MindzleSessions in Sketching
Page of Sketches from April 2009
These sketch session are for me, to become more capable as an artist by weakening my reliance on good reference and giving myself the time and the freedom to draw anything that pops into my head. I cover my results daily on c-hammer.com
I have been asked recently to describe these sketch sessions in more detail. What am I doing? Why am I doing it?
To answer those questions a little background is necessary.
For as long as I can remember I have been able to draw and paint anything I could see. It has never been hard for me, I could always just do it. I’m sure that skill increases with practice, but at this point I have been drawing and painting for 30 years. So it is easy for me to draw from reference. However my ability to take just a random idea out of my head and create it on the page… Well, those attempts were disastrous.
This reinforced my dependence on good reference. I shied away from working without it. For an artist this is a severely limiting factor.
My first departure from this came at university, when I was hired to do caricatures of all the faculty of the Engineering department for a promo. I did 300 caricatures, without ever having done one before. Ostensibly a caricature is just a portrait, those I’ve done plenty. Which is what the first 25 looked like. But with limited time, and the request for them to be more of a toon style, I rapidly learned the art of the caricature. It is not about representing what you see, but is about putting down on the page what you mind grabs as important. Thus the exaggerated features.
That little gig, opened another door. The local paper, who I already worked for designing adverts, was looking for a cartoonist. So I started doing political cartoons. This was very hard for me. I studied Bill Waterson and Gary Larsen, and as luck would have it Gary Larsen was an Alumni of the same University and was interested in chatting about the subject. From those conversations I learned more about humor than drawing the toons. It wasn’t until years later, and thousands of hours of practice that I felt like a cartoonist.
What all those hours of practice and study taught me, was worth more than any degree. In fact I think every art teacher I’ve ever had was trying to teach it to me, and for many reasons it never sunk in. It all finally started to click, recently when my friend Lee Moyer codified design, for me.
The combination of lessons learned from years of practice and a true master setting out “rules” gave me a blueprint to “fix” my own deficiencies.
So that is why I do the sessions. Here is what I do in them:
I create some sort of randomness on the page. Sometimes just drawing shapes, lines or squiggles. Other times I start drawing and lightly erase a series of drawings on top of each other. While doing this I try not to think of anything specifically, and start drawing the characters, creatures and objects I see in the random shapes I’ve placed on the page. When I first started doing this they were abysmal. Not that they are great now. But, the process has allowed me to create things I never would have imagined otherwise.
The rules of this little game are simple.
1) Do not go in with any idea of what you will draw. This stops you from looking for that image on the page. let your mind wander.
2) Limit yourself to a few minutes per drawing.
3) Have something in the room for distraction. I put in a movie I’ve seen a thousand times. Keeps me from focusing too intently on the page and looking for preconceived ideas.
4) NO REFERENCE what-so-ever. After all this is the point of the exercise. So no mirrors, nothing.
If you have any specific questions I’d love to answer them for you. I appreciate those people that asked about this process and hope this helped clear up any misconceptions you might of had.
I will go over Lee’s design rules in a future post, as I believe they need a full explanation and are worth the effort. If you haven’t already done so I highly recommend checking out his website. Lee picks up where a long prestigious line of illustrators left off, and is one of the best I’ve ever met.
So until next time Cheers, and keep drawing!
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