My Lack Of Imagination

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Larry Marshall

I’ve been sketching for about six years. During all of that time I’ve been a dedicated urban sketcher. Nearly everything I’ve drawn has been from life, mostly from my perch upon a tripod stool. Those of us who work this way are fond of extolling the virtues of drawing from life. If drawbacks are mentioned they generally relate to how weather and/or material limitations affect the actual drawing process.

One thing we always ignore when talking about location sketching is that there is no exercise of the imagination when you’re trying to depict some object or scene that lies before you. We may simplify, or even modify the scene but nevertheless, the scene provides the subject of our work.

Because of this, I’ve developed very little imagination when it comes to generating my own scenes. Yes, I can draw a dinosaur creature and maybe even a funny-faced character, but drawing a citiscape or landscape from my imagination – no way. And while I can draw cars, statues, and airplanes when I’m looking at them, I can’t draw one from my imagination to save my soul.

My buddy Yvan has told me that I should spend time drawing from my imagination, because if I did I would look at the world differently, generating a different kind of knowledge about my world. I know he’s right but I’ve found it difficult.

These days, however, I’m sort of stuck at home a lot and often my hands don’t function as well as I would like. Yvan showed me a lot of the small vignettes he draws (which are amazing) to develop his imagination and I decided to give hem a try. His approach is pretty simple:

Paint a block of color(s). Not too big (the ones here are only 3″ to 4″ wide). Add some blotches of color (low contrast is best as it doesn’t force you in one direction).
Let them dry (or not) and imagine what sort of scene can be made from the blotches of color contained within each block.

That’s all there is to it. While the ones presented here are the first two pages of these things I’ve created, they don’t have to be landscape/citiscapes. Yvan likes to invent candlesticks, fancy bowels, statues, or groups of people.

I’ve found this hard, mostly because I have no imagination, no “vocabulary” for making stuff up. But Yvan is correct, I’m looking at everything differently, asking things like “what are the typical shapes of citiscapes”; “what are the features of vases that one could use to create a new type?”, and a million other similar questions. There’s lot of fun to be had here and I’m convinced that it will help me with my “normal” drawing.

Urban Sketcher Goes Rogue

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Larry Marshall

I’m an urban sketcher, or at least almost everything I draw is done ‘on location’ – drawing what I see. I’ve not be too interested in ‘expressive’ or abstract drawing. I’m not into adult coloring books. I just draw stuff and wandering my city looking for things to draw is part of my equation.

But it’s winter here in Quebec and while it’s amazingly warm for us at the beginning of February our high temps are still in the -10 range so sketching on the street, my usual location, isn’t really practical. I know that Nina Johansson uses vodka so her paints don’t freeze but I’m an old Arizona boy and I’d have to consume a lot of vodka to keep myself from freezing.

And so, this is the time of year when I start drawing people in coffee shops, restaurants and at the library. This is a time when I draw in our museums. This is the time of year when I’ll draw the occasional cast drawing in an attempt to improve my ability to see halftones and to render objects.

One thing I’ve never done in art was to make stuff up. I’ve done it as a writer but I haven’t felt that I had sufficient handle on form, light and shade, and the rest to conjour drawings from my memory. Yvan keeps telling me that I should develop that ability as it helps so much when drawing on location but, well, I haven’t done so.

Until yesterday. I was playing with creating some watercolor backgrounds for doing ink sketches on to of them and when my brain looked at the bright Quin Gold blob I’d put in the middle, I saw a ‘tall mountain island fortress’ and so I started drawing. It was a feeble effort, but an effort nonetheless, to draw something from my imagination. I had fun and will probably do this some more.

Sketching Over The Holidays

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Larry Marshall

I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that the holiday season is more a disruption than something to celebrate. I’m an old guy, set in my ways and those ways are for me to go sketching. But with all the hoopla my routine has gone bonkers and my sketching has become scattered. I thought I would just post a smattering of the many small, generally incomplete sketches I’ve done over the past week or so leading into New Years.

Here’s a sketch I did one day at our museum. Another Egyptian guy, standing stiff against a wall, or so it seems. I don’t really know who he is but he was fun to draw and that’s good enough for me.

He was done in a Stillman & Birn Gamma book with my Namiki Falcon and DeAtramentis Document ink. Color was mostly burnt sienna with a bit of ultramarine to produce the grays. I played with the notion of making him look like stone, which he was. I’m not sure how successful I was in this.

Otherwise sketching has been a bunch of doodles here and there, mostly on photocopy paper. On New Years Eve, however, I was watching TV with Chantal and I drew these three ornaments that were laying on a table. Color was done with watercolor pencils but the sketch was done on cheap paper and so I couldn’t use a lot of water or move the color very much.

I was still bored by the TV so I picked up my Sailor fude pen and decided to give it a whirl. I’ve never adapted to the fude pens because I typically want thin lines and there are better tools for that. But I’m determined to improve my ability to draw heavy-line, quick sketches for some reason. I started out by drawing the same three ornaments.

As I scanned this for the post I couldn’t help but think of a conversation I’ve been having with Tina Koyama about what or whether the degree of expressiveness in a sketch says about what the artist was feeling, either about the sketch or the subject. The two sketches above were done within minutes of one another and yet one was done with an “expressive” stroke while the other was done in a more controlled fashion. I’m pretty sure I was wishing the holidays would be over during both sketches (grin).

I turned my fude pen to my imagination and one thing I drew was a bunch of imaginary carriage lanterns. I’d talked to Yvan about meeting to draw some at the museum where there’s a carriage exhibition going on so they were probably on my mind. Anyways, prior to drawing these I looked at a couple sketches I’d done of some a few months ago but these were all done in a very few minutes. While I think they reflect bits and pieces of ‘the real thing’, they’re purely imaginary.

Now that the holidays are over, I should return to a more normal schedule. I’m still a couple sketches/days behind on the blog but I’ll get caught up “real soon.”