First Charcoal Drawing!

Yesterday’s drawing class was great - my favorite one yet! We spent the first half of the class reviewing everyone’s homework, which was extremely helpful. Last week we covered perspective and we were all pretty hung up on the implementation of it in one way or another. So it was great to see everyone’s work and to discuss, ask questions, and learn together what worked and what didn’t and why. I learned so much more from reviewing each other’s work than I did last week while trying to implement the concepts myself. It was great!

Then we learned about tone and used charcoal to make tone-drawings. I’ve never been interested in charcoal because it seemed messy and high maintenance to me. But wow, was it fun! I like it so much better than the graphite line drawings we’ve been doing, but I understand that all of that foundation was necessary for us to be able to execute a drawing like this.

I’ve been struggling with tone in my ink and watercolor class. As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to not see enough whites from the get go and apply too much tone from the beginning, which there’s no coming back from.

But in this case, we don’t build up tone in one direction from white, but instead start with the mid-tone and then add and subtract tone in increments from there. This makes learning tone so flexible and forgiving! I’m planning to do more charcoal sketches to help better develop my eye and then translate that learning to improve my ink wash applications in my other class. I’m feeling pretty hopeful that this is going to help me start being able to see tone better!

Also, I’m wildly proud of this drawing. I’ve never done charcoal before and it’s not even a finished piece (if I’d kept going the darks would keep getting darker and the lights lighter), but dang - it still looks so good and the objects look recognizable. It’s the first time I’ve come home with a piece that feels like an actual image instead of just a bunch of unfinished pencil lines. I am feeling super happy about that!

A Reminder to Practice Kindness

I keep this photo of kid-Hilary on my desk to remind me to be kind to myself as I practice new things. I particularly like how it shows a smiling and exploratory face peeking through the trees. As I sit at my desk, it’s a perfect reminder that art is an exploratory journey; one that I’ve undertaken with much enthusiasm, eagerness, and hope. If I start being critical and hard on myself or begin to feel vulnerable and discouraged, it helps to return to a hopeful and curious explorer’s mindset. From there I can practice compassion and find my enthusiasm once again for this long but exciting journey.

Second Urban Sketch Meetup

This morning Benjamin and I went to our second Urban Sketch meetup! It wasn’t scary this time since I knew more what to expect. We met at Pier 66 and I picked the ‘water dinos’ since they’ve always captured my imagination. I liked the way they stood out along the horizon.

Some might think my composition includes too much boring water. But if you know me, you know I love water. So I liked the way it was framed between the two angles of the road in the foreground and harbor island in the background. I’d like to be able to draw and paint expressive water, but I can’t yet. It doesn’t mean it can’t still have a prominent place in my scene as I learn and practice though.

The dinos, being so far away, were very flattened to my eye. But I wanted to challenge myself to make them more 3-d to really examine them and understand how the beams and supports fit together, while also practicing the techniques I’m learning in my drawing class. So it was a worthy challenge. I spent most of my time on the dinos: drawing and hatching them.

Then I added a wash to the sky, which in the end made it too dark so I wished I hadn’t. But it was very gray and hazy today. Then I mixed colors for the tree-line, shipping crates, water and sky. I like the tree and crate colors very much and I enjoyed painting the stylized washes of color to give the illusion of the colorful stacked crates. The sky was too dark and not yellow enough and the water too light and not blue or silvery enough. But, I was running low on time and can’t adjust colors very quickly yet as it still takes a lot of thought about how to manipulate them on the color wheel.

Yesterday I spent some time on YouTube watching watercolor color-theory videos which was very helpful in mixing my colors today! My sky and water colors kept turning out too green, so I thought about those videos and worked my way closer to the shade I wanted while also introducing colors to adjust the shade and tone. Very cool stuff! But I need a lot more practice.

I used colored pencil on the dinos and yellow docking things.

Afterwards, Benjamin and I discussed our processes for our drawings and he gave me some feedback. He gave me recommendations for blending the treeline into the boxes and for grounding the dinos so they don't feel like they’re floating. He explained that if I’d left the street lamp in it would have helped tie the foreground into the background and also that I should have outlined my yellow pieces on the roadway. He also mentioned that adding in the fencing along the bottom would have been interesting.

So this gives me some concrete stuff to work on! Mixing colors, blending elements better on the page, grounding my objects, and composition. I kind of liked the lamp post, I just didn’t like that it was in the very middle of the picture. Benjamin suggested I could have moved it a little to the left to balance it while still keeping the visual interest. He’s so right! The fencing would have been nice but I ran out of time. And I didn’t outline the yellow colored pencil bits bc frankly I just forgot them as I rushed to finish. In the end my dinos were too dark because I hatched them and then added colored pencil, so I tried adding highlights, which is silly because they're so far away and my highlight pen is so [relatively] thick that it just made them look like they'd been snowed upon. 

There's quite a lot I would change about this image, but what it comes down to is that I'm glad that I went and spent the time drawing and faced my fears of sharing my beginner's work with other more seasoned artists.

Watercolor Wash

Here's a summary of what I've been up to the last few days. There’s not anything to show for drawing class this week because the drawings all look mostly the same, we just practice different techniques each week. This week we covered perspective: 1-point and 2-point and also atmospheric perspective.

In ink and watercolor class we applied watercolor for the first time! We set up our still-life, made our pencil-plan, inked in our contours, applied three rounds of ink-wash, then the watercolor wash on top!

I have several things to say about the unfinished piece shown here.

First, I got confused on my initial ink contour lines, so my amethyst and the white ceramic item didn’t turn out right at all. The amethyst actually wouldn’t be so bad if I’d inked the facets before applying ink and color, but I didn’t know that they counted as contours, so that’s why the facets look so unnatural. The white ceramic item was just very hard to capture and is also way out of scale. I came home and worked on several rounds of quick sketches with that item with Benjamin’s oversight so I could learn to see it and sketch its contours more easily.

In addition to continuing to work on drawing skills like scale and form, I want to work this week on improving my shading. There’s not enough highlights in this image. It’s very flat.The cool thing about these colors is that I mixed them all myself from just primaries! So while I wish they were better... I’m amazed and pleased that I made my own hues for the first time and that they’re not too far off.

Mostly, I just want to get a better handle on tone. That’s my biggest hurdle at the moment. I feel like the drawing and the color-mixing is attainable with practice based on the skill level I have to get me started. But the tone has me vexed and I don’t feel like I even have a good baseline to grow from. Benjamin said he’d help me work on that this week, which I am looking forward to.

The most fun part of it to me was that I got to bring mementos from home for my still-life scene. All of these objects are actually quite small! I enjoyed the challenge of using small items while filling a large page. The treasures featured in this image are: a large apple snail-shell, 2 pecans from the tree I planted with my grandfather when I was a kid, a white ceramic insulator from my grandfather’s shop, some rusty bolts from my great-grandmother’s brother’s blacksmith shop, an amethyst Benjamin gave to me for my birthday, and a wooden frog that my dad carved and painted for me when I was a kid.

A Tiny Micro-Poster

This came up in my Instagram's ‘explore’ feed last week so I printed off a tiny copy of it and hung it on the wall above my desk. It’s an illustration from one of my favorite illustrators, Jessie Oleson Moore. She’s the first illustrator I ever had the pleasure of knowing in real life and therefore the first time I dared to believe that a real life as an illustrative artist was possible. She inspired me just by living her life as a successful artist. But she was (and is) also warm, funny, kind, and a joy to know.

Because I’d admired her for so long as a working artist, this tiny micro-poster felt like the perfect reminder to myself that I CAN DO THIS. If I am in fact what I repeatedly do (and I believe that to be true)... then I need to be drawing more and more. So, with this mantra in mind, I’m sitting down at my desk to do something, anything, towards my drawing goals. Because I want to be doing it even when I don’t feel particularly inspired. In fact, especially when I don’t feel inspired.

First Rainbow Slug

Yesterday afternoon I made my first rainbow slug. It’s a surprise for a friend who prefers her snails without shells! I had a lot of fun working the design out and especially loved painting it. I started with a rough print of just the body part of one of my snail stamps just to get my guidelines going, then I planned out the rest in pencil and finished it up in ink. I gave it 'rainbow' status by adding watercolor. I have to say that the more time I spend with watercolors the more fun I keep having with them!

First Urban Sketch Meetup

This morning Benjamin and I went for our first Seattle Urban Sketchers meetup. We met at Sakya Tibetan Monastery and fanned out through the neighborhood to sketch, on-location, for 2.5 hours. Afterwards we met up for the ‘throw-down’ where we all set out our sketchbooks for each other to peruse.

Trees being a great interest of mine, I noticed these four large beauties filled with prayer flags and stationed myself on the side of the monastery.

I started out too tight and controlling, so I attempted to loosen my strokes and then got too carried away on my first tree. By then I felt committed to keeping the style throughout the other trees. I didn’t know how to change course midstream. So they are way overdone and I’m not really pleased with them at all. But I love how the flags turned out and how they wind through the trees. I’m also really proud of some of my shrubs and included a detail shot of them. My cars are quirky, but you know, I ended up liking their stylized look!

I didn’t quite get all the color in I wanted (although the tree trunks really were white, isn’t that lovely?) but I got close. The sides of my work were a disaster so I admit this is a cropped version. I didn’t have a good plan for how to frame my image and was taking the Urban Sketch Manifesto WAY too literally (about needing to show all of the surrounding context in your drawing), but I learned a lot from this experience.

The throw-down gave this introvert all kinds of insecurity. I don’t like unstructured new social situations anyway and it was even worse because I felt so vulnerable having people look at my art next to everyone else’s who all have more experience than me. I went into full-chameleon survival mode and waited for it to pass and left as soon as it was over. Then I went and sat in the car and had a vulnerability hangover and cried big fat tears over my feelings of vulnerability, inadequacy, and discouragement. Benjamin was encouraging and supportive but I still couldn’t feel better. So I put on Mac Davis’ ‘Lord It’s Hard to Be Humble When You’re Perfect In Every Way’ and turned it up and sang it loud. And that helped. Fake it ‘till you make it, right?

Most of all I’m just proud I went and that I’ve done my first on-site sketch.

First Ink Washes!

This week in Ink and Watercolor class we started ink washes! I’m most pleased with how the sheen on the water bottle turned out, but overall I’m pretty pleased with it in general! The grapes were a fun challenge in trying to get the foreground and background grapes all put in in a way that looked natural. And the squirrel’s fur turned out better than I expected! So did the ceramic bird. I surprised myself as that shape and form started emerging with the ink washes.

I still have a lot to learn with regards to scale. The little cup in front of the ink bottle turned out much too small and the candleholder doesn't have much definition. The pear looks pretty wonky and the shading on it is unnatural. I also want to work more on getting the right mixture for my light and dark washes, because it took me way too many passes to get those grapes that dark, and they still aren’t dark enough!

Overall though, I am pleased. I surprised myself which is a good feeling. This week for my homework I am going to focus on working faster, getting the saturation of my wash-mixed dialed in, and continuing to observe tonal values and translating that into wash on paper.

Drawing is Hard

Drawing class is hard. The first half of the second week of had me so frustrated and discouraged and incompetent that I honestly kind of wanted to cry. The biggest thing I’ve struggled with over the years is drawing things without running out of room on the page. I started the first exercise and once again ran out of room and got completely flummoxed and started over. But I still couldn’t figure out how to make it work.

The second half of the class went much better and I’m really pleased with how I was able to make sense of things in that half. So, here's what I learned this week:

The first image is my first failed attempt in which I ran out of room. The second image is barely my work at all. It was my instructor’s strokes while he walked me through problem-solving the breakdown of the ‘seeing and evaluating’ part and telling him what I saw and then him executing that on paper. This approach did lead to helping me see clues in the still-life better, so it was helpful.

After break he taught us thumbnails: a way to plan our drawings by testing a series of ideas. This led to me seeing how the scale of objects on my paper interacted with ‘zoom’ (so to speak). I would end up with more or less on a page than I intended bc I’d started smaller or bigger than what I wanted to fit in my scene. After doing this approach, I decided on a tightly zoomed in view of a pot (Image 3) because [if I’d taken it to to a fully finished drawing) it was the most interesting to me. I used my thumbnail notes to determine placement for my larger drawing.

The pot was rewarding because I learned a lot about proportion and scale. I used the pot as my reference point for measuring all the other items in my image and it worked well until I got to the bottle (not shown) and my bottle didn’t add up. This led me to realize I miscalculated the top of my pot, which I reworked and then all the visual measurements worked out throughout the page! This was a very encouraging way to end the class.

Each evening after class, I review with Benjamin what I learned. This is for my own reinforcement but also so he can help support me in my practice. He listened carefully to my frustrations and pitfalls during the first half of class and was able to think of an exercise for me to do to help me see my composition and know where I want to place the overall scene on the page. It was very effective and I am grateful! I was able to take that knowledge to my ink and watercolor class last night and succeed in getting things mostly where I wanted them on the page.

So I’m learning a lot. And it’s not always fun and it’s definitely not easy. But it’s worthwhile and I’m grateful for it.

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Hatching Practice

It took me a long time to get this finished, but I finally made it and I’m pleased with how it turned out!

This is my homework for tonight’s class. The syllabus said to practice contour drawing from a still life. And last class our instructor said to practice hatching. So dang. I hatched the heck out of this thing. And wow it took forever, but I did it! I realized once it was time to get hatching that I’d picked mostly all black things. But that just meant I had to get creative with my layering and my strokes. The Holga was my favorite to shade because it has such a great texture on it in real life and loose scribble hatching is my favorite kind to do.

The strap was my favorite to contour bc it was such a fun challenge to observe its form as it twisted around itself. Figuring out its shadow was also really fun, and honestly was easier to see and put in than the Holga shadow which kind of eluded me. I didn’t shade the strap at all because I wanted to keep my options open. I’m thinking about coming back in and doing it up as a stripey rainbow with colored pencils. I thought it would add a fun pop to this b&w image.

It took me so long to draw it that the sun had time to finish coming over our building and into our west-facing window which kind of confused my original understanding of the lighting a little. The light source still came from the same side but the sun was so much more diffused than the lamp-light’s crisp shadows... hence the struggle in seeing the faint-fuzzy sunshine shadows very well.

It was great practice, I learned a lot, and I’m kind of surprised and pleased to have it to tangibly hold and look at and see that it’s real and say to myself “I made that!” It’s the biggest and most detailed pen and ink drawing I’ve ever done.

The Perfect Postage-Stamp

Today’s outgoing mail. It’s been ages since I’ve sent something out (and even longer since I've illustrated an envelope) so I’m pretty happy about it.

But dang if I didn’t find the perfect stamp in my collection AFTER I affixed the floral one! I honestly would have just covered up the flower one if the mountain-cloud one had been tall enough to do so and if the new stamp hadn’t covered over that lovely line of the cloud-bank. Oh well!

I told myself that the flowers are fine because there were so many late season wildflowers out during our visit to the forest and seeing them was one of the distinct highlights of our trip. So the floral one isn’t completely random. But still though, that mountain stamp is A++

A Traveler's First Sketchbook

We went camping and I took my new sketchbook!

So, this ink and watercolor class I’m taking is a total dream. In Spring of 2016 I took my first very intro art workshops. I took a sprinkling of different classes to help me dial in my interests. I also started paying more attention to art styles online and emulating different styles to see what resonated. I ordered some books of my most very favorite childhood illustrator and started studying her work. I started buying art from other artists, which led to me meeting other artists too!

By August of that year I fell in love with pen and ink. I’d always loved it, and after going through the process of weeding out all the things I definitively wasn’t interested in, I came back to ink. I don’t think I’d taken my interest seriously because I’m also obsessed with color. But when I discovered that the favorite illustrator of my youth also did pen drawings in addition to her bright and beautiful painted illustrations, that clinched it for me. I knew I could have ink and color both.

By February of 2017 I was hesitantly putting pen to paper. But then I met Parsley and fell headlong into snail stamps: a necessary detour because the snails could be inked repetitively faster than I could draw. This gave me a chance to practice with watercolor and gain confidence as I painted the stamped snails (meanwhile Benjamin and I discovered a collaborative passion for stamp-carving!).

BUT NOW. It’s time! It’s time to bring ALL of this past observation, learning, and practice into its fullness: making my own ink drawings and painting them. I AM SO HAPPY I FOUND THIS CLASS!

And because my teacher is the best at helping me break through my self-doubt, I took my sketchbook on our camping trip and started documenting our weekend. I painted this tree! And while we haven’t covered any grisaille or painting in class yet, I had the confidence to make it up! I PUT A TREE ON PAPER! (Trees were my focus before snails, so this tree is a super big win because it’s a big time subject of interest and also I didn’t shy away and let my inner critic win).

And now I have a vision of what I want my sketchbook to look and feel like and I can’t wait to keep working on it!

Perfection as an Erasure of Myself

I’m taking two classes this month and while I introduced you to the observational drawing class in the last post, I haven’t shared about my grisaille watercolor drawing class!

Once again, this class also did a lot to increase my confidence in putting stuff on paper. The teacher is amazing at making drawing so friendly and approachable and overcoming your inner critic! He had great tips for not only how to better see things and translate them to paper, but also tips and tricks related to our art supplies as well.

Some of my favorite liberating takeaways from class are:
• Don’t worry about deviations or distortions, welcome them. This is what comprises your personal drawing style!
• When stuff turns out larger or smaller or gets missed in being part of your sketch, it’s not ‘wrong’ it’s an accurate reflection of what spoke to you (or not!). ERASING & PERFECTION ARE AN ERASURE OF OUR VERY SELVES. These interpretations are biographies of ourselves. How can we not put ourselves in our own drawings?! (I love this, y'all.)
• Pencil lines aren’t a drawing, they are instead a plan for a drawing to be done in ink (amen!)
• It’s not about getting it perfect, it’s about training my eyes to see contours, shadow, and light.
• Don’t be precious and protective of my drawings. This is how I learn and evolve! Try things, mess up, find what works & what I love. This is how evolution works! It takes time to dial it in! Going to extremes with style is how I tune into my own style.

We practiced contour line drawings from our own still lives that we got to make ourselves! Of course mine had all kinds of shells, but also a tincture bottle, a brass duck, a broom, my favorite color (the glass bottle), a candlestick, and grapes. All things that are meaningful to me. But, I’m still very slow and didn’t make it very far in my drawing in class. So here is a detail shot of a mostly finished shell necklace that I am quite proud of and a shell necklace that I started that I was feeling pretty good about and a whelk that I don’t love, but it’s alright.

As class wound down, we mixed our ink-washes and started reviewing the grisaille process, hatching, and shading. We also talked about breaking scenes down into common shapes. I left class equipped with a curiosity to know more about this style of drawing and I'm looking forward to next week's class!

Drawing is Discovery & Interpretation

Yesterday was my first art class: Observational Drawing. We started with a lecture where I got an overview of drawing principles, which was AWESOME. Here are my favorite things that I learned:

1. Drawing is imagination realized. (YES IT IS. That’s why I’ve always longed to do it! I have so much inside-stuff that wants to get out!! This is a self-evident statement but still makes the list because it felt so validating to my longings.)

2. Drawing is the origin of our world. It’s how all ideas become reality (blueprints for example!)

3. **It is a collection of time. An amalgamation of images translated over time. It’s not a single moment frozen in time (like photography) and it’s not a copy. It’s an essence of collected time and a *representation* of what we see. (The first part of that definition straight-up makes me swoon!)

4. It is organizing chaos. Figuring out what is and what isn’t.

5. It is discovery. By recording observations and putting them in sequence, you can learn something new!

6. Concept is what we think we know is there (our brain filling in the blanks and making assumptions) and perception is recording information directly from observation. So the goal is to help the eye and hand communicate directly without getting the brain involved and messing it up.

We did an opening exercise from the Bauhaus school of thought (new vocabulary word for me!) which helped loosen us up and get comfortable putting pencil to paper. It also demonstrated how we all individually interpret subjects differently.

Then we did blind gesture drawings, where we looked at the tableau and drew rough outlines of the shapes for five minutes without looking at our paper! Of course it was a mess, but it was another great way to get pencil on paper, make a mess, and then we learned how to use that mess to pull out helpful info and start editing our rough-draft! That’s what you see here. The beginnings of my edits. This took me an inordinate amount of time just to do one corner of the whole tableau but I’m really please with what I managed to get down and I got to practice my angle and proportion skills a LOT which was SO HELPFUL.

I love that our instructor had us start by making total ‘messes’ of the paper in purposeful ways because it made everything more approachable.

My favorite takeaways from yesterday's teachings are:

“There will always be problems in your drawing until you’re finished drawing. Prioritize the biggest problems first.” - This is very empowering! It helped me stop fighting trying to be perfect and to realize that the whole process of drawing is handling imperfection in itself. The whole point is to keep working at it until it’s finished.

Also, drawing is “discovery and interpretation” and I’m there to “follow the process and let it evolve from my original idea.” Drawing is the act of DOING (paired with the choices I make) and how I solve problems. When I’m drawing, I am not a photographer. It’s about “getting in and out of predicaments as I go and compromising my ideas to reality.” - That's all SO LIBERATING.

I don’t feel pressure to be perfect when I walk up to the blank page anymore. He’s completely turned it into a puzzle to solve or into a rough draft to write and work into a finished essay over time. I can solve puzzles! I can write essays! This teacher is really the BEST.

First Day of Art School!

Here's my “first day of art school photo!!”

For years I’ve wanted to go to art school. But I didn’t know that quality programs existed that offer individual classes that I can pick and choose from. I'm grateful that I can attend class without the whole issue of enrolling for a degree program, which is in no way an option financially. So now that I’ve figured that out, and given myself permission and space to follow-up on this life-long dream... I had my first real art class today!

From the moment I walked into the classroom I knew it was going to be great. Supplies were everywhere, the space was ruddy and well-worn, and easels were set up around a large still-life scene. Oh mercy! I was at once intimidated (but only a wee bit) and over the moon excited (a lot!). This is everything I’ve hoped and longed for!!

The instructor is amazing and so knowledgeable and encouraging. A couple of years ago, in an attempt to work towards my art dreams, I took a few workshops. They were alright, but didn’t give me what I was really needing. They were pretty informal and didn’t have offer much in the way of foundation or feedback.

But now! I’m gaining exposure to art history and conceptual frameworks for understanding art while practicing actual skills and receiving critique and personalized feedback! IT IS EVERYTHING I’VE WANTED!!

I'll be documenting my journey here as a way of holding myself accountable to making art (and being vulnerable with the challenges of the process). It will also give me a chance to review key things that I take away from classes so that I can reinforce them in my brain. This will be my journal space for some of my art journey: what I’m learning, practicing, and how I’m going about pursuing this childhood dream of being an artist.

Parsley's Big Adventure

I took a couple of days off from work strictly to work on creative projects long-held in my brain that I haven't gained any traction on. I got Parsley out of his home to join me on my desk while I worked, and I proceeded to not get a single thing done because I couldn't stop marveling at him and watching him and delighting in him and filming his every move!

We had the very best day together. He snailed all over the place! He explored the top of the desk, the underside, the edges of the tabletop, and up and down the legs. I had a cassette playing, one with some random piano instrumentals. At one point Chariots of Fire came on, and I admit it was the perfect Parsley soundtrack. He just looked so majestic and lovely making his slow u-turn on the table leg to head back up while that song played in the background, accompanying his adventure.

I now refer to that tape as Parsley's Soundtrack. And that song especially promises to evoke memories of our shared day together for a long time to come! I may not have made any progress on my snail-art ideas... but I sure did enjoy some extended hangout time with my most beloved muse. 

Colorful Snails

This past week I’ve been exploring some new ideas with the stamps and these are some of the fun things that have materialized. I had fun with inking patterns and texture on a black and white motif. I finally put brush to paper on a free-floating cosmic snail I've been thinking about for a while. I stamped over watercolor washes and cut out rainbow snails. And I stamped a multi-colored snail-postcard from our collection of hand-carved stamps. I'm really delighted with how everything turned out and now have even more ideas for future tests... particularly in black and white and a new spin on the cosmic snail motif.

Groundhog Day!

It’s Groundhog Day!

I hand drew and sent my first Groundhog Day card to my mom when I was in high school and I've kept that tradition going sporadically over the years since. On years when I missed sending out cards, she always asked about them! So it’s a pretty cherished tradition around here.

Earlier this week I was delighted to pair up with Benjamin to do a quick short-run of Ghog Day postcards. This lovely critter is a Hoary Marmot. They live at our beloved Mt. Rainier and have made our hikes more exciting with their prolific appearances! This sweet critter was carved from a photo we took on one of our hikes a few years ago. So this is a marmot we actually met!

As they are our own backyard “groundhogs” here in the PNW, this marmot was the perfect fit for being featured on this year’s card and I'm delighted his smiling face got to go out across the world to spread some seasonal cheer.