Figures in Motion - Workshop Recap

TUESDAY TIPS AND TRICKS

As I’m flipping through my sketchbook and mourning the end of summer, I’m reflecting on all that I learned about urban sketching this season. I especially wanted to share some tricks I picked up at the annual sketch seminar.  In case you missed it, here’s a recap of the class I taught "Capturing Figures in Motion." 

To warm up we took our sketchbooks to the curb and immediately learned two things...

1.  Figures are frustrating.

2.  Moving figures are super frustrating.

So what’s the trick?  Well, there’s not just one, but a BIG one that might make all the difference is having an open mind.  I’m used to long commutes and having a good 20 minutes to make a decent drawing, but when you’re sketching from the sidewalk, you’d be lucky to get a 20 second glance of a passerby.  You have to change your expectations. It’s a different way of sketching, but no less impressive.

20 minute sketch

20 second sketch

Find a busy street and set yourself a goal like, “Today I’ll draw motion for half an hour.”  I encouraged everyone at the seminar to grab a stick of vine charcoal. It’s really messy and takes some getting used to, but it forces you to stay loose and let go of the details.

Don’t work in your absolute favorite sketchbook.  Instead of trying to get a post perfect picture, just try to fill a quota: ten pages of blobby human shapes. Draw as many people as you can, as fast as you can.  Fill up every inch!  (Don't forget to have a can of fixative and spray each page before turning!)

The results may not be readable to anyone other than yourself, but you’ll start to build some muscle memory of how people move, where their weight shifts, how a pair of pants hangs etc.  When you look back at your book you’ll have all of these wonderfully expressive reference pages to enrich your urban settings.  Were you sketching a crosswalk and only got down half a woman?  Fill in the gaps by looking at some scribbles you have in your gesture library.

Think about it like an athlete; warm up sketching, or gesture drawing, is awkward at first and can be embarrassing.  There's no doubt it's a lot of hard work!  But keep at it and before you know it you'll have trained your brain to rapidly record motion.  When you do get a decent motion sketch, you should be really proud of yourself and post it everywhere!  You recorded all that information in a matter of seconds…  That’s pretty amazing! 

Hatching Trouble-Shooting Guide

USk Chicago: Tuesday Tips & Tricks by Wes Douglas

I learned a long time ago that I like hatching as a sketching technique. It’s efficient, effective and it is almost effortless. "Efficient" because you can literally use just one pen and a pad of paper to hatch your sketch. "Effective" because you will not have to convert your sketch to a halftone conversion in order for your sketch to be reproduced in the newspaper or magazine article. I say almost effortless because sometimes it does not work out the way I had planned. 

There are several forms of hatching: Linear, quick tonal, radiating, contoured, precision hatching and the popular cross-hatching. But sometimes hatching just doesn’t turn out the way you had planned. Some days require a LOT of effort. So I thought I’d submit my trouble-shooting guide for hatching:

ISSUE: The resulting sketch did not match what you envisioned in your head. Believe it or not, this sketch of the woman on the train (at left) is messed up--the hatching was too light and I stopped short of completing the texture in the lower half of the sketch. Perhaps I was in a rush to finish this before I had to depart the train or I got tired of making little hash marks? Who knows? Regardless, it is fixable.

TRY THIS: Keep this sketch and move to the next page and create a new sketch. The beauty of sketching is that you can always try, fail and learn. In the case of this sketch, I could go back and add in more cross-hatching and a frame to finish off this sketch.

ISSUE: Maybe it came out too dark and it looks like the subjects changed ethnicity or the female grew a 5 o’clock shadow.

TRY THIS: You can use a blank page and just practice different styles of hatching with different pens. When you find the pen that makes the marks you like, make note of it for the next sketch. In the case of this couple at the Jamba Juice, I went back over the problem areas with white paint and lightened the heaviness of the hatching, particularly on the man's face. One other thing this sketch could use is a frame to give the lines a place to end. As it shows right now, the lines fade off arbitrarily and pull the eye away from the main subjects.

ISSUE: The direction of your lines did not enhance the shape or sense of volume for the subject. The lines should indicate the way a surface reflects light, folds or wraps around an object.

TRY THIS: Pay attention to the surfaces as if they have a grain to them and make your lines follow that “virtual grain direction.” Take a close look at the motorcyclist above and notice how I changed the direction of the hatching to convey the wrinkled pant material, the shape of the tires and gas tank and even the boots.

ISSUE: What if the style of hatching I chose does not go well with the subject matter?

TRY THIS: If you haven’t gone too far, paint white over your curly-cues and try again with linear or cross-hatching. If you have covered the building, like I have in this sketch at left, you might be best to start over and try a new hatching style.

Another trick I like to do: when you are finished with your line drawing, stop and scan or make black & white copies of your sketch. Take one of those copies and try out a hatching technique to see if you like the line quality and linear direction. If all goes well, you can now create your hatching tones on your original sketch. This coffee house was one where I did not like the original attempt because my light source was off. But I came back a few months later, redrew it, and applied a different hatching technique to where I like this much better now.




Please tell me that you have had hatching issues as well and how did you fix them. I can't possibly be the only one with these issues, right? Help!

September Morn – Nudging the Muse

Sea Grass, Long Boat Key

Tuesday Tips & Tricks:

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to school or even had children in school, but to me September is still the beginning of the New Year. It signals not only the end of summer but a fresh start filled with growth and possibilities.

Here on the USk-Chicago blog September is the beginning of a new round of Tuesday Tips & Tricks, aka #TTT. We’ve added two new contributors to our Tuesday ranks. Welcome, Angie Hauch and Ted Gordon! If you were a participant in their workshops at our summer seminar you know why we’re excited to add them to our roster!

A September Ritual

For me, September is the time I examine my creative rituals and make sure they haven’t become just unproductive habits. Dancers have warm-up routines before taking the stage. A singer vocalizes before a performance. Athletes have rituals, too. Think of a golfer, getting ready, stepping up to the tee or batter to the plate. Each goes through a ritual and the swing follows. Why do I have rituals? (I mean besides keeping me from falling down the social media rabbit hole of FB, Instagram, Twitter, and email.) They act as warm-ups for the day or project and flip the creative switch to ON. Do they always work? No, just ask the golfer in the sand trap, but it’s good to have a familiar process to help face the blank page.

Nudging the Muse

Here's a ritual I've followed for a long time when sketching and painting on location. It’s a four-step process.

1. Take a few minutes to look around the area, to walk around if possible.
2. Focus and ask, “What jumps out at me?” “What’s the story of this place?”
3. Scribble two or three quick thumbnails of step 2.
4. Choose one of the thumbnails to be the basis of a larger sketch and begin.

Long Boat Key, thumbnails

Sometimes I don’t get to step 4. I don’t even think about it. The switch has

been flipped. The ritual has done its job. I’m lost in the process and enjoying the ride.

Long Boat Key, thumbnails

#TTT

Research shows that performance and creative rituals have real benefits for those who practice them. They give us focus, create a positive mindset, and help win the procrastination war. If you don't have one give it a try. Do you remember something you did before a particularly fruitful creative session? That's a good place to start. It can be as simple as lighting a candle or listening to a particular piece of music.

In planning a creative ritual:

1. Keep it simple and easy
2. Make it unique to the action you want to trigger
3. Use it. Repeated use reinforces the connection with your desired endeavor
4. Enjoy the process

If you do have a creative habit that works for you, share it here! I love reading about the creative habits of others. 

 Recommended Reads:

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Weekly BobBlast by Robert Burridge

Anything by Danny Gregory           

Some Tips on Avoiding Ink Smears

By Wes Douglas

One of the most frustrating aspects of drawing with pen and ink is the accidental smear that results from not allowing ample time for the ink to dry. A smear can result from an object coming into contact or sliding across a wet part of a freshly drawn line.

I like to pencil in my sketch lightly and then trace over it with pen and ink. Of course, I am a little bit of a neat-freak and cannot wait to erase the grey lines of the pencil--sometimes a little too soon after inking the line--and create a smeared line. Other times I have inadvertently rubbed the heel of my hand across a wet line when I am working swiftly back and forth across the drawing and created a mess.

Thankfully there is no need to slow down the speed at which the sketch is drawn because there are a few tricks to keeping this from happening.

One good trick I learned was from an old sign painter. He would use a twirling baton (a metal stick with a rubber cap on each end) as a brace for his hand. The baton is placed with

one end against an unused portion of the drawing surface and the other end is supported by the left hand at a slight angle away from the artwork that allows for the drawing hand to comfortably reach the drawing surface with a pen. The drawing hand is placed midway up the baton and moves freely about the length of the baton. Other similar sticks that create the same kind of brace for the drawing hand include a dowel rod with a tennis ball fitted over the ends; or a walking cane with a rubber footing at one end. All of these methods help keep the drawing hand safely away from the drawing surface and especially the wet inked lines.

A second method of adding space between the drawing hand and the artwork surface is

what is known as a "Drawing Bridge." A Drawing Bridge is a rigid flat stick, such as an old ruler or paint stirring stick, with a wooden block at each end so that it looks much like a bridge. These are easily crafted out of objects commonly found in the home or at the local hardware store at relatively low cost. The nice thing about this method is that there is already a straight edge built in which allows for easy drawing of precision lines. 

A third method I have often used involves laying down a larger circle template and then placing the desired size template or ruler over the drawing. This permits separation from the drawing tools and the drawing surface to avoid any possibility of contacting the ink.

Finally, there are a few other ideas to protect the drawing surface from the hand and tools used by animators, sign painters, and airbrush artists. They will often get a pair of cotton gloves from the science surplus store, cut off the thumb and first two fingers of the drawing hand glove. This gives a sense of touch to the fingers that hold the drawing tool and protects the heel of the hand from contacting the wet inked lines. If all else fails and cotton gloves are not readily available, then the use of a forearm or a balled up t-shirt also make great supports for the drawing hand when placed just under the right-handed forearm.