It’s My Birthday!!!

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Have you noticed that as you get older the time between your birthdays gets shorter? Have you also noticed that you’re not as thrilled by them as you once were? Maybe it’s just me. I still act like a kid but I’m old and getting older doesn’t impress me much.

But I just had a birthday that I liked a lot. I’m now a two-year-old sketcher. That’s right, near the end of August 2011, I discovered Danny Gregory’s books and his notion that doing art wasn’t about talent and that it wasn’t about creating great art.

He had the audacity to suggest that anyone could enjoy doing art because the process of doing art, not the end product, is what’s important. As one who has always tried to be creative, but also one who was told he had no ‘talent’ for art, this came as a revelation to me. It was a life-changing event.

And so I started drawing cubes. I’m an analytical type, an ex-scientist, so I felt that if I was going to draw, I needed to start with boxes. In hindsight, I’m glad I did. I drew a gazillion of them. I’d draw one and then try to draw another rotated a bit in one direction of the other from the original. It seemed I was buying a new watercolor book every other day, determined that I’d learn to paint.

But I learned something very quickly. Most watercolor books go like this:

1) Start with a sketch…

2) add a wash…..

3) do something else…

4) finish up with details.

And, to me, this is akin to saying “Want to decorate your own house? Ok, first do all the carpentry and plumbing” but it is the standard way that watercolor books are presented. If you can’t draw, they’re all pretty useless in my opinion.

So I decided that I would spend the first year “learning to draw”, whatever that meant to me at the time. I’m still trying to learn to draw and now figure I’m not going to master it anytime soon. But I do believe that by emphasizing drawing over painting I did myself a great service. For the past couple years I’ve used watercolors but mostly like crayons, filling in areas in my pen and ink sketches as a 5-year old does in their coloring books.

I wish I could share with you some of my early attempts at drawing, but I cannot. All my early sketching was done on photocopy paper and ended up in the trash can. I saw no need to keep any of it, at least until I mentioned this to more seasoned sketchers in an Internet forum. There seemed to be a collective gasp, followed by “Don’t do that. You’ll want to look back some day and evaluate your progress.” They were right and that day was today. I guess that advice came in October 2011 as from then on, everything is in sketchbooks, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Here was my first attempt at a ‘real’ sketch. I did it from a photo as in October of 2011 I ‘knew’ I’d be eaten alive by passers-by if I dared sketch on location. At the time I was pretty happy with it. I guess I still am given that only a month prior I was struggling to draw cubes (grin).

But, since then I’ve filled a sketchbook or three. I’ve become quite passionate about urban sketching. I carry sketchbooks with me wherever I go and I sketch constantly, or so it seems. I can’t seem to get enough. While I’ve got a lot to learn about art in general, and watercolors in particular, I’m sure having a lot of fun and that’s what art is supposed to be all about. Just ask Danny Gregory.

Le Carnet Des Escaliers De Quebec

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Larry Marshall

Sometimes it seems there is a gap between the art world and the exploding popularity occurring in the sketching world. Regularly we hear people define ‘sketch’ as an ‘unfinished work’, a definition that might have been fine when Monet was noodling his ideas about lily pads. But this is not what modern nature sketchers, urban sketchers, travel journalists, etc. are doing. Our sketches are finished works and they’re ending up on stamps and in books. They’re being sold, either as originals or as prints.

Sketching has become a representational art form unto itself. There are new books on sketching or containing sketches being released so regularly that it’s hard to keep up with them. Typically modern sketches are done in sketchbooks, in limited periods of time. Often the artist is sitting on a tripod stool, on location, possibly chatting with passers-by. For most sketchers, their emphasis has shifted from the creation of art to hang on walls to simply enjoying the process of art. Some sketch with precision. Others sketch in very loose fashion. Some border on doing caricatures of their world. Somehow, in spite of these different approaches, there is a unity in what sketchers do, mostly related to the process of doing.

While different from studio art, sketching nevertheless shares many aspects with it and I sometimes lament the fact that so many artists don’t understand, or even know of in this growing part of the art world. But something happened in Quebec City last week that was one of those “we’ve come a long way baby” moments.

It came in the form of a book launch for a wonderful book titled Le Carnet Des Escaliers De Québec. The book was a collaborative effort organized by Natalie St-Pierre. It contains 180 pages of great sketches that represent the majority of the staircases that exist in Quebec City. As an aside, we have a LOT of them because of the nature of the city, including several containing hundreds of steps. The artists involved were, Natalie, Hugette Asselin, Guylaine Côté, Louise Denault, Magelline Gagnon, Louise Grenier, Sylvie Riverin, Monique Rousseau and Pierre Toupin, the token male in the group. Marie Dagenais wrote the text for the book.

The book is not just a great compilation of sketches, however. It’s truly a tourist guide to the stairways. Maps, beautiful sketches themselves, locate all of the stairways ane descriptions and histories of each stairway provide insights into Quebec and its development.

The quality of the book is sufficient reason to write this post but the book launch says something about just how far the sketching world has come. This launch was held at City Hall. It was an invitation only event and was hosted by the mayor. Now if you live in a small town, you might expect a mayor to host a book launch by a group of locals. But Quebec City has 700,000 people in it; our mayor is a busy guy and yet he spent an hour at the book launch. Roughly 100 people were in attendance and we were served amazing hors d’ouevres and wine, along with great conversations. It was truly an inspired and inspiring gathering.

Sketching The Good And The Ugly

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Larry Marshall

I’d arranged to meet sketching buddy Claudette downtown and so it wasn’t completely nuts when I started walking in that direction in spite of the fact that I was walking in a cloud. It wasn’t raining but a mist was collecting on my glasses and clothes. Walking fast beat the cold away, though.

When I met Claudette we sort of looked at each other and both of us were disappointed with the morning. We decided to walk through the old port area looking for something to draw but I think neither of us had our hearts in it. It was pretty miserable, depressing weather and we ended up ready to cancel completely.

Claudette spotted a cast lion that was part of the entrance to a building and as we looked at it we both decided it would be worthy of a sketch. What I saw was how we humans have lost site of esthetics in favor of convenience and modernity, or whatever word you want to use. Someone had destroyed much of the beauty of the lion casting by installing a large electrical plug below it and wrapping a wire up around it. A real artist would probably have drawn the lion, leaving the plug out and ‘improving’ their drawing. I’m more about documenting city life and thought this debauched piece of art could be the subject itself.

I did make the mistake of doing it in too small a format for a shaded pen drawing like this and both the lion and plug suffered from a lack of space for proper shading. Nevertheless, here’s the 3×4 sketch, done in a Moleskine watercolor book. I used my Pilot Prera and Platinum Carbon Black.

A Short Trip To Levis

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Larry Marshall

To both of you who follow this blog, I apologize for my absence. It’s embarrassing to admit but without my laptop I’m dead in the water, and I had a hard drive crash late last week. I got the problem diagnosed by Friday night and then began waiting for a hard drive to arrive in the mail. This is not something you want to be doing as the weekend is just beginning.

So, I scuttled around in my basement and, using ancient computer parts, cobbled together something that looked like a computer and ran almost as fast as an abacus. But it did get me email and limited web access. The drive arrived on Tuesday and I’m now back in business Thank goodness for backups as not much was lost except for a lot of time.

3×5 – Pilot Prera w/Lex Gray ink

During that time I went for a long sketching walk. First stop was to do a quick sketch of sailboats in the harbor. Me and sailboats don’t get along well, mostly because I don’t know much about the rigging and doo-dads that encrust the top surface of sailboats and, from my distant vantage point, these things are hard to make out. But I continue to try and this sketch consumed ten minutes of my time. The fact that I was standing up didn’t help much. I do wish I could get better at sketching while standing 🙁

I wandered around downtown for a while and then got the notion to head to Levis as the sun was out and I always look for an excuse to ride the ferry. On my way over I recalled a small, but rather ornate house I’d seen while I was in Levis sketching with fellow sketcher, Yvan. This is it. The people got sort of faked in using people who were walking by. I ran out of room while adding the woman and I’m not sure she has a left arm. If she does, it’s somewhere in the guy’s right side (grin).

Stillman & Birn Zeta (5x8), Pilot Prera w/ Platinum Carbon Black ink

Stillman & Birn Zeta (5×8), Pilot Prera w/ Platinum Carbon Black ink

The Variety That Comes From Sketching

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Larry Marshall

If I did a statistical analysis of the my sketching subjects, it would be clear that I’m a building portrait kind of guy. I just love ’em and enjoy going out, finding them, and sketching them. In fact, being out in the city, sitting on a stool as people walk by, is a major part of what I enjoy about it. I’ve never been much for sketching from photos and this is probably why.

This little guy was hanging out over a path I was walking on in the park. He was actually moving quite quickly, for him, but I had time to do this quick sketch.

I guess it’s true for most people, regardless of how or what kind of art they do; we all have a preferred subject type, whether it is flowers, landscapes, boats, or still lifes. But sketching provides something that other forms do not – the ability to sketch something quickly. This translates into sketchers drawing a much wider variety of things than an artist who must set up an easel and has a mindset of hanging the result on a wall.

I was out for a long walk and sat down in a park. Something suggested that I sketch this basketball hoop that was sitting idle. Definitely a ‘no big deal’ sketch. Took less than ten minutes but it was ten minutes of fun.

We sketchers are happy with these quick sketches, often of subjects that no other group would ever do. We proudly show off our sketch of a garbage can, a fire hydrant or maybe even a dead fish. Why our brains work that way I do not know but I do know that our ability to do this without devoting a lot of time to it is the reason we do it so regularly.

They’re repaving a street near my house and I thought this small roller was unique.

This occurred to me as I was looking at the last few sketches I did in my little Moleskine watercolor book (3×5). Excepting the roller, which took me twenty minutes or so, these sketches were done very quickly, with no particular goal in mind other than to be sketching. All were fun.

I went birding on a ‘too windy’ day and ended up huddled behind a tree. Did this sketch of a fungus.