Camden Harbor

We are finally back from Maine.....actually well over a week but there has been so much to catch up with that blogging took a backseat.  I'm going to put out several over the next couple of days because it's off to paint across the mountains on Friday.

The Camden, ME harbor is a wealth of painting material.....as is all of the Maine coast.  The problem was not so much finding something to paint as it was narrowing the selection.  These drawings are good examples of that.

The area was so rich that even selecting a corner of the harbor I had difficulty focusing.  Here the shore was interesting, the docks were an attraction and those slanted buildings were also a pull.  (Why are they slanted....I don't know.)

In terms of a painting or a more pleasing drawing, just a section would have been stronger.   Here, for example,  is one of several possible simplified views that I think could have been developed.   Looking at this smaller part of the larger piece I find the shapes more interesting, more artistic and calming to my soul.  The larger piece is okay, it just doesn't have a focus....the smaller one does. 

Spring Runoff

This was the day before the international kayak competition on the Wild Mile of the Swan River, Bigfork, MT.  I puzzled how to move the focus away from the white operations building down to the turbulent water and finally settled on subduing everything in the background....about what I'd do in a painting.  If I had darkened the trees next to the house it would have made it more of a bulls eye than it already is.

'V' just wrote me that she thinks there is a comedic component to my marker drawings.  Perhaps she meant 'cartoon' and I'd agree with her.  Marker drawing pulls you to simplify and express the essential caricature of a place, finding more (less and less?) of what is necessary to show the feeling and design.  It's what I'm always working on.  Robin Weiss is constantly aware of this also and it shows in his paintings and drawings.  Check out the drawing and painting of his called 'Flatbed Truck' for a great example.

This drawing will end up in the new edition of my book which I expect to be out in early July in time for my next workshop.   (Yes, I know.  It was due out the end of April...what can I say?)

Waiting for Thai

Waiting for our 'to go' food, I drew....what else?  The food came as I was at this stage so I went home a little disappointed that I hadn't been able to carry it further with darker values.

When looking at it an hour later I thought it made a good point and decided to post it.  While the next step of adding deeper values would have made my drawing more believable, an initial separation of light from shadow is all that is needed to create form and a sense of dimension.

For a painter, this simple 30 percent value indicating shadow struck areas (a value map)  would be all that you'd need, plus a few color notations, to create a painting.  It could lead you all the way to a finished piece.  Click on the drawing to see a larger version.

I feel an urge to talk about shape painting vs. light/shadow painting......but I'll stop and save it for another post.

Mud Flats

I like markers because they make me think like a painter and force me to put out the extra effort to get it right the first time and not count on erasing.  On this one, however, a little judicious erasing would have made it so much stronger, although I still like it.  Again, the overlapping marks are more prominent in the scan than the original.  I hope I can eventually get them to be more representative.  Think I'll go draw...

Low Tide

A good friend recently sent me a link to a talk on the website TED by  Elizabeth Gilbert, author of 'Eat, Pray, Love'.  It's about a twenty minute talk on creativity and where creative inspiration comes from.  I found her talk humorous, inspirational and reassuring and would recommend it to any artist, writer....or most anyone, really.  I've watched it twice and will probably watch it once more.

Lately I've been experimenting with some extra wide markers put out by Copic to quickly fill in large areas of tone.  The broad mass in back of this harbor shack got filled in by it, but I need to spend some time deciding if it is an improvement or just one more piece of art junk to carry around.  It definitely is faster in massing the major dark light split.  The areas where the marker strokes overlap  show up more in the scan than in the original.

Landscape Drawing

I've been hired to do the drawings for an extensive remodel, landscape and building facade, of a country club. This is a fun, but daunting, task. Here are two drawings I did yesterday to help get my head around the project.

The upper one is of the approach to what is a pretty ho-hum building. My favorite part of this drawing is the car.

The second is of some signage I was using for inspiration. I hadn't done a landscape piece on toned paper before.....people and still life only. I think it is just like painting a landscape in that you've got to simplify and then simplify some more to keep the detail from taking over so much that the major shapes get lost. I'm going to do some more of these and see if I can get better.

Ferry Waiting

Just missing the ferry that Monday was frustrating....but once over my frustration it bacame an opportunity to draw for twenty minutes. This looks more complicated than it is. The illustrations in my book, Value Sketching with Markers, show you how simple a drawing can be before you add values. The values create form and give a sense of solidity. I still find it amazing and a great way to 'paint' without all the fuss. Just a few pens and some paper.