A couple of weeks ago about forty people joined me for a weekend workshop at the Rowe Center in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. It was a wonderful time as you’ll see in this film. More photos from the weekend are on flickr.
Would you like to have this sort of experience?
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
Interview continues here….
Richard Sheppard is a longtime illustrator but only started drawing on location about three years ago. I love his work and his interesting color palette. 
Richard shares a lot more in my book. Here’s an excerpt:
“But upon arriving in Ireland, I found that sketching from photographs didn’t prepare me for anything other than sketching from photographs. I was too self-conscious to draw in public and ended up taking photographs the entire time. I kept telling myself that I could paint from the photographs when I returned home. It never happened. There is no substitute for learning to draw from life, out-of-doors. You can’t fake it.…” (continued)
Please don’t forget to check out Richard’s work.
Why are you here? Here, on my blog, why are you here?
Are you here for the reason that I’m here? Which is, I think, because I have a vague itching inside that says ‘make something.’ But the thing I feel I ought to be doing when that impulse arises, namely drawing something, is somehow not appealing right now. Maybe that’s because it’s after midnight, I’m sitting in the darkened cabin of an airplane flying to Tokyo, and the only thing I could draw at this moment is the dimly lit, freckled, meaty arm of the guy sleeping in the next seat. So I’m doing something else instead. Writing this.
But maybe a more honest reason why I’m typing instead of drawing is that I am afraid. I’m often a wee bit afraid when I start to make a drawing — yes, even now after zillions of drawings over a decade and a half. I’m afraid of the Voice. Not the TV show (though that can be scary too) but that teeny, nagging voice saying that the drawing will possibly (or probably) suck. The Voice isn’t always there when I uncap my pen, but it often pipes up once the first line starts to go down. “Oh, well, you blew that one. It’s all gonna be repair-work from here on.” Or “Better start cross hatching now, it looks flat and weak.” Or “Come on, let’s finish this one up and watch TV.” Or just “Puhleez … you cannot draw for beans, you worthless, posturing fraud.”
Whose voice is that?
I used to suppose it was my art/shop teacher from 6th grade. Or maybe it was my second stepfather. Or my father. Or my mother. Or a kid I knew in high school who was way cooler than almost all of us. Or a guy who thumbed through one of my books in a Barnes & Noble in Dayton and shrugged it back not the shelf. Or maybe it was your voice — maybe that was the real reason you came here today, to tell me how much this drawing will suck.
But I know now it’s not any of those voices. It’s one I know much better. It’s the voice that’s editing this blogpost as I write it. It’s critiquing my typing skills. It’s correcting my posture. It’s the voice of fear.
The voice that says,”Why bother? Why take a risk? Why put yourself out there? You suck, it will suck, and nothing good will come of it.”
It’s not Linda Blair’s possessed voice in the Exorcist. It’s not the sneering, sing-song voice of the bully that cracked open my head with a rock when I was eleven. It’s a voice that sounds just exactly like mine, though it whispers, hisses even, back there in my skillet darkness of my skull.
That voice doesn’t just concern itself with drawing. No, it has opinions about most things. Whether I should wear this shirt, whether I floss enough, whether I should have desert, what my client meant by that remark, whether I should write another book, teach another class, look for a new place to live, have another cookie. It’s a busy little voice and it can think of a good reason to be afraid of most decisions, of any impending event, big or small. It can give me umpteen reasons to do something tomorrow instead of now, to ask more and more people’s opinions before I make a move, can tell me what that stranger at the cocktail party will reply if I say hi. Despite its apparent rock-solid convictions about things, the voice is always willing to switch sides with alacrity if it will serve to unsettle me. It can say I’m not good enough — or too good. It can say I should settle for the easy way out — or tell me I always refuse to go the extra mile.
I imagine that voice coming from a smallish, hunched-over ape with bright eyes and twitching fingers crouching right behind the backside of my eyeballs. Sort of like Gollum, but meatier, furred. It’s the voice that tells me the water is too cold and too deep, the girl’s too pretty, the assignment’s too hard, the competition’s too stiff, the road’s too long.
This voice has the keys to the file room and knows the combination of the vault. It can use everything I know against me, push very button, pull every lever, and it is unrelenting. It is smarter than me and it has plenty of time on its hand.
Think about this — would the voice put so much effort into fighting me if it didn’t matter? Do dragons guard empty caves? Maybe it’s so hard to do this because it matters so much?
But don’t worry about that now. It’s time to silence the voice.
Because it can be hushed. It can be beaten.
The secret is so easy, so simple, it took me ages to figure it out. I tried fighting back, debating, fresh approaches, corroborating opinions. But the answer, plain is simple, is to out-dumb it. To not look but just leap. To make not a plan but a move. To get the lead, or the ink, out. Now.
I pick up a pen and mindlessly start to draw. I don’t try to figure out what I’m drawing. I don’t consider the anatomy of the eyeball or the laws of light reflection or where the vanishing point should be. I don’t think about whether my proportions are off, or whether the subject is interesting, or whether my butt is falling asleep, or if the ink is soaking through the paper.
I am the whistling mule, head down, shoulder to the plow, just here to draw, ma’am, pushing the pen on and on. If the voice clambers out of its grotto and starts to harangue me, I switch to humming and I keep pushing that pen. And when the drawing is done, I don’t stop to look at it, I don’t evaluate it or make a few changes. I turn the page and I start the next one. I am not here to have drawn, I am here to be drawing.
And after a couple of pages, the voice has fallen silent. Given up because it is a bully and it can’t face defeat. Poor little ape. See you tomorrow.
This blogpost is a demonstration of this secret weapon. I started writing with no real idea of what I wanted to say exactly but just an urge to say something. And somehow I managed to get all these words typed and, when I get around to rereading them, I think they’ll stand up (I was about to start making some self-deprecating, parenthetic aside apologizing for how second-rate what I ended up doing is in fact, but screw it, I stand by these words and that monkey better get back in its box).
So, if you’re here because you’re killing time, time to get back to work. And if you’re looking for inspiration, you got it. Now, put on your expensive, high-performance drawing shoes and just do it.
It may well suck, but so what? A bad drawing beats no drawing every time. And good drawings are just bad drawings’ grandchildren.
What do you think? Do you ever hear the Voice? What do you say to it? Share with us.
The Art Directors Club just interviewed me about how I began in advertising and what advice I might give people just starting out.
I tried to be amusing .
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.
Felix Scheinberger is a German illustrator and teacher who loves to hit the road and see the world (and takes his students too!). I love the comic darkness of his work, the looseness of his line, and his debt to Tomi Ungerer who had long been one of my favorite illustrators too. I also love his passion for travelling and seeing the rawness of the world.
We had some technical problems at one point so our conversation comes in two servings:
Felix shares a lot more in my book. Here’s an excerpt:
“Travelling is an integral part of my work. But I don’t travel to illustrate, I illustrate to travel, and I travel to understand the world and my role in it. Spectacular journeys aren’t what I am looking for, I want to depict things that mean a lot to me, and sometimes journeys don’t evoke the feelings I am looking for. And I don’t travel on the look-out for beauty. I look for real images, real emotions. So a journey to the Toscana just to draw terra cotta paths seems like a waste of time. These images have been made a hundred times over….” (continued)
Please don’t forget to check out Felix’s blog.
My pal Trevor Romain (you may remember him from An Illustrated Life) is a huge-hearted and talented artist in Austin, Texas and I was so excited to get the following email from him:
Hi brother Danny –
I hope this e-mail finds you well and happy. My new book, ‘Random Kak‘, was just released in South Africa. I wanted to share this exciting news with you as one night in your flat in New York (many years ago), while pouring over your journals (and pouring vanilla vodka) you urged me to document growing up in South Africa as an illustrated memoir in my journal. Patti nagged me about it every time I spoke to her. Some time later, I finally posted some of my journal entries on various Facebook and blog pages and it went viral. Then I was approached by Penguin Books in South Africa to do a three-book series based on my little drawings and notes.
Your last blog post with Cynthia Morris was a wonderful validation and reminded me once more of how much you have inspired and supported me over the years. I am now using this illustrated memoir technique to help children in refugee camps in Africa and children who are terminally ill, share and express their feelings, and their story, even if it’s just in stick figure style. When I met Nelson Mandela a number of years ago he said, “When a person dies, their library of stories dies with them. So they must share their story so that it is not forgotten. Even the most simple story can teach and inspire other people.“
I can honestly say if it weren’t for you this book would still be an idea waiting to happen. Thank you again for unlocking the door and inspiring me to walk into my past where I gathered arm-fulls of great memories and turned them into my newest book.
Hope to see you soon,
Trev
Recently Cynthia Morris came to visit me and we sat down for an interview because she wanted to know more about A Kiss Before You Go and the whole process of recording your life in a book. Cynthia has started drawing fairly recently but she is a life coach and deals with creative people all the time. She describes her job as helping “people enjoy their talents and create on their own terms”. I like that job description. She gave me some solid advice on the direction my life is taking and I offered my own thoughts on how she could create an illustrated memoir.
Here’s a video we shot of the chat in my living room.
Cynthia posted her notes from a conversation we had once the camera was off about my advice on “8 Ways to Live an Illustrated Life“. I hope it’s useful.
Because he made making art a pleasure to watch, because he inspired zillions of people to just start making stuff, and most of all because he was infectious with his belief that making art was something anyone could do and that it would transform the way you see the world around you, let’s remember Bob Ross today.
“I got a letter from somebody here a while back, and they said, ‘Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy.’ That’s for sure. That’s why I paint. It’s because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news.”
Please watch and share the following loving tribute. And from all of us here, I’d like to wish you happy painting, and God bless, my friend.
All week-long, I had been running through the things that could go wrong. Rain was foremost on my mind. I imagined 45 of us sitting in a humid wooden dining hall, drawing each others’ feet, like a bunch of overgrown summer campers, praying for this blighted weekend to end. Then I worried about cicadas, crawling out from their 17-year hibernation to drown out my lectures with their screeching. Oh, and may flies are supposedly virulent this time of year in Northern Massachusetts. Them too.
I worried about my ‘students’ too, of course. When I set up a special Facebook group for us and invited them to start drawing in the weeks before the workshop, they began uploading amazingly good sketches which made me sure I had nothing left to teach them. I had been hoping for people who didn’t know how to uncap a pen and instead I had graphic designers and architects and art teachers and people who had been in the EDM community for a decade or more. Gulp.
JJ and I drove up from New York on Friday morning. The weather was perfect and the air smelled of freshly mown grass and late Spring. We parked, unpacked, and headed up to the large wooden building that was to be our HQ for the weekend. Then I discovered an obstacle I hadn’t been imaginative enough to dread — the projector didn’t work. I had several hundred Powerpoint slides and videos I’d made and now I might be reduced to just tap dancing and making stuff up. By dinner time, fortunately, a new projector was in place.
Before dinner we had a little mocktail party and I got to meet the folks who traveled in from all over, some from neighboring spots in Massachusetts, others from far way — Baltimore, Chicago, New Mexico, British Columbia and England.
We had dinner and then trooped up the hill to our classroom. We had arranged rows of chairs and cushions and fans (it was damnably humid and hot) and introduced ourselves. Everyone took a turn talking about their creative wishes and then I lit into my presentation, explaining what I hoped we’d accomplish this weekend, my view of art, my life story, the magic and power of illustrated journaling and more.
After breakfast on Saturday, we started to draw. I explained some basics, we did some exercises and people started to unwind. There were loads of great questions and I managed to choke out some sort of answer to most of them. Our group was wonderful— open minded and enthusiastic— and we struggled long together through contours drawings, negative space, measurements, plumb lines and the like.
We took a break after lunch and I collapsed under a tree. It was exhausting! Meanwhile everyone else seemed full of energy. They drew their sandwiches then hiked into the woods to draw frogs and trees and things.
Mid afternoon, we headed into the town center where the fire department and hauled out their fire engines so we could draw and paint them.
During a brief sunshower, some of us retreated into the fire station.The attic was full of old fire suits and extinguishers and musical instruments and piles of chairs from the local school — an endless treasure trove of stuff to draw.
Others drew the church, the gazebo, the hills and trees, or strolled back up to draw in the barn.
After dinner, I talked about composition and calligraphy and then hauled out my trunks of journals. I brought about fifty different books and we spend the rest of the evening talking and sharing our work.
On Sunday morning, I described what steps people could take next to further develop their creativity and then we shared what we had learned over the weekend. I was amazed and touched at what a profound effect it had on literally everyone as people shared emotional stories about the discoveries that they had made in these short few days.
It was a wonderful experience for me and I realized yet again what a profound effect drawing can have on one’s life, and how developing a creative habit is so important and rewarding.
This is just a brief description of what we experienced. I hope those who were there with me will leave their comments below to round it out further. Also, JJ and I are working on a little film about the weekend that we’ll share with you soon.
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?
Danny Gregory 