sweet and strong and comforting.
I’m not the only person who responded to Judith’s art. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums and has been the subject of books, films and gallery shows. She made hundreds of amazing pieces in the last two decades of her life.
Judith passed away in 2005. She had lived to be 61, which is extraordinary for a person with Down’s syndrome. I like to believe that her art and her sister’s love kept her going.
I love Judith’s story because it feel so familiar to me. I can identify with what it must have felt like to go from being abandoned in an institution to suddenly seeing the light, to discovering one’s medium, one’s voice, and to see it grow richer and more complex and expressive. And how easily she might never have found her medium and remained mute and locked down. Judith didn’t have the ability to wander through an art supply store, a museum, to trawl the web, and to find her groove.
True love doesn’t just appear. You have to keep your eyes open and look for it. Just because you don’t yet know how to scratch it, don’t ignore that itch.
On the Road
Here are a few souvenirs from my whirlwind tour to San Francisco. I spent some time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
I love to take photographs in museums but I almost always get in trouble when I do. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a crazy rule that you cannot wear a backpack with both straps on. It has to hang off one shoulder or else a guard will come over and correct you. Mysterious and strange. like so much Modern Art.
These pages were drawn in idle and potentially bored moments and turned out to be the best things I got from the trip.
Baltimore!
Jenny & I and Tommy Kane & Yun drove down to Baltimore for the weekend. Our main objective was to eat crabs. And we certainly did that. 
We also stumbled into a half-dozen divey bars around town. This was one of our faves: 
Baltimore also turned out to have some amazing art on virtually every corner: 
We saw this Amish version of the Scream propped in someone’s window. 
The art highlight of the trip was a visit to The American Visionary Art Museum. 
They don’t allow cameras inside, so check out their site for more.
It’s a museum devoted to untrained artists and it is so moving, inspiring and awesome. 
I’ll be thinking about what I saw for months to come. It is well worth a return trip just to reexamine everything again. 
We also went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival and drew critters and ate funnel cakes. 
The weather was amazing. 
And it was a fantastic time with some of my favorite peeps.
My Bangkok Travel Journal
Last month, I took a week-long trip to Thailand. It was a fairly busy business trip but I managed to squeeze in time to do some drawing here and there. I brought along a new sketch book bound for me by my friend Roz Stendahl. It’s made with Guttenberg paper which is really lovely but quite different from the sort of hard, hot press watercolor paper I am used to. Guttenberg is soft, almost like sheets of linen, but takes any sort of medium easily. I also like the way the buff tone looks in a travel journal, sort of parchmenty like an old map.
I made a few decisions before I left about how I was going to work on this trip. First of all, I wanted to make a journal of observations, rather than purely making drawings or paintings. So I didn’t just plunk myself down on a random street corner on my trusty folding stool and draw what was instead of me. Instead I wanted the equivalent of postcards, a real record of my experiences and drawings that illustrated what I was doing. That also meant that if the environment was less than ideal for drawing, I would take a couple of quick pictures and work on the pages when I had time, often back at my hotel room desk.
I also decided to draw boldly, with thicker lines, more sure and blocky. I’ve been inspired by people like Fabio Consoli and Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel and Bryce Wymer, artists who think graphically rather than purely representationally. (All three of these guys are in An Illustrated Journey, BTW).
I also decided I wanted to shake up my usual bags of tricks and so I brought along my gouache and some gold leaf, some white paint and some much thicker pens.
(Click on the images to expand)
I made this spread days before I left, when I was getting excited about the trip and was imagining where I would go. I looked up stuff on the Internet and practiced my Thai calligraphy. I laid down a super rough square of gouache with a dry brush, then painted a map on top of it with black and white ink. I smeared a stroke of glue stick across the top of the right hand page, then rubbed down a sheet of gold. It doesn’t scan well but looks great and Siamese in the book.
My girlfriend J.J. lent me her North Face bag — it’s bright red so you never lose it at baggage claim. I was angsting a fair amount about jet lag — my trip was so short I didn’t want to waste it staggering around in a daze. Medication helped knock me out and I generally did pretty well though I would usually fade by seven PM.
On the left page, I used gouache straight of the tube. On the right, I used watercolors from a tiny pocket-size paintbox. The writing, like most of the words in the journal, were done with India ink and a dip pen.
I like the contrast between these two pages and the way the different media work. I also like spot illustrations in the middle of a block of text.
This page is a bit of a hodge-podge. The drawing of me on the right was done in the rain, by a street artist who charged me 100 baht ($3). I was horrified by how paunchy he made me look and wondered if I should have tipped him much more. The drawing of the bunny dressed in a clown costume came from a photo I took in the market— I drew it later in my room and added some gouache. The bowing Thai lady I made up but she looks quite typical. Even Ronald bows like this in Bangkok:
I like the way the gouache boat turned out. It reminds me of Miroslav Sasek, an illustrator I love but who never drew in Bangkok as far as I know. I drew the gent in the corner surreptitiously while we rode on the boat then hit him with watercolors later on. The enormous reclining Buddha was so impressive I could only record the impression he made on me, gigantic feet towering twenty feet in the air
I love how gouache is forces me to think backwards from the way I am used to doing with do with watercolors. Lights can go on top of darks and the medium is so much more forgiving. I find it much easier to use and the right sort of boldness for capturing Bangkok. It’s got a very different emotional quality from what I am used to and obliterated my line. Some of these images seem really unfamiliar to me, as if they were painted by someone else. I like that.
A fairly ugly spread. I wanted to capture the intense color of marigolds and the intensity of her costume, but I worked too quickly and mucked it up a bit. Not sure what I was thinking with the potato print looking body on the right. Oh, well, turn the page.
On the left, I got a chance to be a little a painterly, working from observation, thick and wet on wet. The right hand side is very cartoony, but it captures all these absurd parking attendants in their uniforms, bossing cars around the parking lots. 
Watercolor on the left, gouache and white paint marker on the right. I drew the first building in a sun-baked courtyard, super quickly, with a brush pen. Then drew it again hastily from another angle. I added all the details and the color later on when I was in the air-conditioning. I had painted the right hand page with dark blue gouache the day before, not sure what I’d draw on top of it but the bone white stupa called out to me as a study in contrast against the clear sky. I like this spread.
On one of our last nights, we went to Thai boxing. Eight bouts and as many beers. Great fun.
The next morning, still a little dazed, I illustrated my thoughts with a quick made-up drawing of boxers. Later, on the way to the airport, I drew a young woman on the back of a man’s scooter and wrote about why it had perplexed me. In my haste, I didn’t hold my book the right way up.
I only drew the ubiquitous king once I was safely out of the country. I’d wanted to draw him all along but had fantasies of being pulled aside at the airport and made to explain my crummy likeness. He does have enormous ears and a generally unfriendly and unroyal air, more like a dull CEO. This is done in gouache and gold paint pen.
As you can tell by the diminishing quality of my pages, Thailand wore me down. It is hot, noisy, crowded and I was thoroughly over Thai food and stilted English by the time we left. It can be hard mixing business and drawing but I’m glad I have a record of the trip and quite pleased with a few of my pages. I stretched myself with some new materials and some stylistic experiments. I’m scheduled to go back in a couple of months. Maybe I’ll try oils.
A conversation with Earnest Ward from “An Illustrated Journey”
Here’s the next interview with the contributors to my new book An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration From the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers
Earnest Ward has had a unique career glide path. For a decade, he was a professional pilot. Then he became an art teacher. Travel journaling combines both those branches of his life. He is an avid traveler and makes his trips a family affair — his wife and children are all artists in their own rights and they all draw together. Earnest’s work is beautiful and carefully observed. He has wonderful lettering skills and loves intense stippling. We had a lovely chat and he shared many of his techniques.
Earnest shares a lot more in my book. Here’s an excerpt:
“I have always been fascinated by a sense of place and culture. I grew up on the tales of Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark, Thomas Moran, Alexander von Humboldt, National Geographic, and films like “I Know Where Iʼm Going.” So, the attraction of distant places and exotic vistas was, I think, quite logical, if not inevitable. Like a child, Iʼm still in awe of the world around me. I believe that weʼve only discovered a fraction of the things the world has to offer. I believe that — when we each discover something that is new to us — we become the First Discoverer, no matter how many people have made the same discovery before us. I try to learn something new every day and to render it in my sketchbook or journal. I travel to discover new places Iʼve never been. And I travel so I can look at home with fresh eyes upon my return….” (continued)
(See more of Earnest’s work in the book and on his blog and his website).
Kong!
I’m in the Hong Kong airport where at least three of my titles seem to be flying off the shelves. Well, available to fly at least.
My debut on slate.com
I was fortunate to get a lovely review on slate.com this week.
I was also invited to illustrate all of the articles on their book review section this month. I haven’t done drawings for hire like this in a while but it was great fun. You can see all nine of them here.
I am traveling to Bangkok right now and writing this post in the Hong Kong flight club so it may take me a while to post all of the actual drawings here. Meanwhile, check me out on slate.
A conversation with Steven B. Reddy from “An Illustrated Journey”
Here’s the next interview with the contributors to my new book An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration From the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers
Steven Reddy took a bold step, agreeing to move to China for a year to teach in an elementary school, but the results have been worth it for all lovers of illustrated journaling. He came back with books full of amazing images and wonderful stories, which he shares in our video chat and in his section of An Illustrated Journey.
I admire his courage, his sense of adventure, and his incredible watercolors. 
Steven shares a lot more in my book. Here’s an excerpt:
“When I draw, many things that happened while I was drawing get “locked into the picture.” I don’t mean in a figurative sense, like, “oh, that was beautiful day…” But very specific details: the conversations I had while drawing, the song I was listening to on my iPhone, the tv show that was on the background. It’s weird, but I’ll look back at a drawing of a cup of coffee and Madmen will pop into my head. Or a glance at a drawing from a Chinese restaurant will elicit a shouted, “Laoban! Laoban!” because I heard a patron call that to the waitress in the restaurant while I was drawing. While doing a drawing, I’m wholly in the moment. It sounds like…” (continued)
(See more of Steven’s work in the book and on his blog and on flickr).
Danny Gregory 