Show Us Your Process!

Foggy drawing, desk view. Click image to view full-size.

I love it when artists blog about their creative process, giving us look behind the scenes. It's important to remember that artists are not magicians. Our creative work does not appear out of thin air; it's work. Here are some of my favorite artists' blogs with links to process-related posts.

Debbi Kaspari is an Oklahoma artist/naturalist currently at work on a field guide to the birds of Trinidad and Tobago. She also manages to write a wonderful blog showcasing many of her sketches, plus bonus things like drawing birds from paper models.

Abbey Ryan makes a painting a day. Wow. (Here are some other artists who also make a painting a day. And they have a book!) Have a look at this video to get an idea of how she builds her paintings.

Jason Hackenwerth documents the construction of his fantastical sculptures in great detail.

James Jean blogs about his sketchbook and works in progress at ProcessRecess. (Some images, while beautiful, are NSFW.)

Also: The Tools Artists Use Creative Workspaces blog Artists' Studios Flickr pool

A casualty of The Process: one of my palettes after a painting session. See more palette photos in this Flickr set.

To learn more about my process, you can look in the navbar to your left, under "Category" and click "Process." Here is one of my favorite posts showing in-progress paintings.

Sketch Series: Dr. Sketchy's 04.05.2009

Merry in a Feather Boa, ink on paper, 2009. Click image to view on Flickr.

Click here to see my other Dr. Sketchy's drawings. Click here to see the Dr. Sketchy's OKC pool on Flickr. Click here to learn more about Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School.

Sketch Series: 100 Heads

5 heads e, blind gesture drawing with pigma micron ink on 3 x 5 index card, 2009. Click image to view on Flickr.

I'm working on a series of blind gesture drawings on 3 x 5 cards. Click here to visit the whole set on Flickr.

"100 Heads" is an undertaking in which an artist creates 100 different portraits using as many different styles and materials as possible. I'm taking a different tack, drawing as many heads as I can as quickly as possible without looking. I'm enjoying the unexpected results.

Figurative Collage Set on Flickr

Sketch for How May I?, mixed media collage on paper. Click image to view on Flickr.

For about ten years now I have collected pictures to use as ideas for new pictures.* I often start a painting by gathering a small pile of image sources, either intuitively, because they seem to go together, or for a specific purpose. I used to create a pencil-and-paper sketch of these various sources, attempting to synthesize them visually before starting the painting. I would also scan them, resize them, struggle through PhotoShop layers to get them to fit together just right. At some point I thought, "what I really want is this head on that body," and went: rip, slap, tape, done. I realized that the collage is visual shorthand for my pictorial plan. It didn't have to make sense compositionally; the collage is a convenient way for me to gather a group of visual sources onto a single page. Plus, the faster I make the collage, the more unexpected and interesting visual moments show up in the result.

I've scanned a bunch of these collages and uploaded them to this Flickr set. Enjoy.

*Old-school illustrators call this a swipe file. Though it was years before I learned that what I was doing was a traditional practice; before then I thought I was (gasp) stealing and that it was (gasp) wrong. Thank you, illustration.

Some Thoughts on Pens

Sketch of Geoff, pigma micron on paper, 2007.

My sketchbook exchange partner Karo has posted a review of her favorite pens. Like many of us, she is still in search of her ideal drawing instrument. My current favorite is the Sakura Pigma Micron size 01. About the micron, Karo says:

The tip gets broken easily and they dry up super fast. And if they get in contact with my gouache... it's instant death. That's why I don't use the 0.01. It had a very fine tip and did a nice thin stroke. I was so happy when I first got it... but it lasted 2 weeks and now it barely writes and the stroke is inconsistent.

I agree about the limited durability of the micron's tip, but I compensate for the pen's short life span by having a lot of them around. I buy them in boxes of twelve (about $25 from the Blick company) so I always have a new one ready. Oh, and I try not to drop them.

Sketch for Carmen McWillie, ink on paper, 2008. This is the drawing I used to make an acrylic gel transfer for the final piece, below.

My other pen of choice is the Bic Round Stic Grip Fine point. (Oddly, I have trouble finding the fine point in stores, so I usually mail order them. The medium point tends to clump and smear.) I use this pen for its versatile tonal range. The major drawback here is that the Bic's ink is non-archival. I get around that problem via an acrylic gel transfer process. You can read instructions for that process here and here.

Normal, OK: Carmen McWillie. Acrylic transfer and collage on found canvas, 2008.