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Today, come with me into my inner sanctum: my bathroom cabinet. Therein, you can marvel at the many powerful medications I take and the unguents, potions and salves that keep me looking so boyish and fresh. Open your eyes and uncap your pens.
It’s Friday and time for the next in my series of simple videos on how to see and draw, based on my latest book, Art Before Breakfast. We will use all of the tools I have given you so far — proportions, contours, and negative space — to draw a scene that is complex and varied. I do this exercise regularly to build my powers of observations and work on my fundamentals.
If you’re new to drawing or are struggling with the basics, I hope this series will be helpful. (Here’re the past episodes, in case you missed any.)
Every Friday I work through an idea from Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from page 30. If you decide to do it too, please share with me how it turned out! (Share the results on your own blog or on Facebook and post a link in my comments section. Use #artb4bkfst on Twitter or FB).
So far, so good. The mercury is in the 50s in New York and winter seems to be slower to come this year. I did encounter a few snow flakes in Indianapolis but I also discovered a concept there that will help me weather the cold.
My Indiana friend told me she used to suffer from Seasonal Affect Disorder. I know lots of people who do. SAD is a form of depression that comes on with the shortening days of autumn and lasts till spring. The treatment usually involves gazing at boxes of color-corrected lightbulbs and popping Wellbutrin. But my friend said that one word had helped her enormously. One word and she immediately felt a color-corrected bulb go off in her head.
Hygge. It’s a Danish word that’s pronounced “hoo-ga” and has no direct equivalent in English. It’s sort of like ‘cozy’ or ‘snug’ but it’s bigger. Hygge isn’t just about soft sweaters, wood paneling and roaring fireplaces — it’s about attitude, about a sense of well-being. About being gentle and calm rather than battling arctic gusts. And it’s about people. It’s about having a warm heart, even in cold times. About sharing comfort and cheeriness with friends and people you love.
Denmark, despite 17 hours of darkness each midwinter day, has the world’s happiest people. They value being good to oneself. To finding warmth in others. To sitting around in wooly socks, sharing a mug with a couple of friends. To chilling, without being chilly. The Danes buy more candles more capita than any other nation. And, come on, they have a pastry named after them.
This winter, I plan to hug hygge. I will enjoy the changing rhythm of winter, rather than fighting it tooth and claw. I will cultivate cheeriness. I will fill my house with friends and warmth. And I will take it easier on myself.
Care to join me?
Last week I really had to project my voice. I was invited to speak to a sprawling group of several hundred creative people in nine locations in California, Texas, Virginia, Washington and New York — all at the same time!
Through the miracle of videoconferencing, I was able to talk to all of these designers at Capital One bank at the same time, while they were able to comment live on what I was saying and even share the drawings they were making while I spoke. It was a wonderful experience for me and here’s what they had to say about it:
“Today was totally great. Your work, sense of humor and overall energy was really loved by Capital One’s Digital Design Team. They are usually a TOUGH crowd!
“Danny’s such a great speaker. He is dropping some deep knowledge! Drawing as a metaphor for life!
“I’ve never been a draw-er, but he’s making me want to hit the art store on my way home.
“I love how observant and thoughtful he is!
“Mind blown!
“This is so inspirational.
“This is fantastic!
“Thank you so so much for bringing him here…”
Can we adopt this guy as our Godfather?
Blush.
If you want me to speak to your company, group or school, personally or virtually — get in touch and let’s see if we can work it out.
Over the years, I have narrowed my bag of tricks to a select few: watercolors, ink, a dip pen to write with. Sure, I vary it a bit with some gouache and an occasional brush pen — but my arsenal is limited and comfortable as old, very scuffed shoes.
Last week, when I hung out with my pal Penny Dullaghan in Indianapolis, I realized the price I pay with this lack of imagination. She opened drawers and pulled out screen prints, monoprints, pages of pattern blocks, , then drawings she had collaborated on with her 7-year-old daughter. I watched her create stencils to define shapes and then pound color through them with ink pads. I marveled as she created carbon paper with oil paint and scribed spasmodic, fractured lines with a special transfer techniques. She whittled a stamp out of soft linoleum and created graceful repeating patterns. She layered ink, watercolor, gouache and colored pencil over the textures she’d made and turned simple drawings and designs into rich, organic textures that made her images come alive.
I left town with my head full of ideas and a long list of things I wanted to try. Then I caught up with my pal Tommy Kane and he showed me new techniques he’s doing by layering drawings on top of each other, by drawing on marbleized paper, and by painting and drawing on ceramics.
My friends fired me up to get radical, to experiment in a way I haven’t in ages, to learn new techniques, and to build myself a proper studio once again so I can spread out and play.
How set are you in your ways?
If you’ve ever wondered how to figure out the proportions of something you want to draw, you’re in luck today. It’s Friday and time for the next in my series of simple videos on how to see and draw, based on my latest book, Art Before Breakfast.
If you’re new to drawing or are struggling with the basics, I hope this series will be helpful. (Here’re the past episodes, in case you missed any.)
Every Friday I work through an idea from Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from pages 28-9. If you decide to do it too, please share with me how it turned out! (Share the results on your own blog or on Facebook and post a link in my comments section. Use #artb4bkfst on Twitter or FB).
We just wrapped up filming the latest klass in Indianapolis with Penelope Dullaghan. Here’s a peek behind the scenes.
If we want to understand what our earliest ancestors were like, our best evidence are the paintings they left deep in the caves of Southern Europe. When we think of Ancient Egypt, we see the paintings anonymous artisans made on sarcophagi, grand sculptures like the Sphinx, monuments like the Great Pyramids at Giza. The Greeks and Romans are represented by marble statues and architecture too. The Medici, all-powerful merchants live on, long after their last pennies were spent, as sponsors of da Vinci and Raphael. Popes like Julius and Leo, who led armies and converted millions, are instead remembered by Michelangelo’s creations.
And when our civilization is over, what will represent us to the future? When every company on the Fortune 500 has vanished, when the borders of all the world’s nations have been redrawn a hundred times, when our glass and steel towers have tumbled, when hard drives have been wiped and silicon decayed, what will stand as our legacy? Will it be our wars, our laws, our economy? Or will it be Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan and George Lucas?
When I visited the Jewish Museum on Prague and saw all those pencil drawings by children long since consigned to the pyres of Auschwitz, I felt their spirits, felt them enter and inhabit me, felt them live on through those faint marks on paper. Hitler should have been more diligent in burning those drawings too, if he was so hellbent on wiping those children from the earth.
When I think of my grandparents, I don’t think of their success as doctors, their accumulated capital, their role in their community — I think of my grandmother’s garden, designed to look like a Persian carpet, her roses, her topiary of a peacock, her frangipani trees and her cacti. I think of my grandfather’s short stories about his childhood in the stetls of Poland and his experiences in post-partition Pakistan, all written painstakingly at his walnut desk in a cloud of pipe smoke, then hand-bound between shirt cardboards.
My grandfather would have been 106 this week. His body is under Mount Olives in Jerusalem. His house is occupied by strangers. His friends and siblings are but dust. But his stories live on in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute.
Long after your will has been executed, your real estate dispersed, your Instagram feed expunged, the drawings you make, the recipes you write down, those are the things that will keep your spirit alive.
Art is our way to immortality. Long after your will has been executed, your real estate dispersed, your Instagram feed expunged, the drawings you make, the recipes you write down, those are the things that will keep your spirit alive. Your illustrated journals, records of what you did and experienced and felt, they will be your mark on this earth.
Make sure your family understands that your art is you. It is not to be consigned to eBay or the dump. It is the most precious part of your legacy and it should live on.
Oh, and make sure that the monkey doesn’t prevent you from making those pages, from creating the art that will keep your spirit alive. Don’t kill your memories before they can be born. Be brave, be creative, rock on.
Ah, Vienna! I cracked open the trusty travel journal, uncapped the old brush pen and began to draw the Hofburg Palace. Soon, I realized that I needed to be creative, resourceful, and as resilient as a Hapsburg to tackle the task.
And speaking of travel, I am flying to Indianapolis today to shoot the next class for Sketchbook Skool. I’ll try to report in from the road.
Here’s the third of a series of simple videos I’ve made to walk you through the steps of seeing and drawing from my latest book, Art Before Breakfast. This one builds on the previous lesson with a different exercise in how to see negative space. That’s the space between things that helps us understand better what we are seeing and hence better how to draw.
If you’re new to drawing or are struggling with the basics, I hope this series will be helpful. (Here’re the past episodes, in case you missed any.)
Every Friday I work through an idea from Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from pages 26-7. If you decide to do it too, please share with me how it turned out! (Share the results on your own blog or on Facebook and post a link in my comments section. Use #artb4bkfst on Twitter or FB).
Danny Gregory 