breakfast first

May we suggest

Font Shop is offering their newest font, Absara, in light weight for free. I've used it when printing a couple of things and found it quite nice.

Drawing class, episode 7

Last Wednesday night I headed over to drawing class for the first time in weeks, having missed the two previous classes on account of travelling. Unfortunately, I also hadn't so much as touched a pencil during those weeks, so I was feeling really out of practice.

I missed the bus I regularly take to class, so I arrived a few minutes after the official start time and was surprised to see only one other student in the room (one of the original guys from the class). The instructor suggested we wait a while for other students, since traffic was bad that night, so the three of us talked about the coming Green Line monorail and other random stuff. After twenty minutes, the instructor gave up waiting and started the lesson on shading.

We had a quick discussion of how light and shadow appear on the basic shapes (cubes, cones, spheres) and how to represent light values. As always, the concepts are straight-forward, but their application is not for me. As an exercise, the instructor grabbed two sheets of plain paper, crumpled one up a bit, set it atop the other sheet of paper., and put it under a spotlight. The other student and I were to make a shaded drawing of the sheets of paper (and the table they rested on). The finished product should have no lines, the instructor told us, just edges of contrast. Right.

I quickly discovered that my drawing was even rustier than I'd thought -- I had a very difficult time even getting the general outline of the picture on the page, once again underscoring the need for at least 15 minutes of practice every day. While we were plugging away on the drawing, another student came in and got the shading speed-lesson. She then joined us in drawing the crumpled paper. About ten minutes later, another student showed up, got the scoop on shading, and went to work.

Just about the time when I was giving up on my drawing, the instructor told us to take a break from what we were doing to go next door to the "real" art class, where they once again had a live model, to practice more fast figure drawing. With my being completely rusty, you can imagine how well this worked out, despite the model holding each pose for a leisurely 45 seconds or so. I drew stick figures for about twenty minutes or so before we headed back to our classroom, were the crumpled paper waited patiently.

We all got back to work, but after two minutes or so, I just got really annoyed. Nothing I was doing to the drawing was improving it at that point, and pushing harder wasn't going to help me learn anything, so I called the instructor over (he had just been off on his own) and told him so. "What do I do with this drawing?" I asked. He sat down, squinted at the crumpled paper, and started reworking my drawing. He wasn't explaining what he was doing, but at least I got to watch someone who knew what he was doing. He (and the other students) drew on and on while I looked over shoulder. After about twenty minutes, he turned to me and said, "I think you pulled a Tom Sawyer on me." Sort of, I said, but in this case I didn't know how to paint the fence myself. He continued working on the drawing until the end of the class, when we all put the drawings up on the wall to see how they turned out. "Mine" was definitely the best.

Our homework for next week is to draw a shaded self-portrait; no lines. That seems so unappealing to me that I think I may just not do it -- I'd rather spend the time working on basic sketching rather than force myself to try something trickier. Next week's our last class anyway. The instructor's keeping the topic of the final class a surprise, so it's sure to be a doozy.

Drawing class, take 5

The title's a bit misleading, as I cut class tonight so I could pack. Miss J and I are headed down to San Francisco tomorrow for business, but we'll also be there for our anniversary on Monday, which we're really happy about. It's not by design, but we've ended up spending every anniversary in San Francisco. This one will make eight -- hard to believe. It seems like only yesterday that Mr. TD was going wild in the bus we'd rented, post-reception, on the way to celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

It was on our first anniversary that I surprised Jennifer with a trip to SF (neither of us had ever been), and that's when we fell in love with the city. A few short months later, we were living there, a thousand little pieces having magically fallen into place. I can't wait to be back, if only for a week.

Storage, comrade!

I'm excited to report that some of i-drive.com's Soviet propaganda-style artwork can be found here (3rd row down), in the designer's portfolio. When I briefly worked for i-drive, this art was everywhere in the company -- shirts, stickers, and best of all, on giant banners in our very, very dot-com office. I must admit, I found the banners strangely inspiring.

Drawing class, take 4: Nude and Rude

Tonight marked the half-way point in the drawing class, which is a mere eight weeks. It seems that the student population has settled down into just five students (myself included), which is a nice size.

Tonight we started off by looking at the drawings of old shoes that we were to do for homework. I remember the instructor saying that this was supposed to be a line drawing, and yet three of the five students did shaded drawings, and to be honest, they were pretty great looking and quite evocative. I did the best I could with a simple pair of square-toed dress shoes. The results were...uninspiring, to put it mildly. Manolo Blahnik, you have nothing to worry about.

Then we launched immediately into the exercises. For the first one, the instructor sat on a stool on a raised platform while we spread out in a circle around him. He told us to take five minutes to draw him with our non-dominant hand. Although this was difficult, especially under that time limit, the result turned out better than I would have expected -- at least you can make out what it is, even if the individual lines looked like the sloppy path of a drunken driver.

After the five minutes were up, the instructor came around to look at our drawings and told us to circulate and look at each other's drawings. Once again, I was amazed at how good everyone else's drawings looked. Are they progressing while I'm not, or are they just drawing sharks who knew what they're doing all along? I haven't decided.

For the next exercise, we had to do a two minute blind contour drawing of the instructor. This involves setting your pencil on the paper, and drawing the subject without lifting your pencil and without looking at your paper. Had I not heard about this before from Dave Bort, I might have just given up right there. But I took a stab at it, and after two minutes had a Frankenstein head and torso attached to a pretty good rendition of a leg from the Charlie's Angels logo. And the shoe was pretty damn good, if I do say so.

The instructor felt differently. He came over and said, "This is all you have after two minutes? No, no! You need to go much faster. You need to loosen up. Maybe you should have a shot of whiskey before you draw." I told him I was absolutely game for that. Meanwhile, he liked everyone else's contour drawings.

So we did it again, only this time, we switched poses after one minute -- although we were to continue drawing the contour. I tried to go faster this time, and the result was even more chaotic, and met with more complaints about how I needed to go faster and loosen up. Hey, I agree, but I think it takes time.

Onto the next exercise. For this one, we first divided our page up into six equal panels. We were then told that we were to draw the instructor, head to toe, in six poses, one in each panel, and had two minutes to complete each pose. We would move immediately from one pose to the next. Needless to say, my results were laughable -- not more than stick figures. Once again we circulated and examined each other's drawings. I couldn't believe what other people were able to accomplish in those same two minutes. One guy in particular, Mark, produced really nice, artistic images, although he beat himself up over not fitting the entire scene in the panels. I felt no pity for him.

Next exercise: same as the previous, only one minute per pose. Results: more laughter.

Next exercise: same as the previous, only thirty seconds per pose. Results: hysteria.

Next exercise: same as the previous, only fifteen seconds per pose. Results: uttery lunacy.

While I struggled under the gun to figure out where to draw a single line, my fellow students were refining their drawings like Picasso's bulls. How humiliating.

But then came a twist in the plans: the classroom next to ours was occupied by another, but large, drawing class, full of actual art students (taking that class for credit). They were using a live model and were doing gesture drawings, so our instructor asked if we could join them to do sketches, and so we did.

This class was completely unlike ours. The room was enormous, and the thirty or more art students, mostly college aged, worked on large easels in a circle around a nude woman holding a seriously contorted pose while music blared. The model -- a fairly fit, late twenties platinum bleached hipster with large barbed wire-ish tattoos running across her shoulders and down her leg -- shifted from one crazy, unnatural pose to the next crazy, unnatural pose about every 30 seconds. We were to draw each of these poses.

Hell, if I couldn't draw a man sitting on a stool in 30 seconds, I pretty much knew I had no chance at this. And, surprise! I was right. However, I did discover one thing: after about 15 minutes of drawing, I changed from using the point of my pencil to the side of the lead, and that made a big difference -- somehow that caused me to loosen up a bit, to draw more flowing lines, and to produce drawings with a least a tiny touch of style. The other discovery I made was that by concentrating first on the negative spaces, like the gap between a bent arm and the torso, I produced better results. "Better", not "good", but still.

The live model drawing only lasted about 30 minutes or so, since the real art class finished earlier than ours. So we went back to our old classroom and went over the drawings from the model. After that, we drew a negative space image of the instructor sitting on a ladder, which was a relaxing way to wind down.

Our homework for next week is to draw a perspective image of a room in our home, since we'll be working on perspective for the next two weeks. Why we have to produce a drawing of a type we haven't studied yet, I don't know.

Now that's perspective

These images of sidewalk chalk art are amazing.

Drawing class, take 3

I just got back from my third drawing class. More shake-up in the roster tonight: only five students; the two original women, two of the original men, and me. Gone were the young girls from last week, and still gone was one of the original men. Anyway, it made for a small, quiet class.

We started off once again by looking over our homework from last week. The assignment was to draw one of your hands in four positions. I found this to be a very difficult assignment, but I tried to compensate for my lack of talent with a bit of originality. Miss J knows how to sign the alphabet, so I thought that would be a good angle. We thought about four letter words to use, and after the requisite jokes, she suggested I use "love" (she also suggested "hate", just like Meatloaf in The Rocky Horror Picture Show). That lead me to think of making a sign language version of the famous love stamp.

We had a busy weekend with out of town friends visiting, so I didn't get start on the assignment until Monday night, and found that it took me forever to get down even a badly drawn cartoon hand. I sketched a page full of small hand "studies" -- that word is definitely too grandiose for what I did -- and then drew two more hands on a second sheet (the letter E and the letter V). I liked the way the E and the V looked, despite being pretty small, and decided to just go with them as part of my assignment. So on Tuesday night I finished up, stranglely spelling love backwards in small, signed hands.

When we looked at them in class tonight, the instructor pretty much beat me up over their size, as I expected. Because some people were late to class, we only looked at two other students' drawings -- one was okay, the other was good (although he cheated, it turns out: rather than draw his own hand, I heard him tell another student that he drew hands he found in photos on the internet).

After a little discussion, our first exercise of the night was about working in negative spaces. So the instructor threw large painting easels in a haphazard pile (so there were a lot of intersecting straight lines) and told us to draw not the easels, but the space in between the easels. You start by picking some enclosed geometric figure in space in the pile, draw the outline on the page, and shade it in. Then you draw an adjacent enclosed geometric figure, shade that in, and continue. what you end up with is the contour of the easels in the white of the paper. This was a tedious and slow exercise, but I really got into it and did a pretty good job. The instructor even complimented my drawing -- definitely a first.

After a break, we went back to the easel pile, but this time we were to draw both the negative and the positive. I found that the work I had done with the negative spaces definitely helped me on the second exercise, although my results came out quite poorly. My sense of proportion and perspective definitely leaves a lot to be desired.

The best part of class tonight was getting to see some of the instructor's work. He brought in three pen and ink drawings, since a student had asked about them last week. The drawings were just amazing -- so beautiful and so detailed. One was of a barn-like house, another was of a station wagon sitting outside a cottage, and the last was of a body of water under a bridge. He told us he'd made the drawings in the field; each one had taken about an afternoon to do, while he sketched from a canvas camp chair. They were exactly the type of drawings I hope to be able to do someday.

Our assignment for next week is an odd one: take an old pair of shoes, arrange them any way you like, and draw them in as much detail as possible. We'll see how that goes.

Drawing class, take 2

I attended my second drawing class tonight, and overall, it was much better than the first one -- far less rambling by the teacher, although his pace remained about the same. There was quite a change in the student line up. Two men from the first class weren't there tonight (dropped out?), but two new women arrived, and with them the average age of the students plummeted. I am now the oldest student in the class, or at least a close runner-up.

We started the class by tacking up our self-portrait homework from last week, and the teacher critiqued them and marked them up a bit. He started with mine, which provided quite a bit of fodder for discussion. Head too wide. Eyes too high. Nose too long. Lips too low. And so on. Mine really was the worst in the class, I have to admit. Only one person, the woman I was paired up with last week, received praise for her work (and it really was good).

Next we had a quick recap of the proportions of the human face from the front, then we looked at the proportions of the head from the side. The main trick is this: the distance from the center of the eye to the chin is equal to the distance from the back of the eye to the back of the ear, so that's how you figure out where to put the ear on the head. Easy enough to understand. Nice how it all works out like that.

So then it was on to some exercises. We were to pair up as model and artist again, first doing a frontal portrait to warm up, then a profile portrait. I paired up with one of the new women, Ms. C, who is essentially fresh out of high school and new in town. She was sporting a shirt that read, in rhinestone script, "Forever Juicy, XXOO". (When the teacher asked her the "How do you pay for this class?" question, she answered, "I have a trust fund that takes care of that.") I acted as the model first, and it turns out that Ms. C is pretty good at drawing faces, and pretty fast, finishing before the fifteen minutes allotted. I capitalized on the extra time and got a head-start on my portrait, which I desperately needed. I just couldn't get going -- I had trouble even drawing a reasonable oval for her face. I think I need to warm up before the next class.

My profile drawing of her worked out a little bit better. Rather than critique at the end, the instructor came by the desk where we were set up and marked up the drawing while I watched, holding it up to Ms. C's face to show me how he was making it more accurate. Watching the way he improved the drawing was the most valuable part of the class.

For the final exercise of the night, the instructor climbed onto a stool, on top of desk, got into a pose, and asked us to sketch him head-to-toe. "Fifteen minutes, let's see what you come up with." I barely knew where to begin. How to tackle something that large? I spent most of the fifteen minutes fumbling around, but towards the end I start to put some lines down of things that caught my eye. I ended up with a sketch that was out of proportion and lacking in detail, but I was in some small way happy with a couple of elements I had captured. This may sound really stupid, but I felt the way that I noticed those elements and put them on the paper really made the image mine, rather than just a generic copy. The sketch is barely recognizable as a human, but I do feel as if I've accomplished something small.

Our homework for next week is to draw one of our hands in four different poses -- holding a coffee cup, gripping something, or whatever. I can tell it's going to be a killer.

This post's for Dave

I've had a desire to learn to draw for a while, but never could find the time. Since it's the start of a new year, I figured now would be a good time to start, so I signed up for a basic drawing class at Seattle Central Community College last weekend. Tonight was our first class.

Let me start out by saying that I essentially picked this class out of a hat. I searched around online for basic drawing classes in Seattle, and didn't find a whole hell of a lot. I looked at classes at UW, but apparently I would have had to have printed out registration papers, "collected signatures" (from whom?), and mailed it in before December 1, 2004. So that was out. I heard about Seattle Community College, and they had a course that fit my schedule (Wednesday nights, 6:30 - 9:30), and registration was a snap: I registered online on Saturday night and received confirmation on Monday morning. We have a winnah!

When I arrived at the classroom, the first thing that struck me was the setup: large drafting-type desk in a U-shape around a pedestal which gave me the frightening thought that there might be a live model looming in my future. Good God. Somehow, I had been picturing more of a lecture hall...I suppose I just hadn't thought about it.

The class was composed of just six students, four men and two women. The instructor is an older man (he told us he graduated from UW in 1954), and he's very nice, but after just a few minutes with him you discover his major flaw: he cannot stay focused while speaking. The entire night was peppered with sometimes interesting, but more often generally weird, comments that were sometimes, but more often not, related to drawing.

He started the class going around the room, asking people what their name was, what their drawing experience was, and what they did for a living. Well, that's not quite right. He actually started the class by talking for about five minutes about how he was going to go around the room and ask those questions. After that five minute prelude, he got a call on his cell phone, which he took, since it was Fabio calling. Really, that was the caller's name. So we were treated to a full five minutes of our instructor yammering away on the cell phone in front of us, not even having the courtesy to leave the room. Fortunately, once he hung up, he relayed to us the entire conversation which we just heard. Jesus.

So then we started the around-the-room questioning. I was the second person to go, and after hearing what a freakin' grilling the first guy got, I tried to be a bit curt in an effort to express my desire to get on with it already. But I knew I was doomed when we started talking about work. It went like this:

Instructor: So, how do you earn your bread and butter?
Me: I'm a programmer.
Instructor: A programmer? Really.
Me: Yeah.
Instructor: What sort of stuff do you program?
Me: Uhhhh, cell phones.
Instructor: Cell phones? Really?
Me: Uhhhh, yep.
Instructor: Like what I just got a call on?
Me: Uhhhh, yep. Well, a little different.
Instructor: This cell phone's got all sorts of stuff on it, and I don't know how it works. It's got games, and a camera, but I don't know how to get the photos from the camera onto paper. I don't know how to get them onto paper, so all I can do is look at them on the phone's screen. It gets kinda boring to look at the same things over and over.
Me: <nodding>
Instructor: So, how do you program a cell phone?

Somehow, mercifully, the conversation switched to something else and we moved on, going through everyone's job. Introductions took more than an hour. So painful.

After that, he wanted to start with an exercise. "A diagnostic test, it might be called." He gave each of us a sheet of paper and a pencil, and told us to pair up. One person would be the model, the other person would produce a drawing of the model's face. After fifteen minutes, roles would reverse. This was pretty much a nightmare scenario for me. I don't even like to have my picture taken, let alone be stared down, at close range, by a stranger who is commiting my visage to paper. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the woman I was paired-up with was pretty good at drawing and did a decent job (although it looked like a police artist sketch of a perp). When it was my turn to draw, I pretty much had no idea where to start, and spent my fifteen minutes decreasing the value of the paper I was drawing on. It was appallingly bad.

Once we were done, we had to tack our drawings side-by-side on a board, and the instructor told us (with lots of side-stories, of course) where our sense of proportion was wrong. Fortunately he didn't linger on our drawings, but moved on to the chalk board where he laid out a diagram of the human face: eyes go here, distance between eyes is this, distance between nose and lips is this, etc. Very interesting, but again way too many unrelated comments. Let me just say that I can tell you what kind of car his 7th grade drafting teacher (who was also the football coach) drove, and how it ruined Chrysler.

Somewhere around this point, his wife called, wanting to know what time she should pick him up.

We talked some more about the proportions of the human face, and then he gave us our homework for next week: a self-portrait. Oh hell.

Fabulous sculpture, made with science

Long, long ago, and kinda far away, I worked in a plastics factory. They had the most amazing machine -- a stereolithography "printer" that allowed people to rapidly build 3D models from CAD designs. It was pure magic: it had a vat of photo-sensitive liquid plastic, a travelling laser, and an elevator that slowly descended in the vat as an object appeared above it in the plastic goo. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It was the kind of thing that people mean when they say "The Future".

Well, it looks like they now have the same amazing process for metal! But rather using it for everyday industrial design, this woman uses it to create some fantastic, intricate sculptures.  (Check out this sweet one!) Be sure to read her description of the technique; apparently the formed metal is very porous, so she dips it into molten bronze, and the bronze enfuses the sculpture through capillary action. Amazing. Sadly, it's too late to put this on my Christmas wishlist.

[via linkmonger]