sketchbook: 12/03/09

It' been a while because I exceeded my download/upload capacity for this past month and I would have been penalized if I had uploaded anything over the last few days. But, the slate is wiped clean, as they say, and here's a new spread from my sketchbook.

sketchbook: 05/03/09

Zerlina's collage

Here's another typographic collage I just finished to give to my sister for her birthday.
Unfortunately, the wood chop of my last name didn't translate too well onto the watercolour paper. Will have to try some other way of putting it on.

sketchbook 02/27/09

I can't say enough about the gentleman who sat across from me. He sat still, just read his book and I happily sketched him.

A riddle…

I found this image I did a few years back based on this riddle:

A wolf, a goat and a cabbage must be taken to the other side of the river. You have a boat, which is not large enough to take more than one of them.
If you leave the wolf with the goat, the wolf will eat the goat.
If you leave the goat with the cabbage, the cabbage will be eaten.

How to get the three across the river?

I really liked the austere effect the final image had and I think I've been trying to recapture that feeling since...

sketchbook 02/26/09

I think every time I visit the museum, I'll start off with a sketch of the Vairocana statue.

sketchbook 02/23/09

I'm a big fan of Star Trek Voyager. So I thought I'd try sketching some of the characters from this show.
(Screen capture is a great tool!)

Ana collage

My good friend Ana has turned 38. This year, I thought I'd give her a birthday present, with a personal touch.

The following piece was based on a typographic experiment I tried in an earlier sketchbook spread. My feelings are a bit mixed about this piece. It's the first piece of art I've produced that will be put out there to the general public for them to judge (and I'm kinda nervous about that). Secondly, just from a technical point of view, some of the spacing is a bit off and that's what I see when I view this piece.

Any thoughts from the blogosphere?

(I hope Ana doesn't see this before our Saturday get together.)

I've also included some process stages (I really liked how this looked just in black ink, actually).

sketchbook 02/19/09

IF: Celebrate

Everytime I do a watercolour, it's a high wire act.
Here's my submission for this week's Illustration Friday theme of, Celebrate.

sketchbook 02/17/09

I've been sick for the last few days so I didn't have the energy to sketch that much. This spread is from a few days ago when I think I first caught this bug.

sketchbook 02/13/09

sketchbook 02/12/09

For some reason I prefer and feel a lot more comfortable sketching in a Coffee Time, rather than a Starbucks or Second Cup... and I don't have to mortgage my non existent house for a coffee.

IF: Time

As a child, whenever I had the winter blahs I'd try to find a golf tournament on TV to remind me of the coming summer. The hyper greens of the golf course and the blue skies reminded me of warmer times...

sketchbook 02/10/09

sketchbook 02/08/09

I'm happy today. My bread starter is bubbling and my sponge is rising! Hopefully I'll have some sourdough bread for tomorrow!

Update: Bread came out blah. Too flat and I forgot the salt. Baking on…

Sir Charles

My sister's cat. He definitely rules my sister's place.

sketchbook 02/07/09

Every time I go to the museum I have the intention of doing quick sketches to loosen up. But as it happens so many times, I'm afflicted with "detailitis". I start off with the quick outline and then I realize that this or that needs a bit of shading or a bit more definition. And before I know it I've spent an hour on something that should have taken 5 minutes. This, I'm afraid is something that's been with me since university.

As I continue to draw in my sketch book, a reoccurring thought that I've read from some where comes into my mind: Get the 1000 junk sketches out of my system so I could get to the good one. I'm not saying that my sketches have been junk, because for the most part, I've been happy with what I've produced but I'm still struggling with that elusive "style". So here are a few more pages out of the way and hopefully when I reach the 1000th image I'll have arrived at a place I'm happy with.

IF: Flawed… judgement

Some might say bungee jumping shows a flaw in judgment or one fry short of a happy meal, but others might think it quite reasonable. Despite my image for this week's Illustration Friday theme, bungee jumping is on my bucket list.

sketchbook 02/03/09

In aikido, suwari waza, is a term used to describe techniques executed while on your knees. By doing it in this stance, mistakes in execution are amplified, so doing a technique has to be done cleanly to make it effective. I sort of viewed this spread as my suwari waza. All the objects were drawn with line. No shading. No colour to hide behind. Just line. Imperfect circles in perspective revealed. Sometimes a pretty good one was achieved.

sketchbook 02/01/09

I was told by an old art teacher that if you could draw the human hand, you could draw pretty much everything... or was it the human figure? (It's been a few years since high school, ok?!)

sketchbook 01/31/09

I think I found another spot in the city where I could sketch people in various poses unobserved: a food court in the heart of China Town.

sketchbook 01/28/09

IF: Climbing

This is my official submission for this week's theme of, "Climbing". My original intention was to submit the plane climbing in altitude, but mid way through, I realized the Adam West's Batman climbing a wall would be a lot more appropriate.

sketchbook 01/27/09

The spread above started with "And so it begins…" on the left hand of the spread. I was going to leave it but thought that the spread should be filled in a bit more. So I did with nonsensical phrases and word combinations.

IF: Pale

In the midst of this Canadian winter, all I could think about is the first day that's warm enough to allow me to wear shorts and to expose my pale legs for the world to see.

sketchbook 01/22/09

The above spread was meant to be a quick series of sketches to loosen up, just as the title implies, "Quickies". However, it didn't turn out that way and as I progressed through the sketches, from left to right, I added more detail and hence more time to these guys. The looseness that I so desire from my sketches has evaded me again!

sketchbook 01/20/09

Another sketch from a cafe. This one at the Kahawa Cafe on College street. Quite small and therefore, no hiding the fact that I was sketching people at the adjacent tables. The gentleman in front of me on his laptop was quite accommodating and basically sat still for me. On the other hand, the lady on the left hand side of the spread knew I was sketching her kept on moving around, so I couldn't get a good head shot. So, I basically drew in a fictional head when I got home.

Question: When you're out sketching, how do you remain "unseen" so your subjects don't get the jitters from being your subject?

sketchbook 01/19/09

As I continue to use my sketchbook, I realize I'm not much for composing a page. Clearly this is the case in this spread where I drew the ubiquitous Museum dinosaur and overlayed that on two kids I drew earlier in the day.
However, with that said, I've taken great inspiration from the sketchbooks shown in Danny Gregory's, An Illustrated Life and will attempt to be a bit more composed in future spreads... I hope.

sketchbook 01/18/09

Go big or go home #2

This refers to an attitude I'm trying to embrace when drawing with new mediums and or combining familiar mediums in one drawing which might lead to a disastrous and or successful result. So here it is and I think it turned out ok.

sketchbook 1/12/09

A before and after spread of the totem pole at the Royal Ontario Museum.

IF: Contained

Well, I thought I'd give it an extra bit of effort for this week's Illustration Friday theme of "contained" and get it done on the weekend... and I did. Woohoo!

I've always been interested in working with graphite so I thought I'd use it to render the pepper mill. As mentioned previously, I've been looking at Paul Calles pencil work and I love his pencil strokes. When viewed closely, they are abstract patterns but when viewed within the context of the entire drawing they form a cohesive figurative rendering. I had that in mind and some parts I've achieved that and in other parts, not so successful... But as my college teacher said, "go big or go home".

Each drawing I do definitely is a learning process.

Amendments

An extension to the last Illustration Friday's theme of "Resolve". I've read that there are some lawns contained in Zen gardens in Japan that are maintained by people who cut the grass with a pair of scissors. Now that's RESOLVE!





This is the original watercolour I did for an earlier post with an ink outline. I like the variation in line weight and the solidness it gives to the drawing.

IF: resolve/ Sketchbook 1/8/09

This week's theme was slightly difficult for me to wrap my head around it.
My official submission for this week's IF theme is on the right, but I also included the entire spread from my sketchbook, a habit that I've been doing for the last few entries of my blog.

So enjoy and tell me what you think.

sketchbook 1/7/09

The truck on the right drove off before I could finish painting it.