Category: Drawing

Brooklyn Travel Journal

 

We spent the last two weeks of September in Brooklyn, New York, so of course I logged our trip with a Salvage Collage junk journal.

I didn’t make my own journal, but used one created by my friend Laurie at Black Dog Studio. It came with a nice variety of papers, including some heavy watercolor paper, so I was able to adhere all kinds of papers, post cards, street fliers, and whatever paper materials I could scrounge. It was a bit more challenging on this trip because during a pandemic, there isn’t as much print material as usual. But being the scrounger and junker that I am, I managed to cobble together a pretty interesting journal.

We rented a tiny Airbnb apartment in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. I set up my make do studio on a tiny desk in the corner of the tiny bedroom with a nice view of the fire escape and the Manhattan skyline in the distance.

I hunted and gathered each day, my piles of possible fodder growing and expanding, and I used the bed as a place to sort.

 

Every night after a day of exploring Brooklyn (or Manhattan), I returned to our apartment, where I cut and pasted the scraps I gathered during the day, into my journal. The journal began to take on a life of its own. I didn’t keep a chronological travelogue, or even write about our days. I just ripped, cut, and glued, creating a collaged journal with visual reminders of our first big trip in three years.

On our return trip, we turned a two hour layover in San Francisco into a three day layover (so I could see the Joan Mitchell exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). My travel journal just kept growing, setting up my studio on the desk in the corner of our hotel room.

 

#the100dayproject – Halfway Through

On January 31st, I jumped into the #100dayproject. This project is facilitated by Lindsay Jean Thompson and you can learn more about the project by simply clicking right HERE. If you don’t feel like clicking, here is what the project is about:

Pick something you want to do every day for the 100 days of the project. You’ll post each instance of 100 on your Instagram account with the hashtag #The100DayProject. What can you do? Anything at all! Paint, draw, dance, knit, doodle, sing, brush your teeth. Once you have an idea, here are some practical tips: Make sure you can do it in 5-10 minutes a day. More time is nice if you have it, but if it’s a really time-consuming project you probably won’t do it every day. What are you curious about? What do you love to do just because? What do you want to get better at? Brainstorm with a friend or make a list of ideas. What have other people done that you find interesting? Or maybe your project is 100 days of figuring out what to do. That’s cool! Another good place to start is by thinking about what you want to get out of doing the project.

I decided I wanted to explore working on a non precious substrate and what is more non precious than brown paper bags. I carry my own reusable bags with me, but somehow I always seem to accumulate brown paper bags that I don’t throw away (or even recycle). It might be from when I order take out, or when I purchase something that doesn’t fit into the portable cloth bag I carry in my purse. For whatever reason, I decided to tear up an abundant resource and experiment with different kinds of art on a scrap of brown craft paper.

My first post on Instagram (you can find me at DaynaLovesArt) at the beginning of the project:

I’m jumping in to #the100dayproject and the challenge I’ve set up for my 100 day project is to paint a quick abstract painting or make paint marks on a scrap of a brown paper bag every day for 100 days. I needed something quick and easy, portable for my sometimes portable life, and a way to try out new ideas: colors, composition, marks…… and to create collage fodder for my stash…….and imagine the cool jumbo collage I can make with all of the brown paper bag painted scraps. #the100dayswithdayna 1/100

Now here it is 50 days later, the halfway point. Over the past 50 days I have created in my painting studio, in my basement studio, along the Oregon Coast, in Northern California, in Gig Harbor, and in Astoria. I get around. I have also used a multitude of materials, including (disclaimer: but not limited to):  acrylic paint, Stabilo pencils, plaster, oil paint, cold wax, collage, black and white photos, book scraps, varnish, charcoal, Woody pencils, acrylic pens, and oil pastels.

I have already incorporated some of the pieces I have created in other projects, Salvage Collage on book boards, and in my 2021 journal.

In no particular order, here is a smattering of the pieces I have created on the lowly brown paper bag.

And only 50 more days to go!

 

 

Intro to Drawing

In all my years of painting and making art, I’ve never taken a good old fashioned drawing class. I’ve never been taught about using sighting sticks, measuring perspectives, figuring out a base unit of measure, drawing negative spaces, or learning about the six elements of light. I’ve never had a particularly strong desire to sketch, although I have always kept visual journals for recording ideas and inspiration. I’ve sketched out concepts, played with color combinations, and have always loved experimenting with compositions. So when my artist friend Heidi posted on Facebook last December that she had a couple of spaces open in her Introduction to Drawing class at our local community college, it caught my attention. And I decided to jump in and take a formal drawing class. . . . . and it kind of kicked my butt.

The class met twice a week from 6:00-9:00 pm. I went the first night and got the syllabus, learned everyone’s name (there were about 15 of us), and got excited about the list of supplies, because, well, I love art supplies. The next day I went to the art store and meticulously searched for the various numbered pencils (8B, 6B, 4B, 2B, HB, 2H), vine and compressed charcoal, a kneaded rubber eraser AND a Staedtler Mars plastic eraser, a blending stump (I’ve always wondered what those crazy things were used for), a large pad of newsprint as well as a pad of nice drawing paper, a journal for drawing exercises, other miscellaneous supplies, and a tote for carrying all of my supplies back and forth. On our first night we were assigned a flat file locker for storing our paper and supplies; I felt like a real student.

Besides being in class six hours a week, Heidi warned us that drawing assignments outside of class would take us six to seven hours a week, which meant that I would be devoting 12-13 hours a week drawing. Immersion seemed to be a good way to learn the basics and become familiar with learning how to draw. I already owned the text for the class, the drawing Bible by Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Throughout the early chapters Betty kept saying how easy it is to learn to draw. I disagree.

Here’s how the class went. We were given our assignments on Wednesday. We would show up at class on Monday and everyone would put their journals on the table, displaying the homework we had done. Heidi would review each drawing, commenting on what had been done correctly (“I believe you, I believe you,” she would say as she carefully looked at our lines and measurements), and what needed more work. We then had the opportunity to go home and make corrections before bringing our journal back on Wednesday for final review and grading by Heidi, each student meeting privately for this portion of the review.

Class time was spent learning new concepts and then drawing. Heidi would set up a still life, adding crazy things to make it more challenging, then we would do our best to apply the concepts and draw what we saw from our perspective in the classroom. Students often worked in pairs doing peer reviews of each others work. It required setting aside ego and being brave. DIGRESSION: The “closet” where the still life objects were stored, well, that made me a bit weak in the knees. Here’s a look inside the closet just because I love this sort of thing:

One evening, there was a young man kind of hanging around in the classroom. He disappeared into a small side closet and when he emerged wearing a tank top and shorts, Heidi announced we would be doing gesture drawing and we had a LIVE MODEL. Okay, now we’re talking.

We did a series of one-minute gesture drawings, and for each one, our model changed position. What I drew wasn’t particularly great, but I sure had fun experimenting. And with only a minute (then two minutes) to draw, there was no time for being judgmental. I could do quick gesture drawings all night. And we did.

 

The six elements of light. Who knew. Highlight, light, shadow, core of shadow, reflected light, cast shadow. Did you know there are a LOT of You Tube videos on drawing the shadows of an egg?

 

I’m not going to share a lot of my drawings, but I’ll share a few pages from my journal. The following are still lifes we set up at home and illustrate using the skills of sighting, basic unit of measuring, the use of light and shadows, drawing negative shapes, varying values – just about everything we have been working on for the past six weeks.

What I learned in class besides the concepts? Learning to see, to quiet my brain and train my eye to draw what it sees, not what my brain thinks something should look like, which is basically drawing from the right side of my brain rather than the left side. It is a lot harder than it sounds, especially since my left brain is pretty strong willed and stubborn. I was grateful to have Heidi as my teacher and guide. She has been patient, creative, and inventive in how she taught all of these techniques, and she was funny, which goes a long ways when learning something challenging and tedious.

And now I’m ready to get back to something I know: painting.