On the Road and Back Again

Time sure does fly during the summer.  Especially when you spend half of it moving and the other half traveling.  As a result, posting on the blog became something that was put on the back burner.

Now that things are slowly returning to normalcy, I should be posting more regularly.

A good chunk of this summer was spent on the road for different trips.  So it seems fitting that I should practice drawing cars while on different parking lots.

I am actually very car-illiterate, so whenever I see a car, half of me is trying to get a believable drawing of a car down on paper, and the other part of me is thinking about the look and character of the car.

Cars, in my opinion, are tricky to draw right because 1) they are machines with slightly curved lines.  If they're too straight lines, it's too blocky and if you use too many curved lines, it doesn't feel like a machine.  And 2) we see (and use) cars every day.  So everyone can look at a drawing of a car and determine if it "feels right" or not.

 These first two groups were from a parking lot while waiting in line for a convention in early August.  I used an ordinary writing pen and was just trying to get the gesture of the car.   The car on the bottom of this group was the one that I feel is the strongest.  Compared to the other two, you can tell this was a car designed for a sense of speed.  I can't help but wonder how professional car designers think of these things?

This group on the left was also from same parking lot as above.  The strongest one of these four is the SUV (don't ask me for model or brand) on the lower right.  This bulky type of car  is borderline a truck, but the lines that make up it's body are still curved to a small degree.  It's a classic example of the first point I made earlier.

This last group was actually drawn while riding on a coach bus.    Many of these were drawn while stopping briefly at red lights in towns, but some of them, like the pickup truck, the SUV and the convertible (the top right) were done off quick gesture lines from glancing outside the window.

The truck on the lower right side of the page was actually started from a gesture off the highway and finalized later at a rest stop (it's just about impossible to draw a straight line on a bus going at 70 mph).


All in all, these pages were a good practice in observing and capturing the vehicle we see so often.

Thank you for reading and stop by for the next post soon.

Cafe Sketching

It's a calm and beautiful Sunday,  I decided to take a trip to do what I call cafe sketching.

Basically I go into a small place, grab a drink and a snack and just sketch the people I see inside.  One of my particular favorite places to go is the cafe in my Barnes and Noble.  Not only are people there for the Starbucks coffee but many of them will take some reading material they find with them for an extended period of time.  That means they're relatively still for someone like me to make a sketch of them.

The important thing to remember (and that I have to sometimes remind myself) is that this is not about getting a "finished" drawing out of the experience.  It's more about getting the gesture, the essence of the subject on paper.  The things that should be focused on are gesture, balance, posture, proportion.  Not detailed and rendered out drawings that are photocopies of the person you're observing.

Here are some of the results from today's cafe sketching.   All of the images in this post were done in ordinary pen on a 5.5" x 8.5" size sketchbook.


 This woman was the first I did.  She had no problem picking her feet up on another chair to enjoy herself.   What's nice about poses like this is the it gives you a chance to really observe how the proportion and foreshortening in positions we do not always see in a life drawing session.







What I really like about sketching at Barnes and Noble is that you can see may people at once doing different things from one place. The little boy with the bottle of lemonade was from the opposite end of where I was, the woman against the trash can was near the stairway entrance and the young woman browsing the books from my far right.

Of these three I like how the young woman turned out most.  Mainly because I was able to add enough of an environment to add some context to what she is doing.          

There is no denying it, the woman on the top reaching for her coffee turned out to be a really exaggerated pose.  I remember seeing her reach for it and thinking "you know you could have just walked another step to get it." But you know what, you work with what you're given and I had fun pushing the stretch on this one.  Exaggeration is never a bad thing, especially with gesture drawing and sketching.

The little boy on the left was by far the fastest on this page, probably not more than 60 to 75 seconds.  He was clearly bored with waiting in line with his mom and was stretching around to entertain himself.  This was a good practice for me because kids are always moving around often move in ways adults typically don't.

This is actually the same boy from the previous page, only now he was allowed to drink the lemonade (after his mom paid for it) and was clutching it with both arms like it was treasure.

I decided that I should try to let myself use the whole page for a while, especially on a small sketchbook like I was using.  This older man was easier to sketch and in a good position for me to see him and clearly see where his weight was on his chair.  In poses like this, I feel it is a must to have the chair or any other object (like a table in this case) to add clarity.  Imagine how weird it would look without a chair to hold him up in this pose.





Another nice thing about sketching in public places is that you see all different body types to observe (not stare of course).  For people like this woman at the counter it was a good opportunity to sketch a person with body volume.  Too often I see artists sketching people in what we are taught as the "ideal body" and almost forgetting how to sketch someone of a different body type.  Sketching someone like this woman is always a good learning experience.





Some of you readers may be asking yourselves, 'ok, so what's the point of all this, what do you get out of it?'  That's certainly a fair question and the best answer I have for that comes from Drawn to Life, written by legendary Disney animator, Walt Stanchfield, (his book can be found on this link. http://bit.ly/1aT81cN).  In one of his chapters, Stanchfield says,

"Whether your heart is set on the fine arts or on animation, quick sketching is the shortest route to training yourself for capturing those spontaneous gestures and poses that are so essential to good drawing."

That is all for today readers.  Thank you for reading and I look forward to sharing more with you in the near future.

Putting a Face to the Name

So I finally took the time to sit down and update this blog a little more.  

If you were here for my last introductory post, I had a blank space for the profile image.  I decided to upload this self caricature of myself with blue pencil and regular graphite.  

The one thing I did not put on this sketch is my mustache and goatee, mainly because I intend to shave it off soon.

Thanks for reading and keep an eye out for the next post. 

Greetings and Welcome to the First Post!

So this will be my first entry here.  The first of many I'm sure.

Since this is the first entry it is only fitting that I provide a little background about myself.  My real name is Andrew, I am a young artist who went to college and graduated with a B.F.A. in animation and now I am who is aspiring to spread myself out beyond my comfort zone and push myself to new limits and new avenue's in my life.  This blog is one of those new avenues.

It has been said to me (more times than once) that artists need to really embrace the internet and show themselves on the web either by a website or a blog.  I've already built a website (which can be view at the link below) and it's about time I jumped into the blogging area of the world wide web.

The blog will mainly be about my personal work, either drawings, animations, illustrations, writings, etc. But I would also like to make this a place to post positive material.  After all there is so much cruddy things that bring down a person's enthusiasm, I would rather not contribute to that problem and post the kind of things I'd like to see.

Let me first start off by saying that this is the first time I've ever worked a personal blog for myself and my work.  Having said that, mistakes will be made along the way of this new venture.  Words may be misspelled and the occasional grammatical errors, but that isn't going to stop me blogging anyway.

The name of this blog, Sketchin Around, comes from the fact that I sketch in my sketchbook very often.  Whether I am at home, sitting in a restaurant, riding on a bus, at a Starbucks, etc. I try to get as much as I can.  One of my friends described me as "a relentless sketcher," so the name Sketchin Around seemed fitting.  I intend to have more than just sketches on this blog, but will be the start for now.

Anyway, that just about wraps up this introductory post.  I look forward to posting more in the near future.  See you next time.

Andrew

www.andrewcoppinger.com