Besides loving to draw, it makes me happy to help other people learn to draw. A friend named Anne Brown has been asking me for many years to give a workshop up here, and since she offered to host it and for whatever reason I now have some time, (OH, because I’m not preparing for a solo show since I still have paintings from the last solo show, phooey but yea), we scheduled this drawing workshop.
In 1990, I drew the Exeter Woman’s Club. (Yes, that is the correct name—I just work here.) It was part of a set of notecards called Tulare County Landmarks. No one can find the original drawing. All I have is this scan of a notecard with a hole punched in the corner.
The club asked to use the drawing, and had an old scan or some other format, not really up to my standards. But I didn’t mind and gave my permission. (It is rare that people know the copyright law which is that the artist holds the copyright, so I was impressed and thankful that they asked.)
They are celebrating a big anniversary (100 years?) and plan to publish a cookbook. The president of the club and I are longtime friends, and we began discussing the cover of the cookbook. I couldn’t stand the idea of a shoddy reproduction of my old drawing (not that it was great 35 years ago), so my friend went spelunking, unsuccessfully, in all sorts of places trying to locate the drawing.
Because I hit a slow time (feast or famine in the art business), I asked her to send me a photograph so that I could draw it again. She complied, and I dove in immediately on a rainy day.
Before finishing, I scanned it without a background, since that is how I drew it 30 years ago.
Then I drew in a dramatic background and scanned it again.
My friend asked me to make a couple of adjustments, which were easy to do. Here it is in its final form. After growing the new shrubs into a hedge with my pencils, I photoshopped the palm trees because of a strange request to shorten them by 1/4”. (As I said earlier, I just work here.)
I love to draw (But don’t ask me for a freebie, okay?)
P.S. My friend did NOT ask for a freebie—I offered. She did ask for some modifications, and I happily complied.
Because it is raining while I write this, I am thinking about water. A few years ago, we had a very wet winter after several dry ones, and I became obsessed with watching flowing water.
Here are some of the results. I was quite pleased with the drawings and pretty proud of the titles too. (There were more, but they sold.)
All the unframed pieces are 9×12”.
I’ve had these too long, and this is a slow month. So, for the rest of the month of March, THESE ARE NOW ALL HALF-PRICE! (half of what is written beneath each one here on the blog) See? Reckless.
(Oh hush up, snobby Art World who says art should never be discounted! I’m in Tulare County, and I’m the boss of my art.)
They aren’t on my website, so you’ll have to talk to me in person, text me at five-five-nine-561-7606, or email me at cabinart-at-cabinart-dot-net (both written this way so the cyberjerks don’t mess with me.)
Yes, there will be sales tax.
If they don’t sell, I might just shred them. Ooh, feeling really really reckless!
“Reckless” is a weird word. If one is feeling reckless, one might not remain wreckless.
It is important that we are kind and complimentary to one another in drawing lessons. It is equally important that we are honest.
AH is my friend and also one of my drawing students. Since she owns dogs, she saw something a little wrong in my drawing on the dog with the black head. I own cats (or perhaps they own me, because they are certainly manipulative and bossy), and haven’t had a dog as an adult.
Her suggestion was accurate and helpful.
I made the correction and finished the drawing. (I bet you can’t even tell what was wrong!)
And now we return to my bosses.
While I was waiting to hear if JM approved the house, I began one of the dogs. Just like on the itty-bitty-face drawing, I am leaving a gap between the different subjects to fill in later.
(This picture is overexposed on the left side of the house because my giant magnifying light is washing it out.)
No emailed instructions arrived, but I had time to keep working on the drawing, so I kept going.
Finally, this was as far as I felt comfortable going without further input from JM.
The dogs’ names were Timber and Tahoe, they were part wolf, and that’s all I know about them.
What a treat to be able to draw this, to pay off my old debt, to reconnect with my old friend, and to just use pencils, my favorite medium.
Many years ago, there was a fabulous little place in Lemon Cove called Foothill Fruit. The owner was a terrific baker and sandwich maker, and some mornings I woke up just ravenous for one of her scones and French Roast coffee. I worked there for a few brief months (it used to be necesary to get a second job during my slower winter months in order to pay my taxes—thank you, Sacramento). When I was no longer working there, we were on trade: Trail Guy (his name was Road Guy back then) and I ate, and I would eventually do a complicated collage drawing of her dogs and her home.
I used my film camera to take some photos, and then I did a few sketches. The owner, whom we will call JM, couldn’t make up her mind as to how she wanted her dogs and home depicted. Then, she moved far away.
This debt in the form of an undrawn picture bothered me quite a lot. She and I weren’t close friends, but we were on good terms and enjoyed each other’s company. I couldn’t figure out how to reach her (this was pre-internet), so I filed the notes and photos under “Incomplete Jobs” or some such thing.
At an oil painting workshop in January of this year, one of the participants asked me if I knew JM. Well, saw off my legs and call me Shorty! The participant put me in touch with JM, I dug out the photos, we started emailing, and she approved this sketch.
If I hadn’t just completed that commissioned pencil drawing with all those little bitty faces, this would have been very daunting. However, I was feeling ultra capable and competent at my craft. Cocky, perhaps? Nope, just confident. (Confidence is a smile; arrogance is a sneer.)
I emailed this to JM to ask if there was anything that needed to be corrected. Stay tuned. . .
This painting seemed too bright. After studying it awhile, I decided to only tone down the brilliant green in the distance to push it farther away. (“Push it” visually, not warp the canvas.)
This is after:
Hmmm, that’s a pretty subtle difference, perhaps even dubious*. Might want to try that again later. In addition, the photography colors are significantly different.
Never mind. Let’s move ahead, shall we?
This painting looks scary in its beginning stages unless you happen to see it while galloping by on the back of a fast horse (or see it the size of a postage stamp on your phone).
After these fairly dissatisfactory adventures in oil painting, I returned to my pencils. This one has a story, which I’ll tell you when I know the ending. This is the sketch I sent to the customer to see if it matched her design expectations:
To be continued. . .
When I started my art business, I named it “Cabin Art”, or perhaps “Cabinart*”, because my favorite subject matter was architecture, mostly cabins.
As my skill and confidence grew, my favorite subject to draw (and eventually paint) was the Oak Grove Bridge.
During a particularly wet winter after several dry ones, I became enamored with rushing water.
Next, it was orange groves with foothills and mountains in the distance.
After a handful of years of painting multiple variations on this theme, I seem to be transitioning into beach scenes.
More on that later. . . Monday is time for a monthly Learned post.
*For a typo-psycho, I certainly am ambivalent about the spelling of my own studio name.
Here are a few thoughts about drawing with pencils. First, have you noticed that when galleries tell the medium used in making a piece of art, they say things like “oil”, “watercolor”, “acrylic”, or “pencil”? “Pencil”???? Isn’t that actually graphite? In a sense, calling a pencil drawing “pencil” is somewhat like calling a painting “brush”.
Never mind.
The drawing has been temporarily removed from the blog because it is going to be a surprise for some people.
When the customers retrieved their pencil drawing with all those little bitty faces, they wanted to know how in the world I was able to make those tiny visages legible.
The way I got those tiny faces was with little itty bitty adjustments while working under a magnifying glass using these tools, working for many hours on nothing but those faces, refining with each pass, turning the photos and the drawing upside down in order to evaluate the shapes, the darkness, the blurry quality, and then mimic what I saw.
That teensy eraser came into being about 5 years ago. (Okay, if it feels like 5, it was probably 8 or 10 years ago.) How were we able to draw without such a tool?? There were other eraser sticks, but none so tiny. We relied on erasing shields to isolate small spaces, which were never small enough. Now, with the Tombow Mono Zero, we sometimes want an even smaller eraser.
Those sharpeners by Blackwing are designed to give a long point, using 2 different blades. First, use the hole on the left for a looonnnng lead (not actually lead—Pb—but graphite). The hole on the right makes an extremely sharp point, unless the blades have worn themselves dull, which mine have. I had to break out my new one, which I had been holding back on using because it cost $14!! For a pencil sharpener??
Since I no longer have one in reserve, it seemed prudent to buy another backup. Now they are $16 on Amazon. SIXTEEN DOLLARS FOR A PENCIL SHARPENER!
Sometimes it feels good to just sketch quickly, without anything other than a Blackwing pencil I usually keep with me, using any available blank piece of paper. It is a different kind of challenge, which is probably good practice.
Yeppers. Time to raise my prices.
P.S. SIXTEEN DOLLARS FOR A PENCIL SHARPENER?? I’m struggling with this concept, which you may have noticed.
For the first time in many years, I kept track of how long this took. Getting these little people to be themselves took a very very long time. (Don’t ask—not telling). It is probably (past) time to raise my prices.