My Stillman & Birn Quest

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Larry Marshall

One of the expenses of living in Quebec City is shipping. I have to order most of my art supplies online as there simply isn’t a place to buy what I need here. So, when I get the opportunity to visit places like Ottawa and Toronto I’m like the proverbial farmer who comes to the big city. I’m looking for stuff… lots of stuff.

At the top of my to-buy list this trip was “Stillman & Birn sketchbooks.” Anyone who has followed my blog knows that I use them almost exclusively as I appreciate their quality. In short, they make me look better than I am and I need all the help I can get. One of my first stops in Ottawa was a big disappointment as the stored looked like they were going out of business. If empty shelves can make a retail store money, they are doing great.

But Toronto is a different place. It’s the location of two of the largest online art stores in Canada. Both stock S&B sketchbooks and both have physical stores in Toronto. I had a plan. Curry Art Supplies is located only a 15 minute walk from our hotel so that was my first stop. While they did have some S&B, they didn’t have the sizes and paper types I wanted. Very disappointing.

But after a romp through the Silver Snail, a comic book store just down the street, we headed for Above Ground Art Supplies, another 15 minutes of walking. Above Ground has got to be one of the coolest art stores on the planet. It’s a large, beautiful, three-story house and each room of the first two floors is filled, floor to ceiling, with stuff. Cool stuff. Great stuff.

I was so excited that I nearly ran up the stairs to the second floor where the sketchbooks were located. You have to see the sketchbook room to believe it. They’ve got hundreds of sketchbooks. They’ve got so many that their inventory spills out into a hallway and dribbles into a room containing modeling materials. I’m sure I spent half an hour just looking at all the sketchbooks. Most important, though was that they had the Stillman & Birn Beta series books that I was looking for. I needed some to get me through the summer. I wanted to buy them all but in a rare fit of rational thought, I limited myself to buying three of them. I added some incidentals to my pile and checked out. The credit card was only mildly warm as I left this great art store.

Opportunistic Sketching In Ottawa

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I was in Ottawa to pick up my daughter, who was coming home for the summer. My wife and I decided it would be a good idea to spend a few days there and, I decided it would be a good idea to also drive to Toronto to see a Blue Jays game, though in my defense, it was my daughter’s idea.

And so it was that I found myself as a tourist, with my family, as we wandered the city, mostly just eating, drinking and relaxing. Many have discussed the difficulties of sketching while on excursions with ~~non-believers~~, err… non-sketchers and I’m no exception to this struggle. Still, if one takes advantage of opportunities and is happy with quick-sketching, sketching can become part of the experience. Here are a few of the small sketches I did while in Ottawa.

We were walking along the Rideau Canal, enjoying the sunshinek and using phrases like “it’s hot today” for the first time in months. We were thoroughly enjoying ourselves. My wife and I decided to give our daughter a rest (that’s our story and we’re sticking to it) so we sat down on a bench. I got out my sketchbook (3×5) and did this quick sketch of a couple girls talking on the other side of the canal.

Once my daughter was well-rested we moved on. We walked and walked and walked. If you lined up all of our steps in a straight line it would be a very long straight line. But it was fun even for an old man like myself.

We sat on the grass in front of Parliament, along with a bunch of other like-minded (tired from walking no doubt) folks and, as a group, worked on our sunburns. After that was accomplished we went across the street to the information center. I’ve found I can get a lot of sketching done while women are in the bathroom and so I started quick-sketching people walking across the street. Parliament should be in the background somewhere but there’s only so much bathroom time available and I was pushing it. Color was added later that evening.

At one point we were in a park not far from the US embassy and the art museum. I don’t know its name and you probably don’t care anyway. We were drinking bubble tea. Lots of other folks were enjoying the day and I decided to quickly sketch a few of them. Here’s one of those sketches, again done in the 3×5 sketchbook.

We went walking again when we returned from Toronto. There are numerous places where you can look over the Ottawa River and I decided that I needed to do a small cityscape. I typically fail at this because I try to put too much detail in too small a space, so I was determined to keep this one spartan, quick, and clean. I hope I succeeded. I did this one in a Moleskine watercolor book; the brown came from a waterbrush filled with dilute Noodler’s #41 brown ink.

Last and probably least I’ll share with you a sketch I did of my new favorite hyper-sweet drink. It’s called bubble tea and is composed of tea, a bit of milk and sugar, a choice of flavoring, and a bunch of huge tapioca balls, called “babba” that are soaked in something that makes them black. They give you a big diameter straw so you can suck these things up along with the drink. Great opportunity to play with your food.

I’m BAAACK!!

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Larry Marshall

Did ya miss me? I’ve been roadtripping and so haven’t been posting. Got back late last night and I’ll be posting a short series of posts about my trip, at least as it relates to sketching.

In the meantime, here’s a pencil I found in Toronto. I paid a ridiculous price for it ($3) but heck, who can resist a pencil that says Draw With Me? As it turns out, it’s a good quality pencil and looks to be hand-sharpened rather than ground to a point by a machine. I will accommodate its request.

Quicker Sketching Search – Part Two

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Larry Marshall

My last post presented an example of one of the experiments I did in my quest for a quicker sketching style. Sometimes I think I’m just not seasoned enough as a sketcher to be searching for different styles but I also wonder whether such a search is the best way to become a seasoned sketcher.

Because it’s been raining, I’ve used the time to think about and try out some different styles and I thought I’d share a few of those experiments, which will surely amuse you. Pratfalls are always popular. Maybe you’ll get some ideas, even if they’re “I’d never do that” ideas.

This one was closest to my current style. The differences are that I did it quicker, with no organization. I think it suffers from too many restated, ill-defined lines. S&B (9×6), Pilot Falcon

Sometimes I think about using a washable ink with watercolor on top. Two things limit me with this approach. First, I don’t have much understanding of watercolors. More important, however, is that I don’t like the unpredictability of washable inks. Call me crazy but I’m not one to enjoy the so-called “happy accidents”. But here’s an attempt using Lamy black ink and some perylene green watercolor. It was done quickly on a scrap of watercolor paper.

The results are reasonable but as I mentioned, I’m not a happy accident kind of guy so its fuzzy nature just doesn’t do it for me.

Pilot Metropolitan with Lamy black and a bit of Kuretake brush pen.

Marc Taro Holmes has blessed us with a recent series of blog posts on how to loosen up your approach and drawing hand. This is one of a bunch of loose, almost scribbly sketches I’ve done as a result of those posts. I was working on a large sheet of paper and doing a bunch of these smallish sketches and this one shows two of them, one drawn on top of the other.

I confess that this sort of thing is a struggle for me as when I start getting loose like this my brain tends to go to sleep and silly little things like angles and proportions start to go haywire. If I can re-engage my brain while making marks like this, I think I could come to like it – a lot.

I went sketching one rainy day and ended up quick-sketching some people. Here are a couple experiments. Both were done in a 4×6 sketchbook. The one on the left was done with a Platinum Carbon pen and PCB ink. The ones on the right were done with a Kuretake brush pen. I still struggle with control with this pen but it’s fun trying to sketch people with very few lines.

One evening I decided to do a sketch with a Pilot Acroball ballpoint pen. I sometimes like ballpoint because I can get nice half-tones with them. But for a hard-line, illustration sketch, I didn’t like it at all. I couldn’t get good line consistency (lack of tooth in paper contributed) and so I think the result suffered. Interesting experience but I doubt that I’ll repeat it.

I was waiting for a lunch date and decided to do a quick, loose interpretation of this light pole while I waited. This was a lot of fun. It felt similar to the loose line drawings I’d been doing but I did think about proportions before I started, marking where the various components were along the axis. The result is far from perfect but a proper depiction of this piece of city paraphenalia and it didn’t rely upon any happy accidents.

I’ll continue doing my slower, detailed illustrations, but my quest for a style that would suit shorter time frames has only just begun. It’s fun to try different approaches but thank goodness I’m not too wrapped up in the results. What style(s) do you prefer in your own sketching and why?

Searching For A Quicker Sketching Style

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I’ve only been learning to draw for three years. I have a long way to go but my goal has always been to achieve the ability to sketch in styles similar to those of Pete Scully, Gerard Michel, and others who sketch buildings in a realistic fashion. My own semi-cartoony attempts lack their skill with line and color but I’m happy with my results because I sketch more for the enjoyment I get from the process than the actual product.

The one downside of my sketching is that I’m slow…really slow, and that limits the situations where I can apply that meditative, let the brain head off into never-never-land approach. I spend a lot of time quick-sketching (2-minutes or less) everything and anything to help me learn to see proportions and angles more quickly but the results are far too rushed to satisfy me.

I need an intermediate method – a method that allows me to capture a building or scene in less than 20 minutes, sometimes much less. And so I’ve been playing around with a quicker, looser style. I study how people like Marc Taro Holmes and Liz Steel create their magnificent sketches and while my skills are not solid enough to completely mimic their approaches, they are providing me both inspiration and some mental targets for achieving a more loose style. I’m convinced that I’m only a few thousand sketches away from solving this problem.

Until then, here is a sketch I did while out walking. It was too cold and windy to sit still for very long and so I quickly sketched this monument that sits in the park near my river. I did it in a cheap, 5×7 sketchbook of unknown origin. It’s one that normally sits on my desk and I use it to scribble ideas. I used my Sailor Profit calligraphy pen and De Atramentis Document Black ink.