Urban Sketch Group Wish List

Urban Twilight, Brush pen and watercolor.

I've been an urban sketcher for about four years now. During that time I've learned a lot about drawing and about myself, e.g., perspective will always be a problem; I can't be outdoors for five minutes without a sweater; I can sketch in public (really surprised myself with that one!); and most of all, I love to sketch. From pencils to brush pens, I'm a fan. The one thing that's eluded me though is finding a good sketch group, one that equates to my writer's group and keeps me motivated.

One of the challenges I've encountered when trying to create a sketch group is that a lot of the artists I meet are actually plein air painters rather than sketchy-sketchers. They thrive on lengthy, silent, meditative solitude, going their own way and able to ignore bug bites, sunstroke, and dirt in their paint. Urban sketchers like me, on the other hand, need, well, an urban environment: strong architecture, lots of people, and most of all, speed: "Let's draw fast!"

The other day I was trying to figure out how to solve this dilemma. In the end, I decided to simply write down my wish list and see what comes of it. As they say, "Write it down, make it happen!"

SKETCH GROUP WISH LIST 

1. Dedicated meeting time as a group, as opposed to everyone gathering at a specific place and then scattering to sketch solo. Two hours is a good length of time for a group meeting, especially if that time is divided into segments, say, using the first half hour to discuss a specific technique, tool, medium, or subject matter, followed by an hour to draw, and then taking the last thirty minutes to share and discuss work. 

2. To save time deciding what to draw, I think it would be fun for a group to occasionally draw the same pre-selected subject or scene together, or at least work from a shared theme such as doors or windows.

3. Taking this a step further, how about meetings where we all use the same medium or tools? For instance, a meeting where we only use brush pens, or just graphite. Or we choose a specific challenges, like drawing in only two colors, or drawing in a continuous line and not taking your pen from the paper. 

4. I love timed sketches and they're especially fun to do as a group. Three minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes--set a timer and draw fast! 

5. Maybe it's just me, but I think urban means urban and rarely, if ever, means going out to explore the wilderness. Not that I have anything against the great outdoors, but it just isn't my thing for artwork. That said, neither does urban mean downtown. There are hundreds of interesting, complex places to sketch that have nothing to do with grand office buildings and busy intersections. How about sketching apartment complexes, schools and playgrounds, construction sites, museums, art galleries, industrial parks, or simply the street you live on? I often think a lot of well-designed and interesting architecture is overlooked just because it's too close to home. 

6. Lastly: LET'S WRITE! Sketches can be greatly enhanced by writing, whether it's to record thoughts and feelings about a place as a journal entry, or to experiment with some poetry or flash fiction inspired by your drawing.

So those are my ideas. How about you? Anything you can add to my list? All suggestions will be most welcome!

Tip of the Day: Finding a group of any kind to work with isn't always easy, and most creative people usually have to learn at some stage to enjoy their own company and work on their own. One of the best ways I know to combat any feelings of isolation or loneliness on the creative path is to watch art videos on YouTube.com. There are hundreds (thousands) of excellent workshops, demonstrations, and on-going conversations with artists at all levels. Two of my favorites are Brushes and Bunnies and Sketch with Teoh. Check them out the next time you need some inspiration as well as a new art buddy.

Travel Writing: Pack Your Journal!

A view of Shanghai--thanks to my travel magazines!

Without a doubt my favorite magazines for finding writing and art prompts are travel magazines. I can spend hours snipping, tearing, cutting, and dreaming over photos of tropical beaches, European cities, and the kind of Asian resorts that make me want to run away from home in a heartbeat. There's hardly a single page I can pass up without having an idea for a story about a millionaire with three poodles or an orphan who finds a full set of packed Louis Vuitton. 

The bulk of my magazines come from the library free giveaway bin: Conde Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure, National Geographic Kids, Sky; you name it, I've read it. Strangely enough, though, for all my love of travel and the magazines that go with it, I've never attempted writing a travel article myself. Lately I've been thinking it's an area I should look into. To better understand what goes into an article, I started taking notes on what makes a good story, as well as the different kinds of articles magazines publish. Some of the main points I've observed are:

• A piece of travel writing can be as small as a paragraph, or as long as a book. That said, there's not many travel magazines willing to reprint your entire book, but they will look at small sections or chapters. Travel magazines are also a good way to promote your book via reviews, which in turn make a good starting point for armchair travel writers. If you've enjoyed reading a book about Singapore or the North Pole, submit your opinion!
• Humorous articles seem to be overwhelmingly popular. The more mishaps the merrier. Whether it's the time you fell off the gondola in Venice or slipped on a banana peel at the Ritz, enquiring minds what to know more, more, more.
• The articles don't always have to be slapstick funny, but they can be deeply personal. I've read articles that have brought me to tears: stories about adopting children overseas, scattering a loved one's ashes on a faraway beach, or coming to terms with a serious illness or disability through the daily rigors of getting from one place to another.
• Travel experiences don't have to be recent to qualify as magazine-worthy. Travel memoirs are among some of my favorite articles: "When I was ten years old, eating ice cream in Helsinki with my grandmother . . . "
• For many people, travel isn't just about business or pleasure. Sometimes a trip has a deeper significance, such as taking a pilgrimage to a sacred site, or doing volunteer work in an area hit by a natural disaster. Writing about these experiences for publication can inspire others to take the same path.
• The more unusual the place visited, the better the story, whether it's a little-known trail-way, restaurant, or museum: weird is good.
• Speaking of restaurants. . . . Many travel magazines devote entire issues to food themes, complete with recipes. Yum! (Don't leave out the wine!)
• Budget travel is always a big hit with both travelers and readers.
• But luxury is even better! I particularly like the articles that show how to combine the two extremes, as in, "A backpackers guide to Lake Como," or, "How to get invited for free to the most expensive island in the world." If you can manage it--write about it!
• Clothing articles are always a stand-out: what to pack, what to wear in Hong Kong, the best in-flight slippers, etc. etc. If you have a clever way to travel in the same outfit from Barcelona to Tahiti, let us know.
• Theme journeys make for good stories: eco-travel, visiting literary shrines or artist's studios, motor racing. . . . Designing a trip and an accompanying article around a specific interest sounds like a great way to test the travel writing waters.
• Travel buddies. Some of the best stories I've read are about the people you travel with. Whether it's a spouse, children, extended family, best friend, group of strangers, or all by yourself--the human element is in many ways the most important part of the trip as well as the story.
• Artwork. Be sure to take your sketchbook on your next trip. Many of the articles I read include sketches of the journey taken, and most of these sketches are totally raw, smeary, crooked, and real. In other words--they're sketches. Their lack of "perfection" is what captures the moment so well. Even if you don't consider yourself an artist, give it a whirl. You might find a whole new reason to travel!

Tip of the Day:  Keep in mind that travel writing doesn't always have to be nonfiction. Perhaps poetry or a novel based on your travels might be just the ticket. Bon Voyage.

CampNaNoWriMo 2019: The Seaweed Collector

"Tide Pool." Mixed-media piece from a long ago class . . .

Until a few weeks ago, I always thought #CampNaNoWriMo was in July. Then, thanks to a stray tweet I happened to spot mentioning it was also in April, well, my course was set, and here I am: once I hear of a writing or art challenge, that's it, I'm lost. I HAVE to participate.

Despite having written with my cabin mates a couple of years ago, I wasn't very well prepared for camp this time around. No sleeping bag, no name labels sewn into my clothing, not even a bag of Fritos for late-night snacking. Suddenly it was April and I had to show up at the blank page with a rather hazy idea and not much else.

Fortunately, CampNaNoWriMo isn't anywhere near as stressful as November's 50-thousand-word-novel-in-a-month ordeal. At camp you're expected to play. You set your own rules and goals, write in any format or genre of your choice, from screenplay to memoir, or you can even go for a full novel if you so desire. For me this freedom translated into the decision to go down a strange path of my own invention: 50 pages of narrative prose poetry handwritten into a journal with collage on the corresponding pages.

My title for this project, The Seaweed Collector, was inspired by a photo on Pinterest of an old nonfiction book of the same name. When I saw it, all I could think of was: Who is the Seaweed Collector? What does he/she do? Where does he/she store all that seaweed? How many kinds of seaweed are there to collect? After some research I found that the original book was printed in 1923 and is actually an encylopedia of British seaweeds. Because it's in the public domain now, you can buy what sounds like a photo-copied reprint on Amazon. com.

At first I was worried that this side trip was going to detract me from my daily page quota on my current WIP novel, Ghazal. But then something interesting happened; I realized that I wanted to add pages and lines from this new work to my novel, making them all part of a mysterious "book within a book" that the characters read, pass on to each other, and that changes them all in some way. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about this development. I'm also grateful that I haven't just gone running after some time-wasting diversion that keeps me from my "real work." Now to go build my blanket fort. . . . Catch you next time.

Tip of the Day: A fun way to start any new project is to borrow the title of an existing book, especially one that's fairly old, or out of print, and that nobody could possibly associate with a well-known narrative such as Gone With the Wind, or Peter Rabbit. You don't even have to buy the book; browsing the library or a used-book store should give you plenty of fresh ideas!

Picture Book Check-in: Sketching The White Pony

Practice page from my White Pony sketchbook

This year I'm once again helping to organize the Enchantment Show here in Albuquerque, a local art and writing event presented by the New Mexico chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Basically, the show turns the usual way of producing a children's picture- or story book on its head: instead of a writer submitting a story to a publishing house and then the house assigning an illustrator to produce the pictures, we invite illustrators to paint or draw to a theme (this year it's Serenity) and then assign writers to write the accompanying stories. It's an awful lot of fun for everyone involved, and my main job is to match the artists with their writing buddies and to make sure everything is ready for our show deadline of June 1.

What this has to do with today's post is that I've been inspired to take this same approach to my own work-in-progress picture book, The White Pony, a project that's been dear to my heart for, gosh, a couple of years now. My title and inspiration comes from a book of Chinese poetry I bought decades ago for the grand sum of 25 cents at a Friends of the Library sale in Carrollton, Georgia. Most of the poems are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old, and some of the best poetry I've ever read. When I took my first splash ink class with artist Ming Franz, the friend I traveled to Taiwan with, I immediately thought the work I created with her was perfect for illustrating fairy tales. And that lead me to think of The White Pony and how I could turn it into a children's picture book.

Ever since then I've been working hard to "play" with splash ink or splash color techniques and learning to draw horses. Some days I feel I will be learning to draw horses for the rest of my life, but that's also how I feel about all my artistic endeavors anyway. Which is how all this relates to the Enchantment Show.

For a long time I thought I had to write my story first, and it wasn't easy. I didn't know whether I wanted to just illustrate some of the poems, or write some complicated story about a princess who wanted a pony, or a boy who wanted to find a pony for a princess, or a pony that wanted to find a pony friend . . . and on and on and on until I was totally blocked. The one thing I did know is that I wanted to paint the pony and his environment, but I just didn't know what to do with him as far as a story went.

Several months ago I decided this wasn't getting me anywhere fast and that what I really needed to do was follow the example of the Enchantment Show: paint first, write later. I've never been happier with a creative decision. 

To experiment with ideas for my illustrations, I worked in a small Stillman and Birn sketchbook, plus used some larger sheets of multi-media paper to create thumbnails and to lay out color palettes for how I would like the finished book to look:
 

There will be goldfish!

 And even a pony eventually!

I do know the changing seasons are going to be part of the story too. Here we have Spring.

  And Winter . . .

Summer turning into Autumn!

My main method of starting the sketches was to simply lay down random watercolor washes throughout the sketchbook and then try to "see the pictures" in the washes. The technique is very loosely based on the Chinese splash ink tradition, and one that matches my way of writing based on random prompts, whether it's for my art journal or a full-blown novel.

My primary drawing supplies have included Akashiya Sai watercolor pens, Caran d'Ache Museum Aquarelle watercolor pencils, Kuretake watercolors including their "Starry Nights" set of gold-range watercolors (love, love, love), and sumi or Black Magic ink and dip pen.

Now that my sketchbook is filled though, I'm gearing up for Phase II: good paper! Final drafts! Let's paint those ponies for real! After that, well, hopefully I'll come up with an actual story. But for now, I'm letting the illustrations guide my imagination. As the saying goes, somewhere in all that manure there has to be a pony, right? Draw it and the stories will appear. Yes.

Tip of the Day: How can the concept of "pictures first, write later" help your own writing project: screenplay, poetry, memoir, or novel? Keep in mind that you certainly don't have to draw your own--just a handful of magazine cut-outs arranged into an evocative sequence are often more than enough to jump start a multitude of WIPs!

Old Books for New Art

This week I've been tearing up books. Lots of them. Not because I have anything against books (no!), or have a particular fondness for the sound of tearing paper, but because sometimes the best thing to do with a dog-eared, multi-read, falling-apart old paperback is to turn it into, you guessed it: collage! Or, better yet, an altered book of its own.

My love of using books as the basis for collage or as backgrounds for artwork started several years ago when I tried using a second-hand volume of architectural renderings as an art journal. At the time, I was so new to the process I thought you had to gesso, paint, and alter every single page of a book to have it qualify as an "altered book." I hadn't yet learned that the established technique most book-altering artists use is to glue or gesso several pages of an old book together in such a way that you end up with about a dozen or so very stiff, very solid "boards" to work on. Instead, I water colored, drew, pasted, and wrote on every single page of my altered journal, back and front. It took months (years) to complete and I still see room on the pages for more I can do. The end result was a monstrosity so thick it has to be held together with the kind of rubber band used to bind a bundle of asparagus or broccoli crowns.

Despite the enormity of my task, or maybe because of it, I learned an enormous amount from that first effort, mainly that one of the best collage materials available were the pages of other old books. Torn or cut up, the pages yielded all sorts of treasures, from weird illustrations to bizarre snippets of text just right for the type of mood or atmosphere I was trying to evoke. And I haven't stopped.

My method for  choosing which books to tear up is most often related to the age of the book, e.g.:

• The book is at least 50 years old, but is in no way a collector's edition. This especially applies to books printed on acidic paper and that (unfortunately) are disintegrating on their own with no help from me.
• If I do use a newer book, such as a mass-market paperback from the '90s, it's amazing how even a 20-year-old book can age to the point of having a broken spine, dog-eared and brittle pages, and the entire thing has yellowed to an unattractive yuck-color. No one could possibly enjoy reading the book in its current state of decay, and that's why it's on the "please take me away" free shelf at the library or similar.
• Sometimes, just sometimes, a brand new book can also be a total disaster due to an accident of some kind: the cover is missing as are several key sections or pages, the remaining pages are beverage-stained, mud-smeared, and/or water-logged,  and the whole thing is destined for the trash.
• Mass-produced nonfiction books, regardless of age, often have amazing illustrations and photographs, but contain very little informative text, especially if the research or covered topics are hopelessly out-of-date, or the quality of the writing is below par. Ho-hum cookbooks, history texts, and how-to books you find on bookstore bargain shelves are all good examples.
• Finally, magazines of all ages are always a good stand-by if you just can't bring yourself to tear up a beloved book, no matter how bad the condition.

Next step: what to do with all this paper madness. How about: 

1. Pasting the torn strips and pieces of text into a random pattern on top of another kind of support, e.g., a journal page, a Masonite board, or Bristol board, etc. 
2. Turning chapter titles, lines of text, and individual words into found poetry.
3. Covering the text with thinned gesso, acrylic paint, clear gel medium, or even watercolors. I like to vary the thickness of this coating, sometimes like it to be completely clear, or quite heavy to just leave the faintest amount of ghost text in the background.
4. Drawing on complete pages that have been torn from the binding, but not cut up in any way.
5. Cutting, folding, and gluing the pages into decorative shapes or small envelopes to paste throughout my journal.
6. Photocopying the various pages to create different sizes, distortions, or stronger backgrounds to then color or paint upon.
7. Label or title an existing collage or mixed-media piece.

The best part of tearing up books for me has been discovering the perfect piece of text through the happy accidents of randomness. For example, I might find in my pile of shreds a passage about the beauty of gardening. Matching and pasting these lines on to a scene of urban decay creates a tension that I don't think I could express any other way. It's magic!

Tip of the Day:  Book lovers, please don't despair. I realize how painful the idea of tearing up books can be for some of you, but look at it this way: when you tear up an old book, you're actually saving it (or at least the best parts). What would normally end up in the trash can now be a serious creative tool.