Train Tunnel Drawing

Train Tunnel at Carl and Cole, San Francisco
12 x 16 inches
vine charcoal on paper

Inspired by my plein air painting session with Mary yesterday, I decided to step out my front door today and try an outdoor sketch. This is a view of the entrance to a train tunnel in my neighborhood. I always admire the afternoon light bouncing in it and have been wanting to paint it for a while. I'm hoping to do a color painting, too. The tunnel interior is painted butter yellow and I just love how the curved shadow creeps around the inner surface. It gets a gorgeous reflected glow within the shadow.

I think one of my biggest problems with painting outdoors is that I am very shy to draw or paint where people can watch me. I hate anyone seeing my work before I feel it is in a good state. I've decided I have to get over this. So even though I live in a very pedestrian-heavy neighborhood I decided to brave the stares and set up right on the sidewalk. It was easier than I thought it would be.

I got a really nice compliment while working: A woman stopped and chatted with me, she said she was an artist too. She said she noticed that even though from far back the drawing is very hazy, that in fact close up there is a lot of structure. Structure!! I've been working explicitly on structure for months so I was thrilled she chose this word. I thanked her profusely but I don't think she realized how much it meant to me.

Plein Air

View Through the Trees
9 x 12 inches
oil on panel

My friend Mary and I did a day of plein air painting together. My husband was confused as to why artists paint together, especially once I described that were set up far apart and barely spoke to each other all day except to share a couple snacks. But I explained to him that it's like meeting up with a workout partner: Someone to help you have the discipline to get out there, but it's not necessarily a social event. In any case, we had fun together, if only in the mostly non-verbal, co-solitary way two artists can have fun together. Hmmm.... "co-solitary", I just made that up and I think it's a good word!

Anyway, this first painting of mine (above) is very unfinished and I would have liked to work on it longer but after a couple hours all the shadows shifted around and absolutely everything had changed. I don't have much experience painting outside, and how anyone makes a fully developed landscape is a complete mystery to me.

Golf Course Grove
9 x 12 inches
oil on panel

Here I've made basically a value painting, color has nothing to do with it. It's just a range of pale yellow through dark green. I think I need to do some landscape painting copies to find out how people get color into their landscapes. Also, I have to figure out how to handle the foreground, this painting is dying for a foreground.

I'd also like to note that California trees are just weird. I grew up on the East Coast, and even though I've lived in SF for 8 years, I never get used to the Dr Seuss vegetation. These are pine trees, and yet the tops are flat. Where I come conifers look like proper Christmas trees!

Marin Headlands
9 x 12 (detail)
Oil on convas paper (bleh)

I only worked on this for less than an hour, and the overall painting is weak but I decided to post this portion because I had so much fun painting the rolling hills and eroded cliffs of the Headlands across the Bay. The hazy fog-filtered light on the distant hills allowed only a small range of color and value, so I had to mix very subtle color steps to describe the forms. It was a good exercise because it made me realize I often rely to much on dramatic value changes and I need to remember you can can really describe a lot of form with only very subtle shifts.

Ted Seth Jacobs - Drapery Study

Drapery Study I
graphite on paper
18 x 24 inches (detail)

Drapery Study II

graphite on paper
18 x 24 inches (detail)

I've just finished 12 weeks studying drawing with Ted Seth Jacobs at BACAA. We spent the final week modeling a satin jacket which was put on a mannequin. It was an amazingly difficult final project, it really felt like a test of everything Ted has been teaching us about how to analyze three dimensional form.

These are the 4 main principles Ted taught us to apply when analyzing form:

Convex Form
Everything in nature is curved, nothing is flat. All of these curves are convex, there are no concavities. If you look closely at a seemingly-concave drape or indentation, you can always see small convexities along it. This is evidence of the underlying structure. (It sounds implausible, everyone doubts it when they first hear it, but try seeing it, it's there).

Wide to Narrow
Nothing in nature is parallel, every shape starts wide on one end and gets narrow on the other. A shadow shape will always be a fan, not a square or rectangle. Use this concept to "shape the light".

Rounding and Ending
Every shadow rounds over a curved surface and ends before the next form begins. This means every form shadow has a soft edge and a hard edge. Think about the direction of the light - generally the edge of a shadow closer to the light source will be soft, and the edge away from the light will be hard.

What's in Front
The only point on an object not foreshortened is the point directly in front of your eye, everything else is foreshortened. That means every form is in front of or behind another. There are thousands of tiny "horizons", the edge of a shape we look across to see the next shape.

The hardest part is that all of these principles apply to every form. A rounding-and-ending shadow has a wide-to-narrow shape and it always describes a convex form which is in front or behind something else.

What I Wish I Learned in Art School

I went to art school because I loved to paint and draw as a kid, and I wanted to be an artist. I didn’t really know what an artist did. Four years and 80 thousand dollars later, I graduated from art school with only a vague idea of what an artist did, and a very fractured portfolio made up of a hodge-podge of homework assignments and figure drawings.

After art school I spent years floundering and did not make enough money to support myself even marginally until several years after college. I felt blindsided - I’d been very successful and my teachers told me I was talented, so I though an "art career" would magically unfold before me.

Only now, 15 years after graduation, do I have an idea of what I should have been taught about how to "be an artist". Lucky you, I am going to share for free what an 80K education should have taught me.

If I were advising an art student now, this is what I would tell them:

Decide what you want to do
For someone who likes to draw and paint in high school and wants to draw and paint for a living, there are essentially two routes: Illustration, where other people pay you to create what they want, and Fine Art Painting, where you create what you want and hope other people buy it.

(There are a lot of other art careers, but I'm just focusing on what I wish I'd been told, as someone who just wanted to paint and draw with traditional materials.)

Illustration
Illustrations are the drawings and paintings you see in magazines, newspapers, on book covers, and in advertising. Publishers and ad agencies hire freelance illustrators to make those drawings and paintings. A successful illustrator has a consistent flow of freelance illustration jobs, and hopefully earns a living at it.

Fine art
Fine art paintings are sold in galleries to people who want to have original art in their homes and offices. A successful fine artist develops relationships with galleries, consistently shows and sells their artwork, and hopefully earns a living at it.

Research art schools
Not all art schools are the same. Some art schools are better for fine art, some are better for commercial art/illustration. Some are more expensive than others – a lot more expensive. Pick an art school that will help you achieve your goals. Visit schools and ask lots of questions about what their graduates do, and what the school does for career counseling. Be specific about what you want.

What to do while you are in art school
By the end of senior year you need to have a portfolio of 10-20 works of art that hold together as a group and look like one person made them all. If you want to be an illustrator, develop a portfolio of illustrations all in one distinct and cohesive style.

If you want to go the fine art gallery route, pick a theme and do a series of paintings on that theme. Show that you can work hard and consistently to make a cohesive body of work.

Portfolio development takes forethought and planning. You won’t have a cohesive portfolio if you just gather up all your art school homework assignments and call it a portfolio. Art school should teach you this. It doesn't.

What to do after graduation
The minute you leave art school, if not before, professionally photograph your portfolio, and start to submit your artwork. Submit your illustration portfolio to small local magazines and print publications. Submit your fine art portfolio to local galleries and art fairs. Submit to contests and juried shows and apply for grants. Submit over and over and over. Assume you will get lots of rejections, even if you were successful and "talented" in art school.

For Illustration
Do illustration jobs for free or very cheap at first so you have professional pieces in your portfolio, not just school assignments. Over time you will replace the college projects with professional work. Publications who hire you to do illustrations need to have an idea of what the finished illustration will look like based on your previous work, and they need to know you are reliable and will finish the project, so present your work accordingly.

For Fine Art
If you want to go the gallery route, this is the most important thing you need to know about being a gallery artist: Galleries need to see that you can produce a consistent output of paintings at a consistent level of quality. Galleries are a business and they need to know you are reliable. Some galleries won’t even consider painters who don’t have a master’s degree so you might need more school. Grad school will teach you how to produce consistently, and they will teach you talk and write about your work.

No one ever told me these things at art school. As an artist you have to think of your artwork as a product and you have to learn to market and sell your product. Most artists don’t like to do this. But most artists also don’t like to operate cash registers or serve food either.

LINK:
This blog post Is Going to Art School Worth It? is a great article about deciding whether to go art school.

Venus de Milo (in progress)

Drawing of the Venus de Milo (in progress)
18 x 24 inches
charcoal on paper

(I already posted this photo but I thought it would be nice to see it near the updated drawing)

I spent a long time today refining the contour before I started shading, but I forgot to take a photo at that point.

It helps to have worked out the contour before the modeling. Even so, I am having a really hard time with the face. I've made her looks like she is glaring at something intensely, so I'll have to work on that.

All that drapery is going to be challenging...

TSJ Portrait Workshop: Bridgette

Bridgette
18 x 24 inches
graphite pencil and white chalk pencil on toned paper
about 20 hours

I experimented with a new technique with the white chalk. Unfortunately, what Ted is teaching requires so much modeling, I don't think it works well with the chalk, which gets ground in and over-manipulated in trying to get very fine detail.

Besides all that, I am happy with the drawing, especially how it compares to my first portrait of Bridgette I did 9 months ago. I feel like in this new drawing there is more a sense of the dimensional feel of the landscape of her skin. When I am drawing now I feel like my pencil is actually touching the surface of the form, like sculpting. Previously I only thought about copying lights and darks, so this is a totally different approach for me.

I do think a combination of the two is best. I first have to "flatten" my vision and record the major proportions without thinking of them as three-dimensional, in order to get the proportions right. But when the major proportions are set, there is a sense of switching to a different mode, thinking in 3 dimensions, and looking very closely at the surface, watching how it undulates towards and away from the light, and towards and away from the picture plane.

I think if you look at my first drawing, you'll see that there is no sense of being able to touch the surface of Bridgett's skin, it's just flat blankness.

I have no idea how anyone ever did or does portrait commissions from life. The pressure to achieve likeness in as short a time as possible must be tremendous.

TSJ Portrait Workshop: Melissa

Melissa
18 x 24 inches
pencil on paper
about 30 hours

Despite some problems with the drawing, this is probably the best likeness I have ever done. I may have made Melissa look slightly more gaunt and maybe slightly older than she is, but the proportions and placements I feel are pretty reminiscent of her as a specific person.

I feel like Ted's lessons are really starting to sink in, and my drawing is much improved since I started working with him. He's taught me to think of the 3-dimensional forms of what I am looking at (and subforms, and subforms and subforms...), and to try to understand everything in 3 dimensions, instead of just "copying" a pattern of lights and darks. The result is a much more solidly volumetric drawing.

Next week we will be drawing Bridgett, whom I first drew last year, and I can't wait to compare the drawings and see what I have learned.

I've also started experimenting with softer (darker) pencils. I usually use hard pencils, 2H and H, and just gently go over and over to build up the tone. But for this drawing I tried using a combination of 3B and H pencils. I really liked the effect, much larger range of value.

A weird effect is happening in my eyes recently. I am looking very closely at the model, and I guess I am really staring for quite a long time, because sometimes when I look at my paper to draw I am momentarily blinded. Instead of my paper and my drawing, I see the after-effect of the model's image burned into my retinas. It's very disconcerting.

Aside from classwork, this is a sneak preview of what I am working on in my studio right now:

TSJ Portrait Workshop: Melissa's Profile

Melissa's Profile
18 x 24 inches
graphite pencil on paper
about 20 hours

This is the drawing I did the third week of Ted Seth Jacob's portrait drawing class. This doesn't actually look much like Melissa.

TSJ Portrait Workshop: Mona

Mona

18 x 24 inches
graphite pencil on paper
about 40 hours

My second Ted Seth Jacob workshop just finished it's 4th week (of 6) and I thought I would post what I have been working on. This drawing of Mona was from the first 2 weeks of the class.

Most of the students in this workshop were also in last November/December workshop, so Ted is showing us how the principles he taught us for figure drawing apply to portraiture.

I have to say, portraiture is very very hard. Struggling to get a likeness had reduced me nearly to tears more than once these last few weeks.

Ted always says "you must allow yourself to relax and be open and receive all the information coming into your eyes." I really agree, because I'm finding that forcibly trying to spear a likeness instead just chases it away.

Something about the human face makes us even more critical I think. The ability to recognize a face is hard-wired into our brains, and so we all have a highly developed ability to distinguish faces from one another by minute differences. But seeing the inaccuracies and being able to fix them are not the same thing.