When Was The Last Time You Looked At A Fire Hydrant…

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… really looked?  Me neither…until I got interested in sketching.  Even then I didn’t give them a glance until I found the sketching work of Pete Scully.  Pete is a master urban sketcher, mostly doing sketches of buildings in the US Davis area and mostly of the buildings there in.  I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from his work.

One of the things Pete is known for are his fire hydrant sketches.  He’s found some of the most wonderful fire hydrants in his travels and he’s made a point of sketching them.  This caused me to look at the fire hydrants we have here in Quebec City and I was surprised to find that ours are pretty cool too.  They are mostly a pale red (sun bleached?) and yellow but their shapes vary as they represent vintages that probably date from the Victorian era to the present.  I had fun drawing this one and so I share it here.  One in a Stillman & Brin Alpha journal using a Noodler’s Ahab flex pen and Winsor & Newton watercolors.

The Internet Art Community Is Special Because…

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… it’s full of friendly and talented people.  But more important, it’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.  And once in a while a piece of art shows up that causes one to feel…deeply.

And so it was when I first saw Dominique Eichi’s pen & ink drawing of her grand niece.  She so captured the wide-eyed and curious nature of young kids that I couldn’t help but stop and stare.  It’s sad that most of us have lost those feelings of wonder.  We go through our adult lives, in adult fashion, or as we believe adults are supposed to act, and we no longer “stop and smell the roses”, “take time to ponder”, or chase bubbles “just cuz it’s fun.”

Aldous Huxley once said, “Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”  Wouldn’t our world be a better place if we all acted a bit more like children?

Dominique Eichi has a great blog called Dancing strokes.  I encourage you to go there, if only to look at this great drawing in its full glory.

Why I’m A Loyal Goulet Pens Customer

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Are you loyal to ANY store?  I don’t mean that it’s the first place you go to buy something because they have a large selection.  I mean, are you loyal enough to a store that you go out of your way to buy from them because you want them to grow and be successful?

I’ve watched as the retail industry has become more and more nonchalant about customer service.  I’m regularly frustrated by stores with clerks who know nothing of the products they sell, online sellers who charge outrageous amounts for shipping and won’t answer emails.  I had a local bookstore owner tell me he had to let one of his favorite (among customers) clerks go because ‘she spent too much time talking with customers.’

And that’s why I’m so loyal to Brian and Rachel Goulet of Goulet Pens.  They’re SO different in this regard.  I thought I’d tell you about an email dialog I just had with Brian as just one example of how different they are from the rest.

I wanted a bottle of Platinum Carbon Black ink.  Goulet Pens indicates on their website that they are out of stock and so I wrote to Brian (who doesn’t know me at all) and asked, “Will you be getting any PCB in stock anytime soon?”

He wrote back, knowing it would not make him a sale because he had to say, “Our order has been back ordered for a loooonng time….”  He went on to say “You should buy it wherever you can find it as PCB is in short supply right now.”  I thanked him for his quick response, which had come within an hour or two of my email.

He wrote back later telling me that they had one “sample” left in stock.  One of the great things GP does is make samples of all their inks available.   Now you could interpret this as him taking an opportunity to sell me something.  This sample sells for the vast sum of $1.75 and I’m sure most of that goes into the labor of creating the sample.  No, he was just trying to be helpful.

But, that’s not all.  Even later he wrote back to me and said, “I just got notice that our order has been back-ordered yet again.  I thought you should know.”  Again, no potential for a sale of any kind but he took the time to write and tell me that.  Do you know any other business who would do this sort of thing?  I sure don’t.

So, what did I do.   I ordered that sample, and two pens.  Thanks Brian and Rachel.  You’re the best.  Oh…before I go I should mention that all this occurred one day before Rachel gave birth to the cutest little girl you’d ever want to meet.  Her name is Ellie.  Visit her here.

 

It’s All A Matter Of Point of View

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People new to sketching very quickly run into the concept of point of view, and associated with it come discussions of perspective.  Point of view is simply where your eyes are relative to the subject you’re drawing.  If you’re looking up at your subject the horizon is below your subject.  Looking down on the subject puts the horizon above the subject.  And we’re told this is important because perspective lines converge to the horizon.

It’s about this time that we vow never to draw a building – the subjects used to teach us this stuff.  We generally acknowledge that a band on a stage is above us, a truck in a quarry is below us, and when we draw them we draw them with different points of view without really thinking about it.  The notion of horizon, though, is not part of the internal debate, at least in my case.

It should be, though.  I’ve just learned that the old “eye-level line”, or horizon can still be mighty important and I thought I’d share with you my error and discovery.  The results of being new at a skill is often not pretty, but it can be funny and even insightful.

I was wandering the Quebec City downtown area when I came across a guy leaning against a lamp post and playing saxophone.  I’m still not much of a sketch artist but I decided to draw him.  I dropped a buck in his sax case and started to draw.  I drew the guy, the sax, and the lamp post.  It takes me a long time to do such things, mostly because my eraser gets more work than my pencil and pen, and so at this point I packed up and walked home.  That evening I realized my guy wasn’t standing on anything so I drew a couple lines to indicate the curbs along the sidewalk he was standing on.  I put the sketch away.

A couple days later I was looking at the sketch and realized that something was wrong.  Apparently, I’d managed to draw this guy while I was standing on a forty-foot ladder in the middle of the street.  That wouldn’t have been a bad thing if I’d planned it, but I hadn’t.  How did that happen and why didn’t it look that way as I was drawing it?

It turned out that the answer was contained in those two short lines I’d added on a whim.  I scanned the sketch and erased them.  Then I added some others.  I kept playing with this until I got the point of view shuffled around to the way it was when I was drawing.  Here’s the result.

I’m betting the sketch would become even more convincing if I’d add some color/shading on the wall on the opposite side of the street.  Maybe I will.  We artists have a lot of power.