Category Archives: Art

Doing The 100 People Challenge

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This week many people are drawing, or trying to draw, 100 people in five days.  Run every year by Marc Taro Holmes and Liz Steel, this is a popular annual event.  It’s no small coincidence that the two people leading this charge are two of the fastest sketchers I’ve seen and a pair that place a VERY high premium on sketching quickly.  I don’t say that as a negative, just a fact.

I still remember the first time someone suggested that I draw people on the move.  I was sketching with a couple people, both my betters, and they said, “Let’s go downtown and draw pedestrians waiting for the light to change.  I didn’t see my face at the time, but I’m sure my expression was “Are you nuts?”  The thought of drawing a person, a whole person, as 15-20 seconds was so far beyond my comprehension that I knew it was a joke.  And it was a joke… when I tried it that first time.

Sadly, the people who do this stuff regularly think it’s normal and so they don’t talk much about how people who don’t find it normal can do it.  I thought, rather than just another rally cry for the event, I’d mention a couple solutions that some use to do this.  I should preface this with the important fact.  All of these approaches are done by people who, if they have the time, can draw very detailed people.  There’s an old adage that if you can’t draw something slowly, you can’t draw it fast.  I think that’s true.

I’m going to describe “capturing” a character with the full knowledge that the results aren’t going to hang in the Louvre anytime soon (grin).  You’ve got to be ok with that before you launch into the 100 People Challenge.

Draw the bare minimum

The first thing you have to understand is that you’re not doing Sargent-level portraiture.  You don’t have time.  Many add two things together to accomplish the task.  They draw their people very small and do little more than draw lines for legs and arms with a round ball for a head.  I’d call this the stickman approach except that most grab for drawing something a bit more complete, where the arms and legs are positioned, bent appropriately, and so you can easily see what the character was doing.  This is a really good approach if you’re happy with these simple results.

Loosy Goosy approach

Artists throw around the term “loose” a lot.  With no solid defnition of the word it’s said that we should all be this, so we’re not “tight.”  My guess is that a lot of the great artists of our past would take issue with this but that’s how the modern world rolls.

Anyway, a lot of artists, realizing that there’s little time for drawing leg and arm musculature accurately in the few seconds they have simply abandon the idea entirely, drawing arms and legs heading off in the right direction but not necessarily with proper geometry.  They keep everything “loose” and are ok with that, no matter how “tight” they might do their next studio portrait.

Sweat the small stuff later approach

This takes on different forms depending upon the artist.  Some will draw an action line defining the subject’s orientation and then add only a few points defining joints, clothing boundaries, etc.  Some will go over these drawings with more ink later, correcting errors.  Others will do a complete contour of the subject while thinking about how color will help them complete the figure.

Still others will do a continuous, or nearly so, pencil sketch, all the time thinking of what they’re going to do with color to bring the character to life.  There is no one better at doing this approach than Marc Holmes.  He is so adept with both pencil and brush that it’s a joy to watch him draw characters.

All of these approaches require that you’re planning on working on your drawings later, probably at home.  The hard thing for many is drawing while thinking color, light and shade, etc. placing lines to indicate shadow borders, etc.

Make sure you’re drawing someone who will stay put for a couple minutes (grin)

The master of this approach is Alvin Mark.  His targets are people eating, people on buses, people on trains, anywhere that people stop.  His ability to draw precise contour drawings of people, reflecting not only their personality but their weight and its balance, is uncanny.  But he chooses his targets wisely.

So, these are some of the ways that people accomplish the task.  What I haven’t said is that it’s a LOT of fun and the more you do of it the easier it becomes.  I’m still not good at it and may never be.  I’m the slowest sketcher on the planet and so my “skills” aren’t amenable to quick sketching.  When sketching people I guess I’m closer to a “loosy goosy” sketcher than anything else.  I’ll let you decide.  These are the sketches I did yesterday, during the first day of the event.

Painting Shiny Objects

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As someone learning to paint and struggling to use brushes correctly, I should be painting a stream of apples and oranges.  I know that but, it seems, I’m attracted to the challenge of painting fuzzy things, clear things, rough things, and shiny things.  This is sort of nuts when I can’t paint the proverbial straight line with a brush but, well, that’s me.

This time I tried to paint a shiny object in the form of a stainless steel stovetop coffee maker.  I didn’t realize it at the time but I complicated things by placing it in front of a window (that was reflected) and by putting a coffee cup in front of it (which was also reflected).

This was a struggle for me and at times I wasn’t sure I was up to the task.  The end result isn’t nearly as important as the experience gained in trying to do it, though, and I am happy with those results.

9×12 gesso board, Cobra water-mixable oils

Oil Paint Sketching

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Long ago I saw Cesar Santos, well-known oil painter, doing what he called “studies” in a sketchbook.  He’d apply a couple coats of gesso to the page and then paint gorgeous portraits, that should have ended up on a wall, but Cesar was in training mode, working on his techniques and he needed to organize painting, notes, color swatches, etc. into a book.

That was before I considered oil paints but I didn’t forget the possibility.  Of course, when I decided to try oil paints I had to try it.  You can see my attempt and discussion here.  At the time my thought was that all the gesso stuff would just not transfer well to street sketching.

But, as they say, “I’ve seen things that can’t be unseen.”  Like artists sketching with oil paints on raw paper, Kraft paper no less.  It’s being done as a way to augment a pencil value study, providing color notes for a painting to be done in a studio.  BUT, the results would be perfect as a sketching medium for quick landscape/urbanscape sketches.  The problem, of course is what I reported in the post I just mentioned – you’ve got to wait a couple days to close the book, not exactly what you want as a street sketcher.

I continued to think about this and here’s where my mind went.

  1. When we need to do watercolors on thin paper we do “light washes,” using less paint and water to do our sketches.
  2. Water-mixable paints can be thinned with just water and the water dries much faster (too fast for normal painting) than with typical oil mediums.
  3. Paper is more absorbent than gesso’d board which would help wick the water away from the paint film

Hmm…says I.  What if… and an experiment was born.  I had some paint mixed on my palette, not the right colors perhaps but they would do for an experiment.  How to get a sketch done in “no” time so that I could time how long it would take to dry?  Solution is to keep it small and not worry about the quality of the sketch, all emphasis on getting the area covered as quickly as possible.

I used a cheap Kraft sketchbook.  I create these by taking a generic 9×12 spiral sketchbook and run it through my bandsaw, creating two 6×9 sketchbooks that cost me around $5, less if they’re on sale.  The paper is 120g.  I’ve filled several of them and they’re good for “light washes.”  A Stillman & Birn Nova book would be far superior.  Anyways, this is the result of this test.

Just toward the end of my “sketch” (total time less than two minutes) I decided to add a bunch of white in the foreground.  Titanium white oil paint is very slow to dry and I thought it a useful addition to the test.  Sorry this isn’t a better sketch.  I tried to keep the paint thin and used only water to thin it.

And then I waited, but I’m not a patient guy so at 15 minutes I was sticking my fingers in the paint.  Most of it was dry, or dry enough that I wouldn’t worry about closing the book.  The white areas were still tacky though (no book closing yet).

Then I remembered Cesar Santos.  He puts waxed paper over his sketchbook oil paintings.  I cut a sheet to fit the book and used a tiny piece of scotch tape to hold it in place, and throwing caution to the wind, I closed the book.  I even placed the book in my sketch bag to simulate me carrying it to the next sketching location.  Throughout the evening I checked it and no paint moved or was transferred to the waxed paper.  This morning, everything is quite dry except for the thicker dabs of white, which remain just a bit tacky.  I suspect even this can be improved upon as I put the white on without thinning and purposefully put it on thick.  My understanding is that zinc white dries more quickly but I don’t have any.

This is starting to look like fun.  I really like the opaque nature of oil paints for sketching and the fact that I can prep 3-4 colors in a tin and be able to see the colors of my mixes before I use them in a sketch.  I enjoy investigating my subject by mixing some the dominant colors as I decide how I’m going to approach the subject.

I know that the majority of the three people who follow this blog are watercolor and pencil types but I hope at least one of you finds this interesting.  I’ve spent most of my art journey without much experimentation and it’s refreshing to do some.

Color, Color Everywhere

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I decided to learn to oil paint principally to get myself working in a medium that didn’t rely upon line for its information.  Why?  Because most sketchers are like me.  We go out, pen in hand, and draw stuff.  If we also use color (typically watercolor) we do so “after the fact.”  It’s common for people to say “I’ll add color later.”

This is fine and makes many of us happy but this approach causes us to draw without thinking of tone and any thoughts we have of three dimensions come in the form of perspective lines, object overlap, etc.  Again, that’s fine but these approaches don’t do much to teach us to see and produce value, and because of the ‘later’ aspects of our color approach we’re mentally reducing everything to two dimensions as we draw and, for many of us, the third dimension is, at best, handled by some general tone variation when we add color.

And so I thought the switch would force me to get into values and form more.  Unforeseen was my complete ineptitude with respect to using a brush to draw my oh so limited understanding of color mixing and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I bought this book, a book you come across everywhere you look when listening to oil painters.  It’s an oil painter’s bible.  Alla Prima’s reputation is well-deserved.  I have a fairly large library of art books (around 300 at least count) and this one has become one of my best.  Unlike the typical hobby books, this one is packed with into on everything oil paint, and as its subtitle says …and more.

One of the things contained within it is a suggestion for learning color mixing and to gain fluency with your own  colors.  I confess that I’m not a “swatch” guy.  I hate this stuff and, with watercolors I’ve always found it lacking because it’s so hard to know what you’re really mixing because of the watery nature of the medium.  Anyways, Richard Schmid argued that this exercise would make me smart and who wouldn’t want to be smart.

Here’s how it works.  Each panel represents one dominant color.  Each column represents a mixture of the dominant color with one of the other colors on the palette.  Then, with that mix, you do a 5-value chart of that color mix to fill up the column.  Each panel reflects 50 color mixes. I just used the Cobra Water Mixable Oils kit as my color palette and set to work.  It took FOREVER!!!

In doing this, however, I became fluent with the palette knife, learned a lot about the strengths of each color, got pretty good at mixing values and by the end I was able to do this a LOT faster than I could when I started.   Can’t say it was fun but Schmid was right, I got smarter.  I’m still dumb when it comes to oil painting but small steps are the way to success.

Here are all the panels I did to complete the Schmid exercise:

The Zorn Palette

All this mixing got me interested in Anders Zorn’s famous Zorn palette.  He painted almost everything with Vermillion, Yellow Ochre, and Ivory Black.  In reading about him I found that they found Cobalt Blue in his studio so maybe he used that on occasion as well.  I used this as an excuse to add it to my look at the Zorn palette.  Same dominant color + other colors approach applies here but as there were so few colors I was able to do everything on one panel in four blocks of value columns.   It’s amazing how many colors you can get from so few colors.

 

Significant Event <-> Trivial Result

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I’ve mentioned before that this blog is as much me documenting my sketching events as presenting great art work.  This is fortunate as I have very little great art work to present.  But here in Quebec we’ve lived through some of the most strict anti-COVID policies for two years.  We’re still partially limited in what we can/can’t do and still use vaccination passports and wear masks everywhere.  And, right or wrong, we’ve all become trained NOT to go anywhere.

But the last few days has brought relief from our bitter cold and so I’ve gone out walking, mostly in the snow and rain but as the temps have been right around freezing, I’ve enjoyed it.  Anyways, I walked through the farmer’s market that’s right down the street from where I live the other day.  The place is dead right now due to people not going out but also because there are no farmers there selling stuff so aside from a few permanent stores, there’s not much to be had there.

There is a place that sells coffee, though.  It’s located along a big hallway and there are some places to sit on the opposite side of the hallway.  There were two women sitting there when I showed up.  I decided to get a coffee and draw them.  I sat down, got my little 4×6 scribble book out, marked the top/bottom of her head and…they both got up to leave.  I quickly sketched a face from “memory” and that’s what you see in the middle of this sketch.

Then I was alone, nobody to sketch.  I was thinking of drawing one of the tables when a woman walked down the hallway.. so in the few seconds she was visible, I drew the back of her head.  Then another person walked by… another few seconds of scribbling.  Each of the people gave me 5-10 seconds to draw them so the results aren’t great.  But this was my first foray into a coffee place in two years and so this was downright exciting.  I had to post this miserable sketchbook page for posterity.

While I’m posting, here are some other quick sketches I’ve done.  There’s no rhyme or reason associated with them.  Done on the fly and on a whim.

Here I found an Indigo Prismacolor pencil, decided to sharpen it for some reason and this led me to draw a bit with it.

I’m quite excited about the prospects of getting out sketching again.  Hopefully spring is coming early this year.  I’ll be posting a massive oil paint project I’ve been doing soon.  Just need to turn everything into digital images and I’ll post them.