Starting with a pencil sketch made from my recent trip through the Ozarks, I tried out a kit of POSCA markers just to see what they are like. POSCA markers are intriguing, laying down smooth, nearly opaque layers of intensely bright color. In one sense, the shapes and lines possible are vaguely reminiscent of gouache, a media with which I’ve a long held love/hate relationship. The color is blindingly, garishly, obnoxiously bright. In fact, I’m uncertain what to do with these things. They’re fun to use and play with, but seem far from spontaneous in use. For me, they seem like a specialty artist product – and probably not well suited for me, ultimately. Retching out color isn’t in my wheelhouse – but maybe it ought to be.
In my hands I suspect POSCA markers would be most useful for pattern design, perhaps, or more abstract color explorations. I’m curious to learn what others have experienced with these or similar markers.
Two things in particular resonate for me in a drawing: line and shape. For years my line drawings have relied heavily on those characteristics. When I wander aimlessly into color, line and shape help guide my compositional decisions. And when I explore value as I’ve done in the architectural subject matter I’ve explored these past seven or eight months, line and shape are ever present.
I rely on line and shape to help me define where to place lights and darks in a drawing. It all begins with a fundamental and simple sketch. Lines form shapes.
And shapes are best defined by contrasts of value.
And compositional design is a vital part of my exploration. If the design doesn’t work, it really doesn’t matter to me how skillfully or clever I’ve been with my pencil or pen.
I lived some of my early years in the Ozarks, and pretty much all of my teens in small town America. Driving through southwest Missouri over Spring Break, wandering along the roads less traveled, it’s a lot like stepping into a time machine for me. The houses along the way remind me of the residences of my friends and my family. I’ve taken a great deal of liberty making these sketches: the proportions are often wildly at odds with the reality of a place, and in some instances I’ve invented details out of whole cloth. But they are also quite truthful in the way they make me feel, the way they transport me to places of comfort and nostalgia and memory.
Another #oneweek100people challenge has come and gone. Prolific sketchers Marc Taro Holmes and Liz Steele facilitate this online sketching challenge. The goal is simple, if a bit daunting to some: sketch 100 people in one week (or to be more accurate, five days. I guess sketchers are slaves to a standard work week!)
I’ve participated in various ways in past challenges by setting a theme for myself. One year I think I managed to get all one hundred into a single drawing! For 2023 I kind of bounced around a bit. Initially I thought I’d attempt the challenge by making Procreate paintings (top and immediately above.) But despite having a very clear concept in mind, I quickly grew bored with that approach, and honestly boredom with the digital process is the thing I ultimately find least satisfying with this medium. With more traditional mark-making tools on paper I am constantly screwing up, and that keeps me much more engaged!
More satisfying was to pick up a pencil and steal photo references from the USk sketch out last weekend, treating myself to a couple of self-portraits. While I was at it, I robbed some photo references from a friend’s camera roll and sketched an Irish music session, adding a few dabs of color along the way (below.)
Ultimately though, I wound up mostly sketching my art students as they painted their projects this week. We are days away from Spring Break, my kids are mostly crazy and bouncing off the walls and ready to end the term, and there’s a lot of “catch as catch can” in these drawings. A LOT of refinement took place after classes ended simply because the initial scribble was usually a super fast gesture. And a LOT of times it was impossible to even do a gesture because kids needed attention – I had to stop at one point because a girl decided she wanted to eat tempera paint. Ugh! But I think it’s valuable for my kids to see me making art and drawing along with them too. It’s amazing to me that they often don’t realize their art teacher CAN draw! And we have some important conversations along the way: “Well, yeah, my drawings aren’t too bad. But you do realize I have been practicing this four times longer than you’ve been alive, right?”
So, did I make it to one hundred this year? Not even close. I didn’t count them up; I didn’t feel the need to. What was important to me this time around, wasn’t quantity but fluidity. People sketches don’t feel “right” to me if they are stiff – and a lot of my sketches were too stiff. The flute player (above) seemed to come close to the settled weight of the figure and casual repose I’d feel fortunate to be able to capture with regularity. Sparse line and basic shading is important to me, too. The value of this challenge is that the volume of sketches made sort of teases out those characteristics.
Some people revere the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, others don’t. I fall into this latter category, to be quite … um, frank. I don’t care for all the odd interior angles, and I especially don’t cotton to the compartmentalized and dark corridors and spaces that seem to be integral to some of his structures. But an opportunity to sketch a Wright design was presented to Urban Sketchers Kansas City, and that sort of thing is definitely worth the gas to get there.
The Community Christian Church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is located at 46th and Main in Kansas City, Missouri. From across Main, the building feels much more horizontal than it actually is, so I made a second, more exaggerated sketch and it seems to feel more “truthful” to the place than my first drawing. There was a chill in the air, so there were only three or four of us sketching outdoors – my friend Judy recognized the extreme horizontality of the building right away and dashed off a fountain pen study that acknowledged the characteristic before, like me, heading indoors to warm up chilled hands.
Immediately next to the Wright building on Main is a place with an odd mixture of styles. The Ponce De Leon building is, I think, apartments. It is tightly nestled into a couple of steep, very narrow streets, along with numerous other apartments of rather more pedestrian design just adjacent to the Country Club Plaza. The geography is part of what I find disconcerting about the Wright building: the design relies so much on width rather than the verticality of the surrounding buildings that it feels oddly out of place, wedged into the neighborhood rather than fitting comfortably into place.
Main is currently running a single lane north and a single lane south, with the normal southbound lanes blocked off for construction of an extension of trolley rail tracks. In a word, the road is a mess! Parking for our group was found, eventually, along the twisting roads that meander behind the Community Christian Church, up and around the hill to the Kemper Museum and the Kansas City Art Institute. In fact, I might have parked at the museum and saved myself a few steps to the church.
Attendance was good – perhaps thirty-five or more sketchers, I’d guess, with several “first-timers.” I packed light, with just a pencil and sketchbook, and a folding stool that fits into my shoulder bag. Wish I’d brought gloves too!
This might be the house I really want to live in, if it were to be tightly nestled in among a grove of walnut trees. I imagine very little yard, only paths that radiate out into the trees, and from there the road and fields and brooks. The house is squat and square with a wide open floor plan so that cooking and dining and entertaining and leisure are all of a single place. There is a single room above, the main bedroom, and out front a deep porch runs the width of the place. My studio is a separate and small structure, a shed really, but close by. In the fall, walnuts drop from above, striking the roof like a drum. Squirrels scurry about – but don’t venture too close, because the cats, seemingly dozing, are in actuality quite ready to pounce.
Just Sketching 