Eat Your Vegetables!

I hope y'all like to eat vegetables, cause I've got a bunch of 'em for you:

I started this drawing to practice my crosshatching and shading, and I have to admit I was pretty pleased with the outcome. I've got a lot of good-looking veg here - long-stemmed mushrooms in the wide basket on the right, "regular stemmed" mushrooms in the little basket on the left, daikan radish above the regular 'shrooms, burdock root that is mostly hidden in the upper left, and finally, a pumpkin way at the bottom of the picture, almost completely out of sight (wait, is that a fruit? Anyone? A little help here...?).

I drew this based on a picture from a coupon sheet, which is why the items look a bit like they are floating. I grounded some of them by adding shadows, but tried not to overdo it, because when all is said and done I don't really mind a floating mushroom. This would actually make it easier to eat. And it would be a relief, in general, if food could just float up to my mouth rather than sit lazily on my plate, so that I have to reach down with a fork or something to get at it. It's like, I'm doing all the work in this relationship - I get the money, I go to the store, I buy you, I boil you or whatever, I put you on a plate, and you just stare up at me. You never say anything. BUT DINNER, YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO: float up there. A little floating, I think, is not too much to ask.

Think about it, readers - floating pizza? That you could just lean forward and start chomping? Why has nobody patented this?? You heard it here first; floating food is going to be the next game-changer. Bigger than Facebook.

Or I'm completely bonkers.

If you've ever wondered what the Charles Bridge in Prague looks like from the bank of the Vltava river at 7am, here is your chance to find out:

The drawing above is actually a detail from a larger piece I recently finished, but I though it looked better than the piece as a whole, so I decided to post it first. Here is the entire piece:

As you can probably tell, my angles and perspective need work. Bricks grow where they should shrink, angles merge where they should diverge, and the primary blocks of light and shadow could be more clearly defined. My main problems stem from not plotting out the larger shapes of the composition before diving into the details. But don't judge me too harshly! This is the first full landscape (bridgescape?) I have drawn in maybe 10 years. It is also the first time I have tried working rigorously with crosshatching on a subject that was not a figure or face - possibly the first time in my life I tried drawing stone-work with any kind of realism.

However, I did learn an unbelievable amount by suffering through this piece. I have already begun planning another, based on a photograph I took of a church in Prague's Old Town Square. Hopefully, you will see my city-scapes improve over time!

In case you were wondering (and I know you were, dear readers, I know you were), my trip to Prague took place several years ago - about two years after I graduated college. I had amassed a trove of romantic notions about the city, gathered over the years from various sources: Isaac Singer's "The Golem," Kafka's "The Trial," Steven Sodderberg's indie gem "Kafka" (starring Jeremy Irons as Franz Kafka living out a dark, dare I say kafkaesque, adventure in the city of his birth). I decided to find out whether all my ideas about Prague had any basis in reality. I planned a vacation, and booked a flight and a room at a youth hostel.

The city did not disappoint. The architecture is almost psychedelic - a collision of periods and styles that, I felt, still retained a unique, cohesive character. There are lush gardens, spooky alcoves, incredible historic sites, fun experimental theater shows, puppeteers, and fantastic beers. In five days, I walked nearly every corner of the city, gorged myself on dumplings and goulash, I crossed the Charles Bridge just after sunrise, entered Prague Castle through a rarely used footpath, and visited Kafka's grave. In a moment of divinely inspired self-mockery, I even brought along a Kafka biography, "The Nightmare of Reason," by Ernst Pawel, which I finished before boarding the plane home. Truly, an unforgettable trip.

ChoiBurger Sweepstakes

I did not see this young man on the subway:

I drew this based on a black and white photograph titled "Fire Hydrant," taken in 1967 by Leonard Freed. Below is a very small, and unfortunately sort of muted, jpg of the photo. There is a prize for you if you can guess which section I took my drawing from:

Did you guess? If your guess was the hydrant, you need glasses, or you're insulting my drawing. If your guess was the building in the background, I applaud your efforts at anthropomorphizing, but you may need psychological help and you are also insulting my drawing. If, however, your guess was the young man at the center of the photograph, his face scrunched with joy as the water jets toward him, you are the winner of the ChoiBurger Sketchbook sweepstakes! Your prize is a large, juicy ChoiBurger, with a side of succulent ChoiFries:

Victory never tasted better, am I right???

I decided to draw the young man's face from the photo above because I wanted to practice some "serious" crosshatching, as opposed to the free-form scrawl that I use in my more cartoony drawings. Drawing people on the subway is great for certain things. It has improved my speed and my ability to "see" the subject I am drawing more accurately - the shapes of faces, proportions, angles, etc. But there are times when I want more rigorous, structured practice, where I can take my time developing a drawing without worrying about my subject changing seats, or noticing me staring at him or her like a deranged person. This drawing was one of those times. My hopefully-not-short-lived sense of discipline was inspired by the New York Times blog Line By Line, by James McMullan - last week's lesson was all about crosshatching:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/hatching-the-pot/

My final drawing isn't perfect (I think I overshaded a bit, AND the scanner sort of washed out some of the darkest areas), but I am proud of the results.

Layers Upon Layers Upon Layers

When I saw this image hit my blog page after uploading, I thought to myself, that is one nasty-looking face:

Even though I'm the one who drew it, I could never really tell whether it was supposed to be a man or a woman. Either way, he/she is not very good looking!

This drawing started as a thick Sharpie marker outline. The outline didn't come out as cleanly as I had hoped, and so I added some coarse cross-hatching, still using the Sharpie - you can just make it out on the face, if you tilt your screen toward you to lighten the image. Then I added finer cross-hatching, with a smaller pen. I still wasn't satisfied, so I added more fine cross-hatching. Then one more layer of fine cross-hatching, and finally, I tried a bit of cross-hatching. I basically worked this drawing to the brink of oblivion, and while it could probably have benefitted from a little restraint, I like how the layers of texture make the skin look sort of leathery. This is especially true of the face, where the marker and pen overlap the most. Coupled with the dark eyes and exposed teeth, it makes for a sinister portrait.

Around the time I was working on this drawing, I visited a flea market in Soho where I met a man selling "Shawnpie" markers. They looked like suspiciously like Sharpie markers, but he insisted they were of his own creation. His name was unfortunately not Shawn, but this did not stop him - he wasn't going to be outdone by the fat-cat marker-makers and their sinister corporatocracy. He had apparently taken matters into his own hands, and was hawking his personal product on the streets of New York.

Not-Shawn, if you're reading this, while I did not buy your wares that day, I was reminded by them of how much fun it can be to draw with big fat Sharpies. I almost gave up on this drawing, but your sales pitch inspired me to keep at it until it was finished. It is dedicated, in part, to you.

Courtesy and Professionalism

What can I say, this lady was just the greatest:

As I have mentioned before, much of my sketching is done on the subway. I've drawn a lot of people, and this woman was quite possibly the best subway model I have ever worked with. Asleep, cushioned by nothing by the palm of her hand, she sat through our entire train-ride like a stone. When I first spotted her, I started scratching away like a maniac, fearing at any moment she might shift or, even worse, wake up entirely, and I would lose the precarious, interesting pose into which she had slouched herself. But she did not move a muscle! And her courtesy and professionalism did not stop there. She had the foresight to show up wearing a dazzling array of textures - a plastic hat, a fur-trim coat, glasses, jeans, a barely-visible patch of cable-knit sweater. She was even able to, without a word of coaching from me, bend her arm terrifyingly in three places, which was just great because apparently that is the only way I am capable of drawing arms when I am on the subway!

What made drawing this person an even cooler experience than her three-jointed arm was the fact that I also happened to have on me a very thin-tipped pen - a 0.1 felt-tip marker, which I almost never use when I am drawing on the train. It allowed me to get a much finer cross-hatch than usual, and gave the drawing a richness missing from most of my quicker sketches. If only all my subway drawings could come out like this!