Joe didn’t want me to go away and tried to stow away in my bag, but I flew to Columbus, Ohio today to do a couple of events for the Columbus Society of Creative Arts and to see my super-cool niece, Morgan.
Here’s a little video about my doings so far.
Thanks to everyone who attended my Open Center workshop on Saturday in New York. I had a lovely time and you were all wonderful students!
Around the planet, Sketchbook Skool‘s doors are slowly opening. The first student signed in at midnight from Russia and now the Aussies are filing in. As the calendar flips and the world turns, I am filled with a combination of glee, excitement, and a twinge of impostor syndrome.
We have worked as hard as we can since last fall to make this thing as rich and interesting and high quality as we can. When I sat down last night for a final walk through, I felt really good. The monkey tried to jabber at me a bit, telling me I’m not really a teacher, or a film maker, or an artist, or an Internet expert, but I have successfully swatted him away and am now just humming with anticipation.
I feel like I did that first night at Rowe Center last summer, surrounded by people who wanted to make stuff and to hang out together and share. The same feeling I plan to have on Saturday at the Open Center.
Thank you so much for supporting me in launching this idea. It’s very gratifying and a testament to our amazing fakulty and my partner, Koosje Koene.
There are still so many people hammering on the registrar’s door and, every few minutes, we see another new name appear on the klass list.
See you in klass!
I’ve convinced my old buddy Tommy Kane to teach for the first time. He’ll be sharing all sorts of great insights at Sketchbook Skool in a few weeks (May 9th). I’ve already learned a huge amount from Tom and Skool hasn’t even started!
My pal, Jane LaFazio is joining us for the first semester of Sketchbook Skool. Â Here we chat about what she has in store for us:
I am back in New York  for a couple of weeks — I was tired of lovely weather and plucking tangerines of my trees each morning. I need rain, cold and bagels.
Jack is here until Monday, meeting with artists/mentors about the upcoming summer, and we have spent a lot of time talking about art and philosophy and other sophomoric matters. Such fun. I haven’t seen him since New Year’s and while he seems to be stopping at 6’2″, his brain keeps growing. I am super-proud of this boy.
I lost my wallet when I was here last, a real pain in the back pocket I managed to laboriously replace every credit card, my license and all the rest of the ephemera that seems important. Then, when I got back here and opened my bed side drawer, I discovered my old wallet and all its contents lodged therein. Grrr.
The upcoming week is gonna be nutty.
On Friday morning, we launch the first semester of Sketchbook Skool. Â We are pulling together the last strands and it is kind of amazing. Â I took Jack through the klasses and videos yesterday and he was surprisingly surprised by it. “It’s really rich. You shoulda charged them more.” True, tuition is cheaper than I pay for RISD (oy!).
Here’s a little summary of the semester:
On Friday afternoon, I talk at the Thinking Creatively conference at Keane College.
Then on Saturday, I go to the Open Center for my workshop, Everyday Matters. I am excited to launch some new ideas for this class and to meet some folks in person.
On Sunday, I go back to LA, to work on my next series of presentations in Columbus, Boston, California….
It also looks like I will be doing an artist-in-residency in Beijing and Kuala Lumpur this fall. Details are almost nailed down.
Busy. Crazy. All good.
Roz Stendahl has long been my friend and my teacher and I am really pleased that she’s a part of our fakulty.  I think her klass will open eyes and change lives.  If you what to learn how to draw animals of any kind, and, by extension, lots of other things, I hope you get a chance to see the incredible, rich and info-packed videos she’s put together.
We talked about them on Skype recently:
My pal, Tommy Kane and his wife Yun just spent a few days with us in California. It was so good to have them with us and we spent a lot of time eating in good restaurants, wandering through Venice and, of course, drawing.
I have known Tom for thirty years and we have drawn together for the last ten. Despite how close we are, when it comes to drawing we are quite different. Tommy is an illustrator, an artist who works toward beautiful finished pages, every one suitable for framing. His journals are immaculate, and each page is perfect from corner to corner. He just put out a lovely book of his work and it is a treat to have all that perfection in one place. The experience of looking at his journals is like looking at a final, published book—so immaculate, so rich.
My style of drawing is far more hasty, slapdash and impatient. And that can be a problem when we draw together. Tom expects to spend hours and hours doing a single drawing. He has a very specific way of doing a page, starting with his uniball pen, putting in loads of careful hatching, then adding watercolors and finally a layer of bright pencil marks. He’d prefer to do the entire thing on location, perched on his little stool. He has a patient wife/traveling companion and has drawn this way all over the world.
When we sit down together, as we did on the Venice Boardwalk and on Lincoln Boulevard, I find myself adjusting to his pace and do horrible overdrawn pages that don’t look like my normal work. I find it impossible with the way I draw to spend hours on a single page, Tom also compromises when we’re together and usually only manages to finish his line drawing before I start squirming and pacing and has to color his picture later on, from a photo.
I don’t begrudge Tom his slow and careful pace. He manages to capture so much detail and observation and yet keep his work fresh and bright. I draw, like almost everything else, at a neurotic pace, and the luxury of time just stirs up the mud.
Everyone has their own speed. Our friend Butch draws at a glacial pace, thinking nothing of spending ten or twenty hours on a page, D.Price, on the other hand, can knock out a drawing in three minutes. We have all drawn together and it’s like a tap dancer, a heavy metal guitarist, a tuba player and a sitarist trying to jam.
Whenever I go on a sketchcrawl, I have to adjust to the group, moving toward the mean of all the people drawing together. And it’s good to challenge that someotimes, to go faster or slower to add variation and stretch. In the long run, though, the work I do with others is never my favorite. It’s more of a fun, communal, social experience than a satisfying artistic one.
I’m not antisocial and I love to hang out with my friends.
But I’d rather pee, nap and draw alone
PS if you’d like to draw with Tommy Kane, join his klass at sketchbook skool.
I first met Prashant Miranda a decade ago and I have been a huge fan of his lovely watercolors, his gentle spirit, and his infectious smile ever since. I have included his work and his story in several of my books — he has been a compulsive journal keeper for twenty years and has a huge amount to teach us.  Prash was one of the first people I thought of when we started to assemble  a list of teachers for Sketchbook Skool and mainly for selfish reasons — I really wanted to learn from him and unless I was willing to fly to Varanasi and disguise myself as a small child, this was as close as I was likely to get to being on one of his watercolor classes anytime soon. I knew that he was assembling the videos for his klass while traveling alone around  a far-away country with uncertain support so I waited for bated breath for his first materials to come in. All I can say is that they are so wonderful they validate the reasons we started this Skool in the first place. I found them so inspiring and uplifting and I hope you will too. Prash will appear several weeks into the first semester and there’s still time to sign up. In the meantime, here’s his update on what he has in store for us:
Danny Gregory 