Katura's Sketch-blog

The Friday after Thanksgiving was when we got to visit our family members living on the horse ranch in Pretty Much Nowhere on the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington. Perfect place to digest all that pie and relax in the quiet, quiet landscape.

It was a chilly but sunny day, and we were taken out to the pasture to visit with the horses. Now, I'm a little bit freaked out by horses (didn't grow up with them, so don't know how they think) and normally hide on the other side of the fence. But this time I armed myself with my sketchbook and a dose of courage and headed into the pasture.


My first sketches were clunky, as per normal. Pen? Pencil? Horses are weird! Man, this isn't working.

And then, I got used to the horses, and the horses got used to us, and they came over close and did some napping-with-eyes-open, and the amazing sunlight made us all relaxed and happy. I put away the confounded pen and replaced it with a few colored pencils, and ended up with these.


(Which I left at the ranch as a thanks for the hospitality)

I then tried to work the colored-pencil magic on the barn cat, and can't say it did a lot of good. I blame the cat being awake, and the comforting sunlight not shining on us directly in that amazing manner it had with the horses. *grin*

I was in Seattle for Thanksgiving weekend, having a lovely time visiting friends and family. While frolicking downtown, I suggested we catch the exhibits of Michelangelo sketches and Calder mobile at the Seattle Art Museum. Alas, we only would have had 45 minutes to see both exhibits! Instead, we explored the free public areas of the museum. Thought you'd enjoy some of the interactive art adventures we had!


After contemplating the exploding cars in the lobby and watching some interesting experimental films, we were in "attentive observer" mode, but not fully engaged yet. "The Shape of Sound" mural was what got us started. The round foam chairs, perfectly sized for kids to sit and play, just ached to be cookies for the kid in the mural to eat. (Or perhaps vitamin C pills?)


The foam furniture was too tempting to just leave as cookies, though. Kate got a little creative rearranging started...

( Read more... )

I had to return the big book of portraits by Ingres to the library today. While the artist's paintings are truly talented, I get really excited by the pencil sketches he did a studies for his paintings. Man, could Ingres catch the expression on a face in delicate shades of graphite! Amazing stuff.

Having to take the book back finally triggered me to launch into a fun project I've been waiting to do for a friend: in exchange for some warm wool hats, here's a poppy-themed composition coming into shape.



Not sure at the moment how much I want to punch up the contrast and how much to leave more subtle. Best to sleep on it and see what the morning brings, I think.

Tagged along on a mushroom walk lead by Chris Melotti of the Cascade Mycological Society this afternoon. I just recently signed up as a member of CMS, and it was fun to start apply all that I've read about fungi to the real world. And, being me, that involves a lot of drawing and scribbling notes as we go!


OK, you are too clever for me, this is totally not a fungus. It's the seed pod of an incense cedar tree, and they were very dense along some stretches of trail we wandered. I am amused by the photo though, in that it's so iconic of what field sketching is to me: grab a fascinating thing, draw the basics of it really fast, jot down a few notes, then catch up with the group and draw the next thing!


Here's a sketchbook page filling in with multiple specimens, now. You'll notice that while my right hand is operating either camera or ballpoint pen, the left hand is supporting the sketchbook, balancing that sketchbook carefully so the tiny mushroom specimen doesn't tumble off, and also propping open a copy of All That the Rain Promises and More by David Arora. Now that's talent!

Now for the scans of my filled-up pages...

( Read more... )

Last night was the monthly "Science Pub" event, and the place was PACKED: huge venue, but not a chair left to sit in. What topic brought so many folks out? Fractals, of course!

Richard Taylor, a physicist/fine artist at the University of Oregon, did a fantastic presentation. I won't give a total recap of the talk, but it was fascinating: botany, biology, electronics, astronomy, engineering, rock and roll, space aliens, doggies, snowflakes, brains, fine art, higher mathematics, and shriveled-up potatoes were among the topics addressed. (Fractals themselves are rated by their level of complexity: this talk, were it a fractal, was a highly entertaining 1.7)

What stayed with me after the talk was the fact that there is sophisticated computer work being done to analyze whether or not a given pattern is or is not a fractal. (That is to say, does the pattern repeat itself over and over at various levels of zooming in and out.) Turns out that is how you tell if a Jackson Pollock painting is authentic or not: something about how he got his balance to teeter around while throwing paint on the canvas provoked distinctly fractal patterns. But to my own eyeballs, even though I think I guessed right on the "which is the true Pollock painting quiz, I really have a hard time seeing when something is or isn't a fractal. And that frustrates me a little: I can't really tell you why the skyscrapers of NYC are NOT fractals while the trees of Central Park are.

But then, while walking home and brushing my teeth, I arrived at a more interesting realization. You'll have to be patient with me here while I lay this out:

1) I had an internship a few years back at the Smithsonian, drawing fossil leaves that were preserved in a volcanic ash flow. Staring at these delicate traces of carbon that were all that remained of the leaf veins under the microscope was fascinating, and it really re-wired my brain to see out that sort of fractal pattern wherever I went for a few weeks: staring at the veins of the lettuce in my sandwiches, caught up in the patterns of cracking of the sidewalks, etc.

2) The biggest difficulty I had with that leaf project is that I started off trying to catch very subtle tiny details that turned out not to be the leaves themselves, but just cracks in the underlying rock, a sort of visual "static" that I had to learn to filter out with time and practice.

3) Years later, I read an article in Science about some researchers that were freezing, then thawing, then freezing, then thawing trays of some sort of gelatin-like substance to see what patterns would form. The patterns ended up closely resembling venation in leaves, curiously enough. (Wish I could find that link, sorry!)

4) Last night's talk mentioned that fractals are the most efficient patterns in a lot of ways: electricity moves in fractals, trees can resist wind because they are shaped as fractals; these shapes absorb and attenuate energy and weather external stress in highly effective ways.

5) Speculative conclusion #1: The reason I couldn't initially tell the background "static" from the actual leaf venation when drawing those fossils might have partly been attributable to the fact that the tiny cracks in the rock were fractal in their own right!

6) Speculative conclusion #2: When I stare at a boring rectangular building and my instinct wants to report that the building can be a fractal too, perhaps what I'm realizing is that if the wind and the rain and the snow and the ice keep picking away at it, it will over time turn just as fractal as the coastline of Cornwall.

7) In sum: If something's not currently a fractal, just give it time and perhaps it will get there! Including those forged Jackson Pollock paintings--if you leave them out in the rain, that might help 'em out quite a bit. *grin*

Sunday's Slowpoke sketchwalk found 4 of us exploring the forest: it was fun. I got to Mount Pisgah Arboretum early and collected a bunch of bigleaf maple leaves (Acer macrophyllum) which, wet with the morning's rain, were fun test-subjects for practicing the idea of sketching on brown paper with white and black pencils. (We actually had a variety of "whites," from cool grays to cream to almost yellow, and our "blacks" included browns, blues, and Tuscan red, as you'll see in the following pics).




We then hit the trail (it was warmer to be walking than sitting, and not raining much at that point) and wandered up to "The Fallen Giant," a 151-foot-tall Douglas Fir that blew over this past September. It's really interesting to see what mosses, lichens, and fungi are living on the trunk already, and we lived up to the "Slowpoke" title of the class by spending the rest of the walk slowly circling the fallen trunk.



It was fascinating to notice that the trunk was also peppered with seeds from nearby maple trees and other conifers: though the trunk is likely to be cleared away to let the normal trail access resume, nature is all set to turn this puppy into a nurse log as soon as possible!

April discovered an earthstar fungus at the base of the log, which spews out spores when you poke it. Awesome! And fun to draw.


Of course, the trouble with these "sepia-toned" drawings is that you don't have the colors on hand to try to catch what something more brightly-appointed than an earthstar fungus looks like in reality. The mushroom in the lower left of the above sketch was really rather vibrant, decked out in yellows and oranges:


Interestingly enough, the colors of paper I'd brought along harmonized really well with the tones of the splintered wood on the broken surfaces inside the fallen trunk. So we leaned all our sketched up against that splintered end of the fallen tree for a mini art-show before we headed back down the trail!

This Sunday is the Sketchwalk, yay! Only 40% chance of rain, that's nothing to an Oregonian.

I did these doodles with gel pens on brown paper while waiting at a bus station on my way home, just for kicks.






Sketching makes waiting for a bus so much more fun.

I'm playing with a theme for this Sunday's sketchwalk at Mount Pisgah Arboretum: drawing leaves (or whatever catches our eyes) on various shades of brownish paper. This technique has been popular at least since the Renaissance, though I can't vouch for whether it was initially just a case of paper being unbleached and therefore intrinsically brownish back in the day! In any case, many artists have put the idea of drawing in white and black on a medium-toned paper to good use.

From the bold strokes of Van Gogh and Degas...



To the delicate shading of Ingres and Holbein...



...exploiting the contrast of both light and dark marks on paper is a great way to capture form, or highlight shiny damp spots, or simply play with pencils in a new way.

If you're in the Eugene area, join us from 10-12 on Sunday morning and explore the trails at an artist's pace! Full details here.

Partly in honor of the Slowpoke Sketchwalk that I'm leading this Sunday at Mount Pisgah Arboretum, and partly due to the fact that the library is really wanting me to give their book back, I'm going to post some of my favorite quotes from The Undressed Art: Why We Draw by Peter Steinhart.

• "The naturalist and the artist are alike in their watchfullness. They are both servants of their eyes."
• "A drawing, says art historian Otto Benesch, 'is an immediate emanation of personality, of the rhythm of life and its creative faculty.' Drawing is more an act of discovery--of one's own feelings or of the world outside."
• "Drawing is a way of seeing. One test of whether you really understand something...is whether you can draw it. A drawing is a picture of your understanding. (...) One draws to advance one's understanding."
• "Art is an extension of our human abilities to make mental images and hold ideas in the form of symbols. Art thus increases our abilities to record and manipulate experience. We draw to assemble more complicated details than we can assemble in memory alone..."
• "To draw anything you have to find a connection with it. You have to turn off the noise that keeps you from focusing. You have to let the object stir you to empathy or ennoblement or joy or compassion--or even fear. You must see that things are a part of your world in some special way before your can attend to them."
• "To find [inspiration], an artist has to be attentive in the right way. It requires an act of self-control, a blocking out of the noise that keeps the disparate parts of one's mind from working in concert with one another in order to draw. You don't get that self-control by divine intervention. It has to come from within. When the drawing is not going well, it's more like a brain dysfunction than a fall from grace."
• "Vincent van Gogh complained of days when artists felt 'dull-witted in the face of nature or when nature seems to have stopped talking to us.' ... [P]ractice is the only thing that keeps one attentive. If you stop drawing for a while, those fractious republics in the mind, the ones that must all carry on a polite conversation for one to draw well, stop talking to one another."
• "So the answer is to keep at it. The answer to bad drawing is more drawing."

Halloween found me in southern California this year, teaching a workshop in how to illustrate insects and spiders for the San Bernardino County Museum. Yay! We had a great time marveling at the live and preserved specimens that Chad, the museum's "bug-wrangler," brought out to share with us. Lots of lovely sketches came out of the event, as well as good discussions all around!


Edith admires a large millipede.


Justin sizes up a vinegaroon.


Jolly does a bind-contour drawing of a cricket, framed by a leaf-insect from Australia and a stick-insect from Thailand.


Moving around the classroom to get a series of quick sketches of many specimens.


Cole's lovely sketch of a tarantula hawk.


Discussing the sketches, and the surprising body structures we discovered as we made them.

So my lovely Aunt Lois, an artist herself, has proposed that we go in together on a joint Etsy shop. I've always been curious about trying this out, and together we have the momentum to be doing it for real! Check it out at
PinkMonkeyFlower.etsy.com

Lois has the lovely idea of transferring some of my art to totebags. I'm preparing a series of colored pencil sketches, and a series of block prints for the bags. Spent a lot of the weekend scanning and resizing treasures from sketchbooks and some of my favorite block prints for this purpose:



I'm a little weirded out by the process of sizing these images UP to make them the right scale for the totebags. With the pencil drawings especially, my goal has always been to reproduce them somewhat smaller so the details look crisper and more accurate. But looking at them larger than life, I find myself really enjoying seeing all the individual pencil marks and how they interact with the texture of the paper...the art side of the drawing starts to come forward, taking its rightful place beside the subject matter itself.


Next up for Etsy: original block prints, not just reproductions for the totes!

A few scans from my just-filled sketchbook, from a recent exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art here in Eugene: Two Visions of Tokaido was a lovely exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints, comparing the classic work of Hiroshige (done in the 1830) with the 1970s prints of Sekino. I loved the how Hiroshige managed to capture details of facial expressions in his tiny, minimalist carved lines; I loved the bold compositions of Sekino as well. Sorry the scans below are kinda meh! I have a hard time capturing faint pencil lines on creamy Strathmore paper...




Maybe the most fun surprise of the show was seeing one of Hiroshige's original sketchbooks. Inspires me to daydream about hand-making my own sketchbooks with Japanese bookbinding techniques! (Not likely to find time for that real soon, plus I have a lot of blank books already that still need filling, but it's fun to dream).

Having wrapped up this project on stippling fossil horse teeth with the computer instead of with a good old pen, I'm suspecting that this might have taken more time to do on the computer than it would have to do it with old-school media.

It's not that I've never drawn in Photoshop before; I have done some work that I'm really quite proud of with that program. But when it comes to stippling, making shading using tiny black dots that are closer together or further apart depending on how dark you want the area to be, I ran into 2 problems:

1) While my pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet is great for sweeping brushstrokes, it was hard to get it to perform reliably when just doing dots. On some days, it would only register half the dots I was trying to make; on other days, what I was hoping were the same hand motions and same amounts of pressure resulted in huge giant dots where the day before they'd been very discreet tiny dots. I don't know the quirks of this tool for teeny tiny detail work well enough yet.

2) The ability to zoom in, to effortlessly work at 400% of actual size, made it hard to keep things in scale from one drawing to the next. I found myself really struggling to figure out what the drawing was actually going to look like: zoom in, zoom out, where is the *real* image scale? A 300 dpi image looks way different on the monitor at 100% than it looks printed out on the page. My dark shadows, when backlit on a screen, were very bright--and on paper they are INKY and mysterious. Which is not a bad effect, just wasn't what I thought I had been doing all that time.

So I'm motivated now to do a lot more experimentation with the different nib tips of the Wacom stylus, and to play more with the pressure settings of the tablet so I can psyche this tool out the same way I can predict the performance of little bits of steel dipped in ink. But in the meantime, I might go back to drawing traditional-style line work with the actual traditional tools that shaped the conventions of the illustration style in the first place.

*whew* Next project!

Yesterday I got the pencil sketch done of the one adult molar in the skull of the juvenile Archeohippus specimen. I also invented a new use for the soft, pliable kneaded erasers: if you pinch them gently into thin, wispy sheets, you can then drape them over the parts of a tooth row that you aren't drawing, to avoid confusion when you look up from the paper.


Since this horse's teeth are tightly interlocked to make a continuous row of grinding surface, that problem can be more prevalent than you'd expect. And this style of eraser does a great job on not leaving goop or oil on the plaster cast.)

Here are the super-rough, and then the more refined, shaded pencil sketches; hoping to finish the stippling this afternoon so we can call the whole project done!

In museums, the rule tends to be, "If you must draw with a pencil." (That way, if you get frustrated or overexcited and swing your arm around and make a mark on an innocent statue nearby, it's easier to clean it up than if you had been drawing with a Sharpie marker.)

Drawing in museums is one of the few times I use pencil anymore; when hiking or exploring, I almost always go for a fine-tipped pen. Largely this is because of the smudge factor. I pack as much as I can onto every page of my sketchbooks, and when I turn the book over to draw on the other side of the page, my hot little hands partially obliterate what I just managed to get down on paper. Gah! And I think museum guards wouldn't look kindly upon me taking out a can of hairspray and spraying down each side of the paper before I move on...

Last weekend I went up and saw the M.C. Escher art exhibit at the Portland Art Museum for the second time. My brain exploded a lot, in a good way: that man had incredible skills of draftsmanship, humor, mathematics, and an eye for beauty, all crammed into one brain. Here's a page from my sketchbook as I admired the details of his work in person: a early series, detailing the Biblical account of the creation of the world.

This coming Halloween will find me in southern California, leading a workshop about drawing arthropods for the San Bernardino County Museum. It's part of their new "Talk Shop" series: starts with a short talk by a curator about works in the collection, then the participants get to do a hands-on project of their own about the topic. Nice article on the most recent Talk Shop here.

And on November 8, I'll be doing another Slowpoke Sketchwalk at Mount Pisgah Arboretum. Woo hoo! Read all about it.

Interesting; when using actual pen & ink, I prefer to stipple on translucent drafting film in order to be able to see the pencil sketch below as a reference. Stippling in photoshop, you can use layers (and vary the opacity of those layers) to get the exact same kind of workflow. Huh!

At the GNSI-NW meeting earlier this month, I came across the book Related Species by Jim Rittiman. The artist takes bits and pieces of different animal skeletons, dry leaves, and insect husks and re-assembles them into creatures that never existed, but that you sorely wish would. Haven't found a website for the artist yet, but someone in Seattle caught a snippet of an exhibit on Flickr.

Sidenote: you'll notice that my normal messy scrawl here starts to get usurped by a fancier script. I found a lovely book from Dover press at the library: Craftsman Bungalows: 59 Homes from "The Craftsman," edited by Gustav Stickley. Now, I'm not normally excited by architectural drawings, but I've always enjoyed the handwriting used by architects in their work. Rewind back to 1908, and that handwriting is cooler than words can express.



I've been sitting around reading closet, porch, living room, sun room over and over like it was the finest poetry ever.

It's well known that playing is an important way to learn. And playing with photos for various silly memes and social-media sites is not only an excellent way to procrastinate, but it also leaves you with some pretty cool skills that you can use for real in future (serious) projects.

Have you all seen the internet buzz about the squirrel who jumped in front of the auto-timer camera? The original photo is just priceless: See it at National Geographic's website.


And it has spawned a meme of its own, where folks insert the "crasher squirrel" into various other photos for humorous effect. See Mashable.com's Top 10 Squirrels.


What has been bugging me, though, is that these Top 10 photos are missing a crucial element to what makes the original photo funny: namely, the fact that the camera is no longer focusing on the intended subjects of the photo, but instead is focused just on the squirrel. The happy couple in the background is upstaged and distinctly out of focus.

In an attempt to correct this error, here are my own weekend contributions to the Crasher Squirrel meme:


Big ones behind the cut!

( Read more... )