Here’s something fun to try: Pick up one or two "mark making" instruments and start making a library of marks. Start with some simple obvious marks. Maybe do some simple hatching (like in the bottom right of the image). Then start experimenting to see what various marks look like.

Make every mark you can think of. Then trying grouping them or overlaying them in different ways. Do everything you can think of and then KEEP GOING. Once you’ve exhausted all the obvious things, THAT is when you’ll start getting creative and discovering new things.

If just experimenting is too vague a goal for you, set some limitations on yourself! ;) Have fun! Trying to do a page full of only one variation of a mark or try to take whatever marks you’re already making and attempt to turn them into a gradient.

There’s no need to rush through every item in your media collection. Take your time. Make a page using a pencil and then another page with a pen. Or a page that explores how two mark making instruments interact with each other.

You don’t have to do every mark making instrument in your collection. Make a library for one pencil today and another pencil some other day. Do it often and just see what you get.

Some advice, take notes. Note what you were making marks with and then how you were making the marks. For example, if you’re holding your 4B pencil from the far end in the wrong hand and trying to make circles, make a note of that. After all, we’re making a library, so make sure you tell yourself how to reproduce these marks when you rediscover this page again 2 years from now ;)

Some ideas to try:

• Make marks with your palm on the page, then make them again with your palm not touching the page.
• Isolate parts of your body. Make marks using only your wrist, or only your fingers, or by only moving your elbow and shoulder
• hold the pen or pencil in odd ways. hold it "wrong" if you have to.
• play with your distance from the page. trying being far away and holding the pen/pencil from the far end so you have to reach
• try on difference surfaces and positions. Put the paper flat on table or tapped to a wall. You can stand, sit, lay, lean, or move while trying to make the mark.
• make the same marks or motions using very different media
• layer media
• use the wrong hand or try using both hands.
• turn your paper then try to reproduce some of the marks you’ve already made from this new angle.
• Close your eyes and make random marks, then open your eyes and see if you can reproduce them.
• Don’t forget your tools that take away marks. Throw down a pattern and then start experimenting with your eraser, whiteout, etc

Example 1: Micron 005

My sketch at the top of this post is pretty straight forward and "obvious" stuff **after the page is full.** Now I can look at the page and get ideas for patterns and gradients using a Micron 005 without having to take time out of the project I might be in the middle of when I realize I want to use the Micron 005.

Example 2: Skipping My Charcoal Pencil

Below are some more experimental attempts. In this first image, I discovered that if I held my charcoal pencil at the right angle, it would skip across the page making a dotted line. After a bunch of experimenting I was able to consistently do it.

All of these dots are downward lines made with a skipping charcoal pencil (and really took no time at all to make once I figured out how to do it)

Next I started stacking the marks on top of themselves and got something that looked like a commit. Then I tried going out in different directions to make that explosion of dots. Again, these didn’t take very long because I was drawing "lines" not making dots.

Example 3: Eraser Marks

Another experiment. I took a brand new eraser and rubbed it on a patch of charcoal, then stamped it on the page 3 times from top to bottom. What’s interesting is the 1st strike is solid (like you’d expect), but the 3rd strike is an outline.

What are you waiting for!? Start your library of marks today!

Bonus Example: Art Cars

UPDATE added 9/26/2009.  We just happen to walk by an art show with art cars.  Check out the way this artist made "marks" on these cars.

Give it a try and feel free to share your work with everyone by post some links to your marks as a comment.

 

I got the new Scott Pilgrim book 5 (well I guess it’s new but I’m not quite sure).  Either way, I just got my wisdom teeth pulled so I’ve been recovering by re-reading all 5 books and drawing some fan art.

That’s Scott and Kim.  Kim’s way cuter than Ramona (the primary love interest).

That’s Scott’s sister at the top.  This is the only picture I could find of her that was nice looking.  Most of them are not as sweet because I think they’re just going for a "it’s just Scott’s sister" feel, instead of "it’s a hot girl".  Also, that’s Wallace and Scott talking to their land lord and then Scott being all dramatic while fighting the half ninja girl.

Update: 7/4/9

From Scott Pilgrim Book 3.  Envy Adam’s band, plus some random street goers up top.

Scott Pilgrim copyright Byan Lee O’Malley

 

I’ve been trying to come up with ways to get myself drawing new things and be a little more serious about my drawings.  Basically, I’m trying to find a rhythm for sitting down and drawing something in a way that will be productive and help my skills improve.  I say this because I often give things one shot and then move on.  For example, my last post with the sketch inside safeway:  I just sat down and started drawing.  If it ends up being good then so be it, and if that same drawing had ended up being bad, well so what.  Either way I would have closed the book, stood up and wandered off.

So I question, how much do I learn by just drawing something once and then shrugging and moving on?

I’ve noticed that Marc tends to draw things over and over again.  It’s actually pretty amazing to watch.  He will draw a pose that may look good or bad, then continue to draw that same pose 3 more times.  After that, he looks at them all and tries to home in on what he likes and dislikes about them.  Then he just uses those rough sketches as reference for another attempt, then another attempt.  When he’s done, he’s drawn the same thing about 5 times (at least) and he smiles and tears up all but the last drawing.

This persistance to get where he’s going is really admerable.  So I experimented with drawing the same thing over and over today.  Not as allaberate as Marc, but with the intent of drawing something new and walking away feeling like I’d gained something.

So here’s what I did.  I looked for an odd object that was already on my desk and just started drawing.  No waiting to be "inspired" to draw or searching for the "perfect" object to draw.  I just looked at the first thing in site that looked challenging yet doable, cleared some space for it and started drawing.

Warm Up

Rather than do my normal "just make an attempt", I decided to try some warm ups from some drawing classes I took a while back.  I started with a 5 minute blind contour drawing. 

If you’re not familiar with this I really recommend giving it a try.  Basically, you put your sketchbook on your lap, *under* the table and then start drawing without looking at all.  You focus on only the outline of the object.  I’ve heard it described as imagining an ant very slowly crawling around the outline of the object and you’re watching it.  You tried to notice every little detail that ant would encounter on it’s epic journey around the object border.  Basically, you go really slow and you look for tiny details on the object’s outline.

While you’re doing this with your eyes, you have your pencil on the page and you’re very slowly drawing what you’re seeing.  When you’re done, the drawing will look like nothing (if it does look like something, you probably cheated and looked).  But what you’re doing is training your eyes to looks for new details and letting your hand feel what it feels like to be drawing just those details. It goes back to that saying, "you can’t draw what you don’t notice."

It’s great because you can’t mess it up.  When you’re done you have a drawing that looks like nothing, but it’s the experience in your head that’s valueble.

So I did that and I took 5 mintues or so to slowly going around my object, the old beat up headphones, twice –my pen died out a little on the second time around, but who cares?  In all honesty, you could do it with a pen that doesn’t  work and still gain the experience of training your eye and your hand on the details of the object.

Next I made another contour drawing, only this time I put the book on the table so I could see what I was doing.  I ended up also outlining the shadow and blocking it in with some highlighters that happened to be on the table already.

And that was my 15-20 minute warm up.

Focused Attempt

Next I made an attempt to draw the object with as much detail as I could.  And I commited myself to take as much time as I needed to feel like it was done (as in, adding more lines would take away value instead of add value to the drawing).

One thing to note is that I’m still using the pen a lot these days.  I find that starting with the pen really makes me take my time and think about every line before I draw it.  I’m not saying you should use a pen, I’m just saying I like my own state of mind when I use it.

I also decided to make an attempt with those highlighters again (which is a tool I’m still trying to get the hang of). 

After that, I did something I rarely do, I made a pass at cleaning up the drawing a little with the use of a whiteout pen.  Like I said, I normally make an attempt, shrug and move on.  But I’m really trying to get all I can out of this for a change.  I’m really trying to focus.

All this took about 35 minutes.

Put it to the test

Finally, I covered the object so I couldn’t see it and I tried to draw it again from memory.

Again, I commited myself to taking as much time as I’d need to finish it.  I also started with a pencil this time and tried to keep myself thinking about every line before I drew it.  I ended up drawing as you would expect to draw with a pencil, I "constructed" the object by making a lite, rough layout of the shapes and slowly homing in on what the final lines should be.

I inked it and shaded with a pencil this time around.  Then I did some cleanup with and eraser.  I was trying to take my time, but I think I went a little too fast because I was done in about 20 minutes.

After that I compared what I had just drawn to the drawing I had done earlier and then I compared against the actual object that was on the desk.  Right away I noticed I’d shifted the orientation of the head phone on the right (which is just "interesting", not "right" or "wrong" or anything), but for the most part, I drew something with no reference that I wouldn’t have been able to draw at all about an hour ago.

I was pretty exhausted afterwords (mentally), but I do feel like drawing something a few times in this order really helped me walk away with a lot more then a shrug.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll try to draw it again from memory, just to see what happens.

Give it a shot, I think I’m going to be taking this approach more often (and I’ll be trying more than just one viewpoint of the object),
~Danny

PS: you may have spotted the "fill in the blanks" I wrote on the page in my very first photo.  Basically, I’m at the end of a sketch book and I’m trying to go back and fill in all the blank (or mostly blank) pages I skipped for some reason or another.  I figure it’s paper and I shouldn’t waste it :)

So I’ve been doing a little drawing and I’m nearly finished with one of my sketchbooks.  Since I’m so off and on about sketching in this particular sketchbook, it contains drawings that range from 2002 to today, April 2009.  Reaching the end is always a milestone and it always has you flipping through the whole book, reliving some of the thoughts and moments that involved each sketch.

Any way, if you haven’t already heard, the book Outliers goes on about a study that describes how it take 10,000 hours of practice to get good at anything.  So if you did something for 10hours a day, 5 days a week, that would be about 2,500 hours worth of practice in one year.  In 4 of those years, you’d have your 10,000 hours.  Surprise, surprise, that’s 4 years of college.  What’s interesting is if you don’t go to college for something.  You can still get to your 10,000 hours, it will only take much longer to get there.  For example, if you practiced something for 1 hour a day, that would be 365 hours a year and would take you about 30 years to reach your 10,000 hours.  You’d make it, just not as fast as a college student did.

This 10,000 hours is in relation to anything, but of course I’m thinking about drawing, especially since I just reached the end of a sketchbook.  On a whim, I flipped through the book and tried to estimate how many hours I spend drawing in this book.  I came up with 53 hours (about 30mins a page in a 100 page book).  After that I estimated I’d spend maybe 500 hours drawing…. but by the end of the day, I couldn’t help be flip through all my sketchbooks and loose sketches to try to get a real estimate of how many hours I’ve spent drawing so far… after all, I didn’t go to college for art, so I’m pretty curious where I might stand.

After going through every sketch and sketchbook I could find (I’m talking 12 years worth of stuff) the number I came to was 2,172 hours of drawing.  Which is almost equivolent to 1 year in college.  Surprisingly enough, the time I spend on "You had me at croissant" and my other comics accounted for a large part of that number.  So, long story short, I think I should draw some more comicbooks :)

 ~Danny
21.72% Artist :)

 PS: that sketch above was basically me killing time while waiting for the mechanic to look at my car’s power stearing.  When you’ve got plenting of time to kill, you end up with a lot of detail.

So the de young museum is having a Yves Saint Laurent exhibit, which means FASHION that’s FAB-U-LOUS!  :) All joking aside, I got invited to tag along with a friend and her group of friends to see this exhibit.  So basically, I spent the whole day with 5 lovely ladies because all the other guys who were invited were too stupid to show up (suckers!)

Again, all joking aside, I was excited about going because normally museums are full of pots and pans and paintings, all of which are not really that much fun to draw.  However a fashion exhibit sounded great to me because it would mean I’d have plenty of subjects to draw that resembled humans and didn’t move, ever (unlike the real things, which always move the moment you start sketching them).

So here are some sketches I did today at the de young.  They were all done with pen, so there wasn’t any construction lines, so some came out better than others.

We spend the majority of the day walking in the museum as well as in and around golden gate park, so in the end it turned out to be a throughly fun and exhausting day which I hope to repeat some time.

~Danny

PS: Bonus Sketch from lunch a while back (which I just found today when I opened my sketchbook).  If you look close, you can see that it started raining while I was working on it, but I kind of like the raindrops.

I’ve been trying to get away from my computer during lunch to do a little sketching.  I’ve been attempting a SketchTaro-esk style.  Mark’s one of the people I spend the day sketchcrawling with.  He uses 100# paper, pen, ink brush-pen, and he puts more detail in the center and lets everything just fade out the further away he gets from the subject.  So I was, you know, "trying" to do something like that :)

This last one is a sketch while chilling at home:

Observations:

1. By skipping the pencil and going straight to pen, you have to spend a lot more time planning before you touch the pen to the page to make a line. Because of this planning, you end up drawing front to back, instead of back to front.  For example, with oil on canvas or just pencil sketching, you start with the background.  Things like the horizon are the first thing you make, then you put things on top of that, like the background, then the foreground, finally, any details.

Using the pen is much more like the Chinese Brush Painting we were doing a while back.  You start with the closest object first, and you go backwards starting with foreground, then background, and then distant background and horizon.  So in the last image above, I drew the front corner of the cabinet first, then the camera on the tripod and all the things on top of the cabinet second.  After that was the book case, then everything on the wall, then the wall itself followed by the things behind the wall (kitchen and hallway).

2. I thought pen would be great because it’s not as messy and smudgy as pencil.  I was very wrong.  Ink is just as prone to smudging as pencil AND it’s more permanent.

3. I was starting to get the hang of using the darks and solid blacks to push things into shadow and give things depth.  You can see this in the sapling I did above.  I’m not totally there but applying a lot of black is starting to make more sense to me.  It’s good for pushing the eye to see depth.  Of course I’m still looking closely at Mark’s work to get a better understanding of how he applies so much solid black so brilliantly.

practice practice practice.
~Danny

SF Sketchcrawl 21 was a bit of an experiment.  Rather than picking a starting and ending location, the start location was optional and the end location was the De Younge Museum in golden gate park.  Actually, at some point it was announced that one of the optional start locations was going to be the ferry building. (?!)  Here’s a map to show you what that would have been like.  4.4 miles.  it would have been a lot of ‘crawl’ and not so much ’sketch’.

So a few of us decided to just go to the De Younge Museum at the beginning of the day and spend all day sketching there, which worked out pretty well.  Here are a few of the more presentable sketches I did.

That last one is just me fooling around with the first sketch.  You should check out all the results from all the other sketchcrawlers on the sketchcrawl forums.  It was a big turnout, about 60 to 80 people. –oh There’s a photo of everyone here.

~Danny

I have this ink brush-pen that I don’t used often, but have always used for thick solid blacks.  However I recently discovered just now nicely it does these scratch grays.  So there are some experiments.  I miss the Chinese brush painting class we were taking at the beginning of 2008, maybe we’ll sign up again soon.

 

 

I’m just trying to get the hang of drawing in flash.  So I drew a friend’s facebook portrate.

 Ever since going to France last year, I’ve gotten in the habit of carrying blank index cards with me everywhere.  So I end up doodling at odd times like standing in line or waiting for friends to show up, etc.  Back in France I carried a pencil, eraser and pencil sharpener, but it’s just so messy and annoying to carry around that I just stopped and tend to favor the pen I already keep in my pocket.

So I’ve been doodling with an ink pen more and more.  It’s tricky.  No pencil means no rough sketch. 

Here’s a bunch of them:

Working on Uncle Rich’s car (as in, it was leaking oil on a long trip on an extra hot day, so we stopped to let it cool down and give it some fresh oil to hold it over until we get home and he can actually fix the leak.)

 At the book store.  Playing with Marc’s technique of putting more detail in the center and letting fade out toward the edges.

 Sketching while watching TV (it’s tough when the reference is always changing! :)

More TV sketching.

sketched over lunch:

 more tv sketching

 more tv sketching

 sketching while burning backup discs (see the stack of index cards on the bottom left?)

 sketched while out at breakfast:

 Idea while standing in line for coffee:

Yes, it works and I’ll sue you if you steal my soap idea! :)

had time to kill before a movie started.

The dots are how I’ve been making a rough sketch without a pencil.  If you scroll back up you might see a stray dot here and there on the more elaborate sketches (I don’t do it as much for the quick cartoons)

~Danny