I wanted to draw at this location and sent out a general invitation to the SketchCrawl group saying “I’d love company” – and wow, did I get it!  We ended up with 12 sketchers camped out along N Russell, mostly focusing on White Eagle saloon.  At one point, a man that was later identified as the bartender stopped to ask about the group. “Are you all drawing the White Eagle?”  Later, inside, he told me we’d made his day – that he’d woke up feeling hung over, but we’d made him feel like he was part of something special, he was someplace that mattered.

Sketch 1 was a reject.  Sketch 2 is a Jason Das tribute, using red pen as a base…

I had drawn with colored pens before the Symposium, but it was in the urban color session with Jason Das that I first tried using colored pen as a base for other colors.  This pen was water-soluble (Pilot Hi-Tec-C) so of course there were some challenges to overcome, but some of the blurring effects of water-soluble ink are quite attractive.

Then we went inside. I sketched something for the shared sketchbook, then joined Carrie at the bar to draw detailing…

The bike ride there & back was gorgeous, taking me along the river, over and along railways, and alongside some interesting industrial scenes. I did catch one more scene on the way home, crossing some rail tracks…

I’m really thrilled with the increased turnout at our sketchcrawls ever since the Urban Sketchers Symposium! Thanks to everyone who came out to sketch today.

I’ve been drawing at least a little each day since the Symposium. Today I felt like drawing facial expressions, so here are sketches of the Doctor and a couple other folks making silly faces, from the Doctor Who episode The Sontaran Stratagem. These sketches are obviously completed on that vintage ledger paper I already wrote [...]

Any regular visitor to Urban Sketchers or the Urban Sketchers Flickr pool will have seen the gorgeous linework of Lapin, which is often done on a surprising surface – old accounting ledgers. He uses this paper because he likes the surface – the paper is thin, but takes watercolor without buckling, ink without feathering, and [...]

The Portland Urban Sketchers have been more interested in Portland’s Northwest neighborhoods since the Symposium, so we met up this morning at Pearl Baking, NW 9th & Couch.  We stopped in the North Park Blocks to draw the elephant…

I wish I hadn’t drawn the frame, or had drawn it to the left – the elephant would be better on the right side of the frame.

Then we went for more coffee at Floyd’s – there continues to be a lot to discuss as we all absorb our experiences at the Symposium and go through resulting changes in our practices! – and afterwards stopped at Hoodoo Antiques to draw this scene…

These were drawn in the sketchbooks donated to symposium participants by Legion Paper; a new product to be released this month, Stonehenge Wired.  The 90 lb paper is nice and sturdy, takes Lamy Safari fountain pen without feathering, and holds up well to watercolors – I’m liking it.

I’ve always felt shy about my drawings.  My most frequent excuse for not drawing has been that I couldn’t find a spot where no one could sneak up and peer over my shoulder.  Ohh, the hours of drawing practice I could have gotten, had I not been so worried about the opinions of strangers! It [...]

Matthew Brehm teaches architecture at the University of Idaho. On Friday morning, I went out with his group for tips on sketching urban architecture. Now, like anyone else who has ever taken an art class, I know that being systematic at the beginning of a sketch is a good thing. We’re supposed to make thumbnail [...]

On Saturday, we wrapped up the 1st International Urban Sketchers Symposium. This event drew together artists from around the world to celebrate this particular joy we have, of sketching the living city around us.

Sounds fun, right? And it was. It was lots of fun. Also lots of hard work! But the surprising part was how much our energy became amplified, when we all got together in that room. We got swept away into this lifestyle, so much so that just three days seems like it may have triggered some major transformations – not just of our art skills and styles, but of practice, attitude, diligence, receptiveness.

But I’m gushing. With my next post, I’ll start discussing the specific lessons I learned, and directions for the future.

During May 2010, I committed to making a comic (ostensibly a “journal comic”) for each day of the month.  Some fabulous comics-making friends joined in. The month was a success – lots of great work got done, and Mike and I both made it to the end!

How I managed to keep going:

• Being part of a group was half the job.  I got excited about seeing new work come up in the flickr pool, and felt like keeping that going was important enough to bust through the dry spells.  Support from friends was also sometimes enough to reverse my mood right when it needed it.
• My partner participated, so on nights when I was lazy,  seeing him working on his comic made me grudgingly pick up the pen as well.
• We kept our social calendar fairly sparse for the month.   Whenever we did go out after work, it was quite challenging to get the comic done, so we didn’t do it often.  This project was a top priority!  Hopefully our friends still like us a little.

What I learned about comics-making and my own creative habits:

• That dull, depleted  feeling I get by the end of the work day is hard to resist, and if I don’t fight it, the rest of the evening will consist of snacking and watching X-Files reruns.  However, it only takes a little bit of fight to reverse the tide – just a first step towards trying to stay active makes all the difference.  The results might not be great every time, but it’ll always be better than mindless nothingness.  After fighting back my dullness each night just long enough to get a comic done, I never woke up the next morning and thought “if only I didn’t make that comic last night.” Even when the results were not good, nothing was lost for it, and the occasional payoffs made the gamble feel worthwhile. I still managed to watch plenty of X-Files.
• Artmaking has a payoff percentage.  For me, it’s maybe at around 30% – it takes 7 embarrassing drawings for me to generate 3 that feel somewhat rewarding.  So the crappy 70%? Totally necessary.  This fact feels much more tangible and manageable now, after The Month in Comics.
• The content of your life is what you make it.  Both Mike and I occasionally wished we’d done something more remarkable during the day, to spice up our comics.   Occasionally it was actually the deciding factor when we couldn’t decide between laziness and action.  I found myself following trails of interestingness in my own head very purposefully, looking for the juicy middle in days that often were dominated by a beige work cubicle, the gym, and the need to get the dishes done before the jungle of dirty dishes made approach to the kitchen sink impossible. Turns out even though my walk to work is a relatively small portion of the day, if I kept my eyes open, something would always be there to be found & drawn.
• When you look for beauty, you find it.  When you can’t even get yourself to look for beauty, well, there’s the struggle, and that’s worth something too.

The image above links to a flickr set of my 31 comics.  These will be published as a zine which will be for sale at the upcoming PDX Zine Symposium in late August.

Man, am I glad to have done that, and am I glad to be done!

Worldwide SketchCrawl Day – Downtown Portland, OR

Originally uploaded by geminica

I uploaded a few sketchcrawl photos to flickr – this is the one I liked best but all the comments were on the street view, so what do I know!

It was a great sketchcrawl – 11-12 people, and a beautiful sunny day.

The Month in Comics #3

This project is going great so far!  We’ve got 6 participants churning out the goods every single day.  Yes there have only been 3 days so far… but it’s already a lot of comics-making done so that’s a big win.

Day 3 of the project was a Monday, and therefore Day 1 of fitting comics into the work day.  It’s definitely harder.  Mike and I had to be thinking about comics all day, really – drafting panels on morning breaks and lunch,  scanning and editing before heading to the gym, with our only real chunk of time left *after* 9pm.  Yet we did it!  I did have moments of despair, of feeling like this project is totally unrealistic and doomed, but pulled through and had an emotional payoff upon finally uploading the image. DONE and DONE.

This morning I had to go to an 8 am work meeting, and because of the necessity of constant comics-planning paid close attention, waiting for gag ideas… and got them.  And made notes.  I love being in that state of alertness.