A Sketchers Day Dream...The Flight and Thank You!

 Let's make up a trip.  A day dream.  Let's say you are on routine (getting a building permit) business trip for your client (Free People). This usually means travel to a beautiful places and having evenings to yourself. Say you do this (twice) in Miami Beach. Say you are a constant sketcher and stop at a very cool outdoor bar with this crazy shape that just has to be sketched. You pull out your kit, order your beer and just play while imagining this was your job.  ( I love my job but I would love for this to define my semi retirement) Say a few sketches really pop and you put it on your meager little blog online wondering who will enjoy it. AND what if the hotel saw it, and loved it, and called you about it. They say, I don't know what I want to do, but you have captured the spirit, etc etc.  What if they called you on the coldest day in Minnesota (-14 degrees - 44 windchill) in a decade and said, "We have decided to pay for your flight, and take care of you while you are here.  Just pick something before it gets crazy in February and we won't even give you direction. Just come and feel taken care of and do what you do." Add to this daydream that you didn't take vacation this year and decided to cash in miles and have  Marcy and Leo crash your room?  Then the hotel says that's fine and we will pick you all up and they can eat too!  Yeah right....dream on sucker! All you did was enjoy your beer and the beautiful people, and the pigments swirling around on your little sketch book. 

WELL, THIS DID HAPPEN, I KEPT WAITING FOR IT TO FALL APART AND IT KEPT GETTING MORE AND MORE REAL. NOW IT IS DONE AND IT STILL FEELS SUREAL. THANK YOU CLEVELANDER AND ESSEX HOUSE AND TOM BURCHETT, MIKE PALMA, IAN ABDON,AND CHRISTINA WARD! VIP TREATMENT TO A PERSON!

Anyone who follows my blog knows I love other people's process and assume people like to see mine. I have documented the trip. I produced about 14 images onsite and have plans for about 5 more. For the images on site I took periodic pictures. ( I also teach and these come in handy). I plan to to post the semi final images in about 3 blogs and then the process for each image later for the process junkies like me.

This first series is intended to give you a sense of what we left...frozen Minneapolis and crazy work...to being literally pampered in a beautiful hotel room and warm palm trees. I still feel like it was a dream although it was only earlier this week.

TO BEGIN:

I took this picture yesterday morning to show the people in Miami. This is the view outside my office. The little squares are ice houses. It looks like a small skyline but the frozen lake is large and flat and these houses are a long distance apart. But, this is just for reference as we head to Miami!

This morning we finished packing and woke up with what we thought was enough time. It had really snowed the night before and the car was covered and the trip in was slow with blowing snow. 

I travel a lot. However I was shocked at how packed the airport was. I never fly Sat morning, and this was alarming. Thank goodness for the family line they put us in or we wouldn't have made it.  We also stopped in the middle of the concourse and decided to CRAM everything together and skip the bag check in line. This was the move that let us make our flight. Well, that and bringing handsome Leo.  

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Warm ups on the plane. 

This is an image in top of a previously inked page. This is white gouache over the top of the dried ink.

Just some general sketching and painting to pass the time and warm up.  (I notice my palm trees were much less practiced than they are now as I am proof reading this!)

But after 6 hours of conference calls (3 projects) on Friday, a crazy crazy sat morning airport and barely making it (despite being there early), my butt is seated,  the email is set to manual, and I am on vacation and ready to relax and sketch. 

For warm ups I was able to knock out a couple of sketches for EVERY DAY MATTERS on the iPad

We did make it on to Miami and on time enough. We were picked up by the hotel and as such started our wonderful trip.

Once we land, Leo is still on board and carrying his weight.

Dinner

Dinner at the Clevelander and surprised that the main street closed to traffic for the Art Deco weekend!

Back in the room we are greeted with a bottle of wine and chocolate covered oreos....Plus a phone call from Ian....Seriously..we are treated well.

Isn't she just a beautiful person? I love this woman.

Leo LOVED the cookies...Loved them...Still talks about them...

Leo enjoying the room decor.....

Breakfast at a place that Marcy and I had a date back in ...well I don't like to think about the math but it was one of our first and we were here for the AIAS convention before we graduated and we were just dating then. I still remember the date vividly and eat here every time I visit.

I will post the rest of the sketches in other blogs (this is long enough) but it REALLY was a great vacation. We REALLY were taken care of in a way that I hadn't before. I REALLY felt appreciated for my art in a way that I never have before...so thank you. Everyone to a person was fantastic to us. Even when Leo was grumpy in the high end (AMAZING FOOD! WOW) Zen Sai.

Now to the sketches....I hope you open the next blog.

Sketch Process on the Clevelander Drawings

I love sharing process. I was reminded of one of my favorite Urban Sketches of late by a phone call. I had always intended to add the process shots that I always take.

I was in town to get a permit and had the evening free to walk around and sketch.  I passed The Clevelander and these awesome shapes just had to be sketched.

I positioned myself for the view I wanted, then ordered a beer, and then set up my minimal travel kit.  How often do you get shapes and colors like this to draw? Never....

There was a lot to see here so I skipped a few pages ahead in my book until I found two pages that could be removed as one.

First the layout with pencil to get the big pieces in. Then I started to commit with the pen. If you look closely you will see sometimes I follow the lead and sometimes I don't. I very deliberately move things to be proportional on the page.  I think the lines are washed out,  but I lay down a proportional grid first.  Usually I incorporate the golden mean on the page and try to put the intention giving shapes based on the grid. After that everything falls into place. There is as much choice on what not to draw as what to draw.

This is the nearly finished piece and my travel kit. 80% of what I draw is with this limited pallete.  A Pentel water brush, a kids kit filled with gouache (in this case, often watercolor) a pencil, a pen, and a sketch book.  This is pure happiness for me.  The staff got interested and had me surrounded at one point. That was rare experience and a lot of fun.

The final image!  I believe this image took about 45 minutes to an hour.

On the second round of permit comments I was able to visit and came to the same place, but much later in the evening. I blogged these earlier, but his is my favorite from that trip.  These were drawn in the dark so it is always a surprise to see exactly what the colors will be like. The building was white, but dark with a DJ in front of a bright screen.  I was trying to catch the contrast.  It was a fun evening.  There is no place to people watch like Miami.

I hope you enjoyed a peak into the process. 

James Nutt aia

AT-AT! A blast with Cardboard and Oil pastel - in Progress

"AT-AT!"

 

After a visit to Hazel's NE I was encouraged by how many people inquire about the "T-REX!".  I finally have some more of the cardboard from the original.

 

 

 

This is the final product. I will post a better picture once I can get it.

 

 

A detail shot. 

Laying in the sky. I was going for the orange to blue sky that I love so much on my drives home.  These are Crayola oil pastels. 

 

Last nights progress. Laying in the grey was pretty laborious because despite the erasure shield I still needed to scrap the pastel off of the ink. 

 

The beginning of color. Color a little, then a lot of scraping.

 

After the pencil underlay is no long useful and the inking is done I erased the construction lines. I don't typically do this, but for some reason tonight I did. 

 

Inking is finished. I place the drawing on the mantel several times during this process to look at it from a distance and see what is worth fixing.

 

The inking process using my pentel brush pen with Noodler's Polar Black.
 

 

 

Pencil is roughed in. Leo is helping me.  Notice the golden mean layout in the background. I always do this and then loosely follow it.  This helps me make good compositional decisions.

 

Placing the drawing on the mantel to check for areas that don't work. I noticed that it looks too long and skinny and realize I missed the lower portion. It really helps to step away from our work every so often and look at it critically.

 

 

My drawing, my helper, and the model.  A 1970s AT-AT given to Leo by a friend of ours. I have wanted to draw him for some time now.  This particular composition has been in my head for several months now.

 

 

An Evening or Two in South Beach Miami

Recently work took me to South Beach Miami where I had a few evenings free to wander and sketch. These are two of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them.  Watercolor, brush pen with warm grey ink, and a Noodlers Ahab flex fountain pen

with Polar Black. Both drawn and colored in relative dark so the colors are always a bit of a surprise!

 

These last two are iPad sketches using Procreate.

 

 

 

James Nutt

Digital pencil sketch -WBCA Gallery - Progress Shots and process

Recently I was invited to submit a piece of art for the White Bear Center of the Arts (WBCA) grand opening gallery.  On of my goals this year was to have art in a gallery.  This month I have two pieces!  I am so excited about that.  For the WBCA I had a hard time choosing because I teach two classes. I run one series on urban sketching and one series on iPad sketching.  I decided on this particular piece because it is maybe the first project where I realized this is more than a doodling, or study tool. This iPad sketching isn't a gimmick. This is FINALLY where technology for digital art gets sophisticated enough to become intuitive and simple enough.  We have finally crossed the line from early adopters to a true medium with its own strengths and weaknesses and demands a unique approach toward these abilities.

A big difference in this medium is the ability to undo and the ability to use layers (imagine 4-8 pieces of trace paper you can turn on or off, up or down, and rearrange).  If you are a person who believes deeply in proportion and how that equates to the minds understanding of beauty, this is a wonderful tool.

This project is also where I developed my approach to most of my iPad art. Meaning I start with my proportional underlay in blue that eventually gets turned off. I do my sketching on a layer on top of that. My shading and sunlight on a layer just below the sketching, and back ground color last and on a separate layer.  I teach this method at WBCA in my class, but of course there are a billion other processes and students have blown me away with fresh ideas. However, that is a separate and lengthy blog.

I referenced my blog and an explanation of my process in the art description for this peice, so let's get to it.

The image below is the final product.  I drew this almost a year ago but I believe this took me about 2.5 hours.  I had been playing with the program for about 2-3 months on and off.  I used the iPad app "ArtStudio" and my finger. At this point I had a stylus, but could never find it. What most people miss on digital sketching is the tactile touch and I kind of enjoyed the thought of using your finger to bring this back. Using your finger takes some getting used to, but not as much time as you might think. The super detail is achieved by really zooming in. Plus, at the time, all of the styluses were the size of your finger anyway, so I really didn't see the difference...plus I could never find it when I wanted to sketch anyway. Since then the stylus has gotten smaller and I keep one in my ever present sketch bag along with my pens and water color.

THE PIECE

This is the piece hanging in the gallery. I had "The Lab" in NE Minneapolis print it 20"x20" on a semi gloss fiber rag. At the time I created this the program couldn't print high res enough to do a 20x20 but John with The Lab had a photo shop fractals program that did the trick. You learn something everday!  I did a simple frame with no glass. I may apply glass later, but I like the look and figure the gallery is full of people who know not to abuse the print.

I thought it would be fun to display a digital sketch, of a regular pencil, sharpened by hand, that doesn't look much like a digital sketch and drawn by a finger.  Also, I am a believer that if you sharpen your pencils this way they last 50 times longer and you get a huge variety of tips to solve what ever you are trying to describe. Pencil sharpeners waste so much in their efficiency and consistency. Plus, they are never around anyway.

THE PROCESS

I am a deep believer in using the golden mean to layout art, buildings, everything. I truly believe a proportional system is a deep secret to beauty. I also believe any system works, our minds search for order and are happy when they find it, even if they don't know how or why. The golden mean is old and my favorite.  I have designed building with this ( Two Market Pointe on 494 and France and the parking garage for the University of St Thomas at Grand and Cretin) and people love them. I have design without this system to a collective....hhhmmphh..its ok..Long story short, I am a believer.

I almost always start digital and real work with literal blued lines or mental subdivisions (after so much practice and positive feedback I have a hard time not doing the subdivision) .  This is an example for this project.  This is a screen shot showing the program interface and my screen.

From there I start to layout the detail lines. I am not using the proportional system to this level of detail, but I am looking at it while zoomed to to make sure the spaces feel right.  The blue lines will eventually be turned off. I sketch in this way until I am ready to commit.

From there I create a new layer and start to lay down the black. I set the line weight to have a heavier start and stop. I  also draw with this method using regular pens and pencils. I do this because it is how I draw anyway and also to knock out the over consistency that I am not crazy about in digital art. (unless that is the embraced style and the artist owns it, but too often it looks to artificial for me). Note that the blue lines are still turned on.

On the left you can see my layers of blue lines, pencil, shading and back ground.  In this step I am starting to lay in the shading. Note that after printing it large I wish I had left the shading at this point.  I still love the image but think this is was more powerful. Just like water color, it is easy to go a few steps too far. Unlike water color I could go back into the program and fix this (but I would still need to repay to reprint, but not to repost :)  )

Without the screen shot of the program and process this is the semi shaded progress shot. I took progress shots because (I love progress shots and ) I thought it might be fun to teach this someday.

Final Shading with the proportional lines layer still on.

From here I started playing with a the gradients I might use.  You have a lot of options and I thought a radial gradient at the point of the pencil would be a great start. Note that since this is on a separate layer I can play with a lot of options and not commit.  However I wanted to set the background so I could decide on the tonality of the rest of the shading.

This shot is before any color is added and I have started to shade the body of the pencil. There are a lot of brushes and pencil options. Straight line, as if with a ruler and free hand as well.  Also fuzzy painterly effects and crosshatching too. You can control all of this, or just use the defaults which are typically all you need. There are a ton of customizing options and you can go as far down that rabbit hole as you care to go.  As long as you don't get lost and keep an eye on the big picture it is ok. If you are the type person who can't, just leave the options alone and use the great default options with minimal tweaking.  I try to emphasize this in my class, but some people just have the push the buttons if they are there! (You do learn a lot that way, but sometimes the hard way)

I have worked primarily in black and white to this point, but have decided the background could use some color.  I use the same gradient, but a blue that I love and that will let the pencil stay "forward"

I debated about this last move of the smoke a lot.  I wanted the piece to have some meaning beyond the literal. I also thought it looked a ton like a smokestack once I put the blue in. So I saved it both ways and over time have come to love the smokestack industrial pencil. Smoke is simply a pencil tool using white and really ramping up the "jitter" command available for that tool.

THE FINAL PIECE AS HUNG IN THE GALLERY

When you are drawing on the back lit iPad screen you can draw in the dark while (sort of ) watching TV with the rest of your family. This is so mobile with no clean up I have also done art on planes, in bars while traveling alone, anywhere. All of the art supplies are free as long as you have the $500 piece of paper (the iPad itself - drumroll please)

I really hope you enjoyed this and maybe learned something. I did this sketch over a year ago and it was really nice to revisit it.

Keep drawing!

James Nutt, AIA