On a 90+ degree day, after walking around over a mile through downtown Denver looking for a place to sketch, I decided (wisely) to go indoors and get an iced coffee. And whaddya know, there was this view.
Okay, this is killing me. I've been reading this blog for a couple months and now I need to ask the questions I'm sure you get, like, every time you post: how long did it take you to finish this drawing? Did you first sketch with pencil or do you do everything in pen? How do you fix mistakes?
Hi Kate! Good questions. This one took me about 3 hours from start to finish. On these longer ones I do sketch in pencil first, mostly rough guidelines to show me where everything is when I go in with pen. As far as mistakes go, I can't fix them, so they're just in there. The diagonal floor tiles below the stairs and some of the lines in the "drum" shape on top of the building are wonky, but I can live with it.
Ever since I first sketched a spherical panorama in the Procreate app, people have been asking for a tutorial, so I've finally put together the steps for how I did it. I had seen illustrations that you can pan around before and I wanted to figure out a way to do one on site, rather than make it in my studio from photo references. I will start by saying that panoramic urban sketches done on location are nothing new. The brilliant G é rard Michel and Arno Hartmann have been doing them for some time, and Arno had already been taking his analog images done on site and turning them into scrollable panos with computer software years before I set out to try this. Most of the time when I draw in curved perspective I draw "intuitively," meaning I don't set up any vanishing points or use any rulers or grids. In researching this process I knew that to do a 360 degree drawing accurately I would need an equirectangular grid with 2:1 proportions. I found one, along with a ton of...
When asked what kind of art I make, I say "I sketch what I see." That's it. I go out on location and sketch what I see. Or I stay home and sketch what I see. The "what I see" part is what's important to me. And that brings with it all sorts of other ideas to explore. Because what do we see, really? My style of sketching is a mixture of a few different approaches to observational art-making. There's the still-life/in-studio tradition where the artist narrows their focus on just a small portion of their field of view. There's plein-air landscape painting, where often the goal is to widen the field of view as much as possible and take in sweeping vistas. There's architectural and perspective drawing, where the challenge is to effectively depict human-made spaces with their corresponding geometry in a convincing way. And there's figurative art, where capturing the human form in one way or another is the goal. You can find examples of each of thes...
It's been an amazing year for me, and sketching has been a big part of it. I have done a lot of drawings this year, too many to post, really, so here are a few highlights of what I haven't yet posted. Click any of them to see them larger on Flickr. Now I've got to top all that in 2015.
Nice view! I like the diagonal lines in the tiles beneath the stairs.
ReplyDeleteOkay, this is killing me. I've been reading this blog for a couple months and now I need to ask the questions I'm sure you get, like, every time you post: how long did it take you to finish this drawing? Did you first sketch with pencil or do you do everything in pen? How do you fix mistakes?
ReplyDeleteGreat job, BTW.
Hi Kate! Good questions. This one took me about 3 hours from start to finish. On these longer ones I do sketch in pencil first, mostly rough guidelines to show me where everything is when I go in with pen. As far as mistakes go, I can't fix them, so they're just in there. The diagonal floor tiles below the stairs and some of the lines in the "drum" shape on top of the building are wonky, but I can live with it.
DeleteLove your work! Thank you for posting it
ReplyDelete