In a Minute Ago

A new everyday sketch challenge

Liz Steel has announced a new everyday sketch challenge. Just like many of us Liz struggles with sketching daily as the mundane can take over and squash creativity and sketching the mundane doubly so! There are a number of everyday sketch challenges online but they all propose either drawing a thing or an idea. Probably one of the first and best was Danny Gregory’s Everyday Matters Challenge. The EDM challenge suggested drawing things like a coffee cup, trees, tools, or bikes etc solid things – nouns in other words- that you go and find and draw. For me this was …

Travel Journal tip 1 from on the road

This is the start of a series of travel journal tips. The idea is that these tips are quick little things you can do while traveling that enhance your travel journal. These tips are all things I do in my own travel journal and the examples I share are real life samples of something done while traveling. Tips that are shared are real rather than polished or perfect. I figure that many people attempt to keep a travel journal and don’t because their expectations are too high. Or they want perfection which is the undoing of many creative projects. Before …

Urban Sketching at the Carillion Canberra

Urban sketching1 comment

We attended an informal urban sketchers meeting at the National Carillion building followed by a picnic. I thought I would share my efforts. This was the last page in my Stillman and Birn Alpha series landscape (9 x 6, 22.9 cm x 15.2 cm) sketchbook (150 gsm white medium grain surface paper). I used water colours and Pitt pens. As usual it was a fun morning getting together with sketching buddies. If you are interested in Urban sketching, the Canberra Urban Sketchers group meet on the second Sunday of the month and everyone is welcome. We often have other informal …

Werner’s nomenclature of colours

Design / Resources online2 Comments

German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner developed a detailed nomenclature – or naming system – colour guide published in 1821 under the flowery title of Werner’s nomenclature of colours : with additions, arranged so as to render it highly useful to the arts and sciences, particularly zoology, botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and morbid anatomy : annexed to which are examples selected from well-known objects in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Between the pages of this mouthful of a title is a type of colour dictionary which long predates Pantone colour swatches. It is an attempt to describe the colours of the …

Journal Prompts for this week

Creativity / Journaling / Journaling Prompts

Make a cuppa and take a break for a few moments. I have a few articles of interest to share. Each holds an interesting tit bit and all make good jumping off points for a written journal entry. I often use this sort of reading matter as a journal prompt. One of the topics that is an ongoing reading project which is driven by the question “What makes a person creative?” Following this interest I came across Leonardo da Vinci: How to See the World Like Nobody Else by Zat Rana who is summarising Walter Isaacson’s ideas explored in his …

Free drawing lessons from the great master Hokusai

Art history and Theory / Sketching / Techniques and tutorials Japanese Art / Katsushika Hokusai 7 Comments

Katsushika Hokusai is well known for his iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa. He was a master in the true sense of the word. Hokusai also produced a three-volume series of books of drawing lessons. These are now online free. The title has been translated as Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing. These books neatly demonstrate how drawing is taught today too! For instance, if you have ever done any basic drawing classes, you have probably been asked to draw a sphere, a cube, and a cone. It is a drawing exercise that many courses start out with. The idea is that many things …

A Egon Schiele sketch that rocked me to the core

Art history and Theory Egon Schiele 14 Comments

When Austrian painter Egon Schiele died at 28, he left behind 3,000 drawings and more than 300 paintings. Schiele has been described as major figurative painter of the early 20th century but that is not what I shall talk about today. After my attempts at doing the the #OneWeek100People2018 challenge I have been thinking a lot about sketching people and about sketches of people I have seen that really moved me. I thought today I would share a sketch that rocked me to the core. I saw this image at the National Gallery, London in 2013 at an exhibition titled …

More Urban sketching

Urban sketching9 Comments

I am just quickly sharing two more Urban Sketches. Yesterday was the regular meeting of the Urban Sketchers Canberra Group. We all gathered together at the Australian National Botanic Gardens to sketch for the morning. The gardens are lovely I always enjoy them. Below is my effort for the morning. As I was sketching a couple came up to me and told me how they got married there. Last weekend Government House was open to the public. So we like thousands others went to look at the house and of course do some sketching. Both images are linked to larger versions, …