Sometimes, I worry that I don’t adequately convey my enthusiasm for the things I truly love. People tell me I am too soft-spoken, too grumpy, too English… Well, I’d like to try to remedy that by telling you about a project I worked hard on and which I think is deserving of your time too.
After crawling from my sickbed, I finally finished my homework for Penelope Dullaghan’s klass in Expressing at Sketchbook Skool.
It was a bit messy and I managed to completely screw it up at one point, but her assignment got me to thinking a lot about one of my other favorite artists, Andy Warhol. In this rather adenoidal video, I explain what I was thinking, and then make three different pieces that I like quite a bit.
I love reading, writing, illustrating and making books. This week at Sketchbook Skool, Jill Weber* challenged us to make a book that shares something about ourselves — so I tackled the monkey.
I’m not terribly good at crafty things as I am clumsy and impatient but this was a very fun project. See the process and results in this video:
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).
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).
Here’s the second of a series of simple videos I’ve made to walk you through the steps of seeing and drawing as I outline them in the first section of my book, Art Before Breakfast. This one describes an initially tricky concept  — drawing what isn’t there so you can do a better job of drawing what is. If you’re new to drawing or are struggling with the basics, I hope this series will be helpful. (Here’s the first one, in case you missed it.)
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 26-27. 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).
I usually listen to the radio while I potter around in the kitchen of a morning. Today I put on the TV instead and watched talkingheads discuss the last Republican debate. While they kvetched, I sketched.
I approached it like a doodly collage, capturing moments in boxes that approximate the shape of the screen without being too slavish to reality, and augmenting them with decorative bits.  I kept moving around the page, adding bits to earlier parts, making the whole thing denser and more detailed. It’s a fairly mindless way of drawing, half paying attention to the screen, half to the page.
One trade secret: the pause button on my remote control. I can freeze the action for a couple of minutes and catch a gesture. Other bits I just drew while they were happening or from memory. Or from my imagination.
I used a manga pen and a brush pen in my trusty Stillman & Birn Delta sketchbook.
Every Friday I work through an idea from my latest book, Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from p.51. If you decide to do it too, please share 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).
Instead of hitting the POST button at 7 am as per usual, I sat down to draw my breakfast.
This particular slice comes from a loaf baked by our pal, Michael. He brought it to a wine tasting we hosted last weekend and it was so delicious I managed  to stretch the loaf out all week. Today I hit the heel.
Drawing toast is an adventure. It’s an opportunity to slow way down and delve deep. I begin by slowly driving my pen around the perimeter and then, quadrant by quadrant, I work my way through every nook, crumb, divot, pit and hole. It’s not difficult work but it’s absorbing and clears the mind.
I have gone into this in more depth here on the blog, Â in Art Before Breakfast and in Seeing at SBS but all you really need is a pen, a piece of paper, some toast, and about 10 spare minutes.
Every Friday I work through an idea from my latest book, Art Before Breakfast. It would be lovely if I could imagine you out there drawing along with me. This particular exercise comes from p.38. If you decide to do it too, please share 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).
And if you’d like to draw the same bread I did, here’s Michael’s recipe:
Look, I’m going to tell you some thing pretty embarrassing. I need to get it off my chest so I’m just telling you, but please don’t let it get around.
A couple of weeks ago, I realized I was horribly, horribly out of shape. I’ve been pretty busy this summer and haven’t had a lot of time for much, but this is no excuse. I know better but frankly, I had just plain let myself go.
One afternoon, I sat down, brushed the dust off my sketchbook, Â uncapped my pen and began to draw Jenny’s shoes.
I couldn’t believe what came out. It was awful. And even worse, the act of drawing was awkward and crabbed, like I had three left hands and they each had sprained wrists and five thumbs. I tried slathering on some gouache to cover my mistake but that just made matters worse. The prognosis was clear and so was the cause.
I had forgotten how to draw.
I felt humiliated. I mean, I have been so busy all summer writing books, giving talks, blogging, making stuff for Sketchbook Skool that I had become that archetype: he who can’t, teaches. I felt really awful. And I wasn’t sure how to fix it. Well, I sort of was but I wasn’t sure it would work.
I had three left hands and they each had sprained wrists and five thumbs.
My first impulse was to get down all my old favorite, sure-fire drawing instruction books. Sketchbook for the Artist. Work small, Learn big! Creative Ink Drawing. then all the artists who’s inspired me. Crumb. Searle. Gentleman. Hogarth. Kane. Ware. Jean. They remind me how to do it. But my mentors just made me feel more inept and hopeless and lost.
Next, I decided I’d better go to the art supply store. Maybe, I just need some thicker pens. And  a new type of sketchbook. I bought a painfully expensive one that claims that ink never bleed through its page. Cool, I could finally draw with Sharpies. I’d seen Jonny Twingley doing that to great effect. And the Basquiat notebook show at the Brooklyn Museum was full of big bold lines and flat colors that seemed just the ticket. I came home with an armful.
That was another mistake. Thinking that switching everything up would provide instantly good results. Not only had I forgotten to draw, I was now setting out to learn how to use a bunch of new materials and simultaneously ape someone else’s style and POV to boot.
The first few pages in the book continued down the disastrous path. I kept thinking and thinking about how to reduce things into shapes, struggled with how to add tone, drew far too fast, and then, to cap things off,  the cap came off one of my fat new pens while it was in my pocket, scrawling a tattoo of india ink down my leg, my pants and even my good salmon Lacoste shirt.
The weekend arrived and Jenny and the dogs and I went to the park. While my family dozed on a picnic blanket, I drew people. Fat, tall, crazy, slow-moving, sleeping, texting, skateboarding people filled my pages. Even the slowest were too unpredictable for me to do a lot of strategizing. I just drew and, if they got up off the bench, I started drawing the next person who sat down. The shadows grew longer, people got sweatier, Jenny and the dogs when back to the air-conditioning, while I kept going.
The next day, I started my morning in the window of the Lafayette bakery, drawing a couple seated at a sidewalk table and having a long argument. Over and over I drew them both, as they gesticulated, accused, sobbed, then paused to shovel down almond croissants. Then I went to church and drew the choir and the congregants, page after page of earnest reverent faces.
I spent the rest of the day watching the U.S. Open on TV. I drew the players, the  commentators, the actors in the commercials. Occasionally, I would hit the pause button and to freeze and study a gesture.
As Federer rejected half the balls the linesmen lobbed him, squeezing, bouncing, assessing, until he found the right one to serve, I grabbed new pens from the pile, testing out different weights until I found my way back to an old favorite, a Stabilo pigment liner, but a fatter one than I’d ever used before, a 0.7.  I was feeling my old line start to flow again and it had picked up a bit of weight from the influence of Jonny and Jean-Michel.
Monday, Jenny went to work and I began to binge. Summer rains had rolled in, and I started to rewatch Breaking Bad on Netflix. Episode after episode, season after season, I drew bald heads and grimaces and dramatic lighting.
I didn’t try to draw accurate portraits, I just let my pen slide over their heads to take me to new inventions. I didn’t write clever quips, didn’t compose my page, didn’t add color, didn’t judge. I didn’t think. Just drew the scene, turned the page, and moved on.
Fortunately there are five seasons of Breaking Bad and there are still some empty pages left in my expensive sketchbook. After a week of intensive workout, drawing has started to become second nature again. The lines flow. I’m  still not thinking but I can just plunk down the pen on the page and it starts to move. And generally in the right direction. For better or worse, the drawings look like mine. And best of all, I love it again. I can’t wait to keep going.
I’m back.
Danny Gregory 