Camping in coffeeshops

I stopped at a coffeeshop on my way home from work this evening, to draw the unsuspecting customers. There was a girl sitting and flirting with her conversation partner, very animated, a lot of fun to draw. She switched poses every three seconds, always tilting her head around and making these great broad expressions. I tried to capture some of them... I've found that drawing people talking is a really good exercise, because there are very specific ways that they look at the person they're talking to. Really expressive attitudes. I've been listening to the radio and drawing the characters on the radio talking, which is another thing that's been helping.





Figured out this morning that drawing the head and neck at the same time, in a kind of gourd-shape, really helps the overall gesture and expression. Gives me an idea of what the area is I have to work with, where the ear will go in relation to the face, where the hairline will be. Usually I draw the head and then when I'm done with that I tack on the neck... this works way better.

A ghost with a collection

Yeah, I don't know. He was a geologist when he was alive, and his love for rocks followed him through into the afterlife.

He appears and leads people places, but instead of pointing the way to treasure, he tricks them into digging up the rocks he wants. Sometimes if you piss him off, he gives you a hug in a creek, which is unpleasant because he's very, very heavy.

Sketchcrawl 14

Saturday the 19th was the 14th global Sketchcrawl, wherein people from all over the planet hit the streets to draw stuff. This crawl we had a higher purpose, too - raising money for the charity Emergency USA. Emergency is an organization that builds hospitals for civilians in war-torn countries... so we got our sponsors and went out and drew. I don't think Enrico has counted all the sponsors' donations (or the benefits from the following auction), but last I heard it was a pretty amazing sum.


We met up at the ferry building in San Francisco. Lots of familiar faces (Paul shown here) and just about as many unfamiliar faces, totalling about 80 people. Walking down the street with the mob of crawlers was pretty cool.


Looking up the Filbert steps...


On the Filbert steps...


Went to a park near all the Italian restaraunts, but there was an evangelist enlightening us so we moved on to a park in Chinatown.


More from Chinatown - including Ronnie taking photos, James drawing, and probably the rattiest pigeon I have ever seen.

Sketchbooks were passed around at the park... it's always inspiring to see what everyone else has done (and look at the rest of their sketchbooks, what they like to draw in their free time). Also to catch up with sketchcrawling buddies, although the group was big enough that sometimes I only caught sight of someone across the crowd, and never actually got to talk with them or see their stuff.
After the crawl was declared officially over, some of us went out for dinner and to try to find moon buns (??) and arcade games. Successful on one point, not so much on the other. Even without arcade games it was fun, and new people were met and blog addresses exchanged and ... things!

Crawlers with blogs:
Grant Alexander
Vince Lee
Ron Bowman
Jackson Dryden

Pirate monkey and a pumpkin baby

Lunch hour doodles, testing to see if what I think I know about color is right. Andrew Loomis has an amazing book on painting (or else it's the one on illustration) that someone let me read, and the whole color thing just finally sunk in. I had values pretty much figured out, but every time I tried to translate that to color I would end up getting completely mixed up and turned around and have a page full of mud.

One thing that stuck with me out of that book was this that he said: You can't look around and be like "oh that table is burnt ochre, and that chair is alizarin red with some spring green toads on it," you look at things and identify it by primary colors - say "that table is yellow leaning towards orange, and darker in value and less intense in saturation," or "my hat is blue leaning towards purple, higher in value and totally saturated."

That helped a lot, because just to be able to trim it down and have a system for identifying colors in the world as they relate to the colors available to me in Photoshop is amazing. I don't have to look over there and try and scrub the slider thingies around to get the right color HOPING I'll maybe get something that doesn't look like crap... I can start with yellow and make it oranger, and then decrease the value, and then I have something that works pretty well.

There was also a bit in the book about how complementary colors lessen the intensity of each other when placed against one another, but colors that are neighbors on the color wheel will intensify the feel of the original color.

So in an attempt to apply these ideas, I tried to make Pumpkin Baby really intense, and pirate monkey not-so-intense but also not a complete swath of mud.