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These things are fun. I miss playing with them. These, and the pencils. I need to make some phone calls. It’s been too long.
Colors, colors, colors
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Category Archives: Drawing
Artist Date – Indianapolis Museum of Art
My friend Jem and I went on a bit of an Artist Date, as prescribed by The Artist’s Way. I was feeling the need for some inspiration, something to cause my brain to make different waves. I took a day off work, and in the morning we went to a coffee shop and worked on our drawings:
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Then in the afternoon we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art:
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Unfortunately, while they did have some cool kinetic sculpture (including work by Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile!!!!), those were in areas where I was not allowed to take pictures. I was able to shoot this wall, which is kind of cool, if not a seminal work by the originator of the mobile:
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Fair enough, the other stuff is in my head anyway, where it will do the most good!
The whole idea behind an Artist Date is to take the art half of yourself (or maybe it’s the art 7/8 or the art 3/4, whatever – you decide the exact equation) out and treat it well, show it a good time. In return, the art portion of you will grow and flourish and start helping you do really awesome stuff. It’s also part of a practice called “refilling the well,” where you replenish some of the energy needed to run the creative engine inside of you.
There were honestly some kind of scary moments in the museum, like when I realized I was writing down tons of names of sculptors, but almost nothing about photographers. What does that mean? Does it mean I’m not going to be doing photography? Does it mean I’m supposed to be a sculptor? Does it mean…well, what DOES it mean? I mean, that lamp, the one with all the brass on it – how do you do that? And those clocks! The clocks with the copper, brass, and steel faces! Those were gorgeous! How…can someone make a living like that? How do you make something so precise and so gorgeous? Many questions, no immediate answers. I guess that’s part of the price of admission with this stuff. (Actually, the IMA is free, which means my confusion and fear cost me nothing. Huzzah!)
Overall, I really enjoyed myself. I got some new ideas for sculpture work, and found out some fun stuff about the Art Nouveau movement. Things could get more interesting. I think we’re entering dangerous inspirational territory here. At any rate, Jem and I have refilled the well, so look for some fantasticness to occur here in the near future!
Affects and Side Affects
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RAM chip, chord book. Totally related, right? Well they are, sort of. Here on the blog where we are all about creativity, it’s no surprise that both of these are linked to my creative growth. Well, that, and I ordered them both off the interwebz, if you need one more obscure way they’re related. I know the mail media link is a thrilling one, but let’s put that aside and look at the whole creative thing, since that’s pretty much why I write on here all the time.
The RAM I hope is going to be a huge help with my photo stuff. You’ve no doubt noticed that the photo posting has slowed until it seems as if it has stopped altogether. It has not, I assure you. I’ve still been taking photos (almost!) every day. I have all of them either on my hard drive or on my camera. However, processing all those photos gets ridiculously time consuming, particularly when I have over a hundred to go through and I want to switch back and forth among five or six of them and pick the best one. Right about the time I start doing that, the virtual memory in my lappy kicks on, and then everything…slows……..to……….a………….crawl. It can take me two hours just to pick through ten photos. Granted, I’m a perfectionist, but the slowosity of my hardware isn’t helping things any.
Enter my brother, who informs me that the whole slowness thing is caused by this virtual memory issue, and that if I got more RAM I could whip through dozens upon dozens of pictures as well as run iTunes, Word, and my web browser all at once and never have a hiccup. This sounds like more than a good deal to me, so I only kind of reluctantly shell out money I don’t really have to get this stuff which should perform what is really an invaluable function: that of making my creative efforts more easily accessible and enjoyable. This is pretty key stuff, as in the past I’ve hamstrung creative efforts by trying to get by with the minimum. Then I’ve been unhappy with the results, and then I’ve called the whole thing a failure. I’m pretty much done with working against myself these days, and I realize that my creative efforst are important enough and valuable enough that I actually DO deserve to spend money on them.
This sort of thing – purchasing the RAM – is the sort of side-effect that working toward a goal has. I didn’t set out to update my computer when I decided to take more pictures, it’s just something that has come with the territory. I didn’t set out to learn more about how my computer operates, but it happened. The same thing was the case with my outboard hard drive – just happened as a matter of course. It’s really interesting to see how all this stuff comes about when I pick up on something and go after it.
The same sort of thing has happened with my drawing stuff. I started with a handfull of pencils that a friend had given me. Now I have a whole box full that I’ve bought for myself. I also have a sketch book and some regular lead pencils for other types of drawing. I’ve been hanging out a lot more with a friend of mine, because she likes drawing. I’ve been noticing visual art more and taking a greater interest since I started drawing. There are some other projects in the works related to this subject, and I hope I’ll have some other developments to report on in the coming months. It looks like I’m going to learn matting and framing in the near future as well – not that I planned on that, it…just happened. I think there’s a trip to the art museum coming up as well related to “refilling the well” as the Artist’s Way puts it, and that will be an outgrowth of all this drawing stuff too.
The guitar chord book – well, that’s kind of obvious, now isn’t it? I…didn’t really plan on buying that, but they guy who is teaching me things, he said that’s the book he first used over forty years ago. I wanted to learn a few things, so I’m going to give this a shot. Working on guitar stuff has led me to listen to music differently and led to new conversations with new people. This interest was also responsible for my nephew getting a ukelele from me for his birthday this year, in a weird sort of related twist. The people who are being affected by my interests are not just me, which is a cool thing to note. (If my nephew ever ends up on Youtube singing Jason Mraz tunes, I’ll be sure to let you know.)
Now, off to work on some photos or guitar or whatever the heck else…
Combined talents
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Jem is working with me on all of these. She is actually saving the life of the one on the right, which I started and disliked greatly. It’s now looking pretty effing cool. She had to remind me, “Wait until it’s done.” Yeah…I knew that.
Sharpening Up
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Jem came over to draw. Jem got a box of new pencils for Christmas. 72 pencils. None of them were sharpened. None. It took more than an hour, but they are now!
Influences and Inspirations
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Following up the steam engine (train wreck?) that is my interest in automotive art, I picked up a bunch of magazines and books with different images that seemed like they might provide some push and fire to the whole shebang. Juxtapoz magazine does “low brow” art – weird stuff that’s cool and different and likely isn’t going to show up in any kind of fine art gallery or event anytime soon. The top and middle images are from that mag. The bottom one I got kind of on a whim, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s a custom car magazine from Japan. It’s written in both Japanese and English, and I have to say that those guys have built some pretty impressive machines over there, especially considering the fact that they can’t just drive down to some junkyard and pick this stuff up locally.
Keep trying
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Here are some more efforts from me on the caricature “monster car” drawing style that was typical of shirt and decal designs of the sixties and seventies. To the left you can see a couple of examples of the sort of thing I’m aiming toward. This stuff was first popularly made known by a guy named Ed Roth, although it had been going on in one form or another for a few years prior. Roth was the guy that put it out in the public eye on a wide scale. Later on Roth concentrated on building his crazy show car creations like the Mysterion, and he left the shirt design in the capable hands of guys like Ed Newton.
I’ve always enjoyed art like that, but never figured I could hack that. These days I don’t much care if I can be the best, at least not enough to stop me from at least trying to have some fun with it. These are pretty amateur efforts, but they are still fun, and it seems that the second and third drawings are slightly better than the first, so there may be hope for me yet. I may not be another Ed Newton, but maybe I can at least get to the point where someone looks at the picture and goes, “Cool…what kind of car is that supposed to be?”
Rough start
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It doesn’t matter how good your gear is, if you don’t have the ability, 20 bucks worth of pencils and markers isn’t going to make you a master of the arts on the first try. I didn’t squish this photo, either. I drew the car squished! Niiiiice. Oh well, hopefully I’ll improve? It took five days to get up enough courage to attempt this. I read most of the book and kept coming up with reasons to do other things, but tonight I finally put the pencil to the paper, so that is pretty awesome. It turned out better and worse than I hoped, but at least now there are pencil marks on the page. Even if a person is not destined to greatness in an effort, there is always room for some amount of improvement, and I hope that with practice I will improve to the point that I am at least proficient enough to satisfy and amuse myself and maybe make a buck occasionally. In the meantime, I’m being reminded of a LOT of stuff I forgot from high school art classes!
More art with Jem
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The one on the right is looking pretty sweet by now. This evening we finished up the separate pieces of that project, so there wasn’t a way to switch on and off on it. To give both of us something to do, we decided to start another project and swap between the two. I pulled out a scrap that was sitting around and seemed to be of a size that we could finish the two projects at about the same time. I started the design while Jem colored on the larger piece, then she added her own design work to the smaller one while I traded off and did color on the larger piece. I think Jem did some amazing color work on the smaller one. We’re tossing around different ideas on how we want to use color in the future, and I’ve purchased a few different supplies to help us out on some things later. This just keeps getting more and more interesting.
Another log on the fire
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I bought this book for myself today, largely because playing in a band, drawing abstract art with Jem, learning guitar, working on photography, writing novels and short stories, building rolling ball sculpture, and drag racing didn’t occupy my time enough already.
Something’s definitely wrong with me, but it’ll be fun finding out what it is!