David Lloyd is self-taught as an artist. Born in Virginia and raised in Houston, he studied Drama, English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Houston.

Lloyd has developed a style that wavers between painterly realism and a graphic feeling that recalls the modernist influenced styles of mid-20th century illustrators like Al Parker.

Lloyd works in acrylic at a relatively small size (at least in those paintings for which I can find sizes), frequently 8×10″ (20×25cm).

Lloyd’s subjects range from mountainous landscapes to intimate still lifes to portraits and figurative works to illuminated night streets mirrored in rain. My favorites are his quiet interiors, their subtle darks in sharp contrast to brightly illuminated windows.

There is often a sketch-like feeling to the drawing component of his paintings, in which verticals are left casually askew and forms are briefly suggested.

At other times the works can feel more finished, as in the image above; there is always a feeling, though, that he has stopped at the moment when there was “enough” to the image, never pushing into the dangerous territory of potentially overworking the painting.

Lloyd maintains both an Artblog, where he posts recent paintings, and a Sketchblog, in which he posts his sketches which are frequently done in pen and ink on toned paper, occasionally accented with wash.

Lloyd is represented by the Jean Bragg Gallery and the Canal Street Gallery in Houston, as well as making his work directly available through his web site.

Though there aren’t many pieces available online, the variety of subject, medium and approach, and the high quality of each, make the sketchblog of Simon Otto well worth a visit.

Otto’s blog is actually just excerpts from his contributions to insert name here, a group blog he shares with several other talented artists, who, like Otto, work in the film industry.

Otto himself is an animator at DreamWorks Animation. Though I couldn’t find any of his professional work online, you can see a list of his credits on IMDB.

His blog posts range from plein air oil paintings to digital sketches (apparently also painted on location with a laptop), to figure painting, to a series of wonderfully appealing sketchbook pages. The latter feature drawings apparently done in pencil and white body color on cream paper, and are my favorites of his posted work.

It’s an unusual approach; most toned sketchbook drawings tend toward ink and wash or monochrome watercolor. The combination of pencil against the cream and white areas, along with accents of textural tones created with lines, a technique more common to pen and ink, makes for nicely subtle and varied tonal range.

Occasionally, Otto will work with black body color or ink in place of the lighter tones, and he will sometimes punctuate his sketches with small areas of red or other colors. He’s not shy about tackling complex architectural subjects or cityscapes; rendering them in confident but sensitive lines and arranging them in interesting compositions.

Many of his sketchbook drawings are annotated with notes or dates, but for some reason they have been flopped in posting so that they read backwards, along with signs in the images. That does little to reduce their charm, however, and at the end of the available blog posts you’re left looking in vain for more.

Unfortunately, neither Otto’s blog, or the group blog from which it is extracted, have been updated since July. We’ll have to hope that Otto and his fellow artists get inspired soon to resume posting.

Chris Ware, who I wrote about here and here, has just released The Acme Novelty Date Book, Volume Two: 1995-2000.

For those of you who are only familiar with Ware’s precise, carefully controlled marvels of precision comic art, these two volumes are something else altogether.

Basically they’re sketchbooks, not that different in essence from sketchbooks released by a number of comic artists and illustrators, with a mixture of sketches from life and fanciful doodling, often accented with handwritten notes.

You may notice a similarity in particular to the sketchbooks of Robert Crumb. Though not the marvellously expressive cartoonist that Crumb is, I think Ware is actually a better draftsman, despite his occasional notes of complaint about his own drawing ability.

What sets Ware apart from most, and invites comparison with Crumb, is the exceptional mind and original talent behind the sketches.

The drawings themselves are in turn loose, careful, freewheelingly imaginative, and when drawn from life, wonderfully observant, both of people and of everyday scenes.

Even those not familiar with Ware’s work, particularly if they enjoy sketchbooks, will find much to like in this volume. The sketches for the most part have a personal quality, the kind of honest, often casual, observations of what is a hand when one picks up a sketchbook. A far cry from the careful, self-conscious presentation drawings that many comic artists like to publish as “sketchbooks”.

Artists who frequently fill their own sketchbooks with observations from what’s around them whenever they get the chance will find common ground and inspiration here, quick sketches of people, sketched from angles the indicate the subject was often unaware of being drawn, and numerous room interiors and street scenes, drawn in simple line or detailed crosshatch pen and ink, and often colored with modest but very effective watercolor washes. There are travel sketches from Europe and “around the corner” scenes from Ware’s native Chigago. One is a very detailed watercolor and ink drawing of an airplane cabin, obviously filling as much time as possible on a trans-Atlantic flight.

There are lots of drawings of simple household objects, kitchen counters, tables, chairs and odds and ends like toy robots. There is also plenty of cartoon sketching, including sketches of classic early 20th Century comic characters, like those from Gasoline Alley, as well as sketches and doodles of his own characters, designs for his wonderful fake ads and other germinating ideas. There are lots of handwritten notes about where things were sketched, along with longer passages of various ideas, notions, ramblings, rants and diatribes, giving an unusual glimpse into his thought process.

There are also some comics stories, comics that are printed small enough to have you squinting, nose to the page, but comics nonetheless, and drawn much more freely than you will ever see in his finished comics.

I don’t know what size the original sketchbooks are, but most of the sketches have a feeling of being printed at the size they might have been done, so perhaps the comics were drawn that small.

Interestingly, the paper is off-white and flecked with spots and ink smudges, giving the book feeling of sketchbook pages that have been collected into a classic old library binding, another of Ware’s wonderfully imaginative an detailed book designs.

The image above is not an actual spread, but two separate pages I’ve put together to try to give an idea of the variety in the book.

All in all, this is a treat for fans of Chris Ware, and fans of sketching and sketchbooks in general. This is the second of two volumes, covering the years stated in the title. The first one was composed of sketchbook material from 1986-1995.

There are a few mentions of the first one on the web that include some images from that volume, and a scattering of mentions are begining to appear for Volume Two.

Here are two Acme Novelty Datebook Volume One posts on Book By Its Cover and Read About Comics; and and article from The Comics Reporter on Volume Two.

I don’t know about you, but I can sometimes be a little intimidated by my own sketchbooks, specifically in cases where I’ve made some drawings that I feel were particularly successful, and become reluctant to add to them, either from worry about carrying a sketchbook with drawings I like in it around and losing it, or simply feeling like I have to be confident I’m going to make a comparably good drawing with my next entry.

This is completely silly, of course, and counter-productive for an artist, but I venture to think some of you can identify.

How much more intimidating would it be, though, if the sketchbook in which you were drawing were full of wonderful drawings by other artists? Daunting? Perhaps, but how inspiring might it be as well? This is the situation facing the artists participating in Sketchtravel.

Sketchtravel is a project jointly managed by Daisuke Tsutsumi, a multifaceted artist who I profiled on lines and colors last May, and Gérald Guerlais, a French illustrator and background designer, who informed me about the project.

Sketchtravel revolves around a single sketchbook to which 50 artists will make contributions at it travels around the world.

Each artist contributes a single page of art, be it drawing or painting, though the rules suggest that care must be taken not to damage previous or subsequent pages with invasive tools or techniques. The drawings are scanned, both as a precaution in the event of the worst case scenario of the book being lost or stolen, and also so the virtual version of the physical sketchbook can be updated on the project’s web site.

The theme of the works varies widely, though it often focuses on the book itself and its travels.

One of the more interesting aspects of the process is that the sketchbook is making its zig-zag journey around the curve of the horizon not by post or package service, but carried by hand. It travels in a custom made, felt lined, oak case with brass hardware.

Each invited artist receives the sketchbook from the previous contributor in person, adds their contribution, and, in turn, hands it off to the next artist; though I found no mention of how the artists are selected or how the logistics of travel were determined. The site has a map marking the book’s recent travels and current location (as of this writing, the west coast of the U.S.).

The project was started in 2006 and the sketchbook currently has 24 artists represented in the virtual version on the site. You can view the contributions to date, along with photos of the book and pictures of the hand-offs from artist to artist. There is also a list of the participating artists with links to their individual web sites or blogs.

Guerlais also maintains a blog for the project, with more details about the sketchbook’s travels, the hand-offs and related news. The blog and the web site have content in both French and English.

As each artist adds to the book, presumably more inspired than intimidated by the work of those who have added their drawings before them, the book will grow organically into its final state as a collaborative artwork. When finished, the original sketchbook will be exhibited at the Arludik Gallery in Paris, after which it will be auctioned off to a charity association selected by the artists.

(Images at left, from top: Gérald Guerlais, Dominique Louis, Claude William Trebutien, Ronnie Del Carmen, Nash Dunnigan, Benoit le Pennec.)

I’ve long maintained that both men and women have only one erogenous zone. (Got your attention, didn’t I?)

I’ll further maintain that this single erogenous zone is located in the same physical location for both sexes, directly between… the ears. Nothing is sexy unless you think it’s sexy.

Which is why life drawing sessions are set up to maintain a professional or academic atmosphere and the sexual element is almost non-existant. This is generally a Good Thing, but it’s nice to know that there are exceptions to every rule.

Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School is a series of drawing sessions that looks to put the “arrrrrr” back into art classes, with racy costumes, provocative poses and a generally anti-academic atmosphere.

For more background, see my previous post on Dr. Sketchy’s.

At the time, I mentioned that submissions were being taken for the first Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art Show.

Dr. Sketchy’s founder, illustrator Molly Crabapple, has written to say that the show is now assembled and will hang at Rapture, 200 Avenue A in NYC, from November 21 to December 20, 2007. The opening party will be November 27th.

There is a gallery online for those of us not in the area, that features work by some of the participants, as well as photographs from the sessions.

Note: The Dr. Sketchy’s site should be considered delightfully NSFW and politically incorrect.

(Image above: Jim Hoover)

I’ve mentioned Enrico Casarosa before. A multi-facetied artist who does storyboards for Pixar, but is also a character designer, comics artist, designer, illustrator, blogger and dedicated sketcher. Casarosa is the instigator of the Sketchcrawl drawing events.

Last summer Casarosa took a trip to Veince, that most magical of Italian cities, and instead of just making travel sketches as most artists might, decided to chronicle his trip in the form of a comics journal.

As always, available time became a factor and, while he couldn’t document his entire trip during his stay, he decided to continue telling the story after the fact, extending his narrative into the next winter and beyond. The result is a wonderful stream-of-consciousness style story, not only of his stay in Venice and his visit to his childhood home in Genova, but of his attempt to chronicle the story in comics form, artistic blocks and all.

His story wanders from cut-away views of a Venitian apartment to similar views of his parent’s home, to the streets of both cities and the canals of one, to his ruminations on Hugo Pratt’s famous comics series, Corto Maltese, which takes place in Venice.

The artwork varies from quickly suggested cartoon-like characters to nicely drawn images of scenes he encountered in Venice and Genova, to renditions of the masterworks he saw in the Gallery Academia.

From the introductory page, click to launch the story in a pop-up, which you can then click through in sequence until you get to the limit of that section’s thumbnails, at which point you will no longer have a forward arrow available. You must then close the pop-up and click to the next page of thumbnails to continue.

[Link via Bolt City]

Hey all you non-artists: want to know a secret? Shhhhh! Don’t let this get out, and I hate to spoil any idyllic illusions you may have, or that your artist friends have encouraged you to have, but… drawing nude models isn’t particularly sexy.

There, I said it. Don’t look at me that way! It’s true. Hey, I promise you I’m a healthy, red-blooded, heterosexual male, and some of the models I’ve drawn over my years of attending life drawing session have been astonishingly beautiful women; but when I’m drawing them, sexy is not the operative word. Not that you can’t make sexuality, and the physical appeal of an attractive model, part of a drawing, but you actually have to work at it.

I discovered this, much to my amazement, as a teenager (talk about healthy and red-blooded), when I first started to attend life drawing classes in art school. My fellow male freshmen and I were looking forward to the first life drawing class, our tongues prepared to hang out of our mouths in leering anticipation, as much as the freshmen girls were undoubtedly prepared to look down their noses at us at the first sign of impropriety; but the school cooled our jets with somewhat unattractive (but actually quite good) models for the first few sessions.

Eventually, though, the session came when we were presented with a very attractive young woman to draw; but, after about 6 seconds of leering, we found ourselves caught up in the process of drawing, as we had been in the previous sessions, and only realized at break time that we had been drawing a beautiful young woman for half an hour and it didn’t matter!

Part of it is the setting, of course; art schools and professional artist organizations that sponsor life drawing sessions know how to keep things professional and straightforward, and so do experienced models and most artists with any life drawing experience. It’s more than that, though, it’s the fact that the act of drawing involves a different way of seeing.

I found, even as an easily, um… excitable teenage boy, that once you start drawing a person, even a very attractive naked person, you are no longer seeing in the same way. Though you know intellectually that you are drawing a woman, and can be cognizant of the fact that it’s an attractive woman, that’s not what you’re seeing. When you’re drawing, you’re not seeing a shoulder or a breast, as much as your seeing shapes, angles, curves, lines, juncture points, shadows, intersecting forms and complex spatial relationships. All of these things go together to make a drawing of a person, but you’re not looking at that person the same way when you’re drawing as you would be under other circumstances.

I would venture to say that the same applies to women drawing attractive men, or people who are attracted to those of their own gender; the principle is the same. (I’ve found in my years of drawing, though, that male models are scarcer then female, and tend not to be as good at it. It may be that women are more conscious of how to exert subtle control over their bodies in holding a pose, or it may simply be that fewer men are willing to deal with the fact that life modeling is much harder work than it seems, and the pay is usually terrible.)

Yes, as I mentioned, you can inject sensuality and sexuality into the drawing, but it’s actually hard work. You have to consciously shift slightly out of your drawing mode of seeing/thinking far enough to see the model as an attractive person, but not so far as to lose that precious seeing state in which you can draw effectively. Some think of this mental adjustment in and out of a drawing mode of seeing as a left-brain, right-brain shift (see my post on Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), which may or may not be scientifically correct, but it’s basically a move from the usually dominant verbal/logical mode to the harder-to-access visual/spacial mode that lets you see what’s in front of you without interference from verbal-brain chatter.

I eventually learned, though, when drawing a woman I was involved with, in private, it was, of course, much easier to put the sexual component back in (though drawings would often go unfinished…); and the professional art school or artist organization setting actually does have a lot to do with keeping it dry and unsexy.

So the question arises, why not something in between? Why not have an occasional setting in which the professionalism of art school is tinted with a bit of naughtyness to put the “sexy” back in drawing sessions?

That’s the idea behind Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, brainchild of illustrator Molly Crabapple (seen above sketching with “helper art-monkey” Steve Walker, along with her sketch of the session, inset). Crabapple “draws saucy Victoriana for magazines” and used to work as a life model when she was in art school. Her boredom with posing for those classes prompted the creation of Dr. Skecthy’s as a series of sessions that combine drawing with a bit of burlesque and theatre.

As models, she searches out, in her words, “the most beautiful burlesque dancers, the most bizarre circus freaks, and the most rippling hunks of man”, and hosts drawing sessions on every other Saturday in Brooklyn. The sessions are often punctuated with a bit of theater, silly drawing contests (best incorporation of a woodland animal, best left-handed drawing), prizes and drinking. The Brooklyn Dr. Sketchy’s sessions take place in a bar/restaurant called the Lucky Cat Lounge

The sessions are three hours, like many life drawing sessions; but, though the stated goal is to answer the question “Why can’t drawing naked people be sexy?”, the models in this case are actually not nude. This is due to the fact that New York has an ordinance prohibiting nudity and drinking in the same room. The models pose in sexy costume and are selected on the basis of “being heart-stoppingly gorgeous, possessing a unique talent (trapeze, contortion, sword-swallowing, burlesque), or extraordinary costumes”. The models are also paid better than in normal life drawing sessions and, very much unlike art school sessions, can receive tips. You’re beginning to get the picture, and Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School bills itself as “what happens when cabaret meets art school”.

The brooklyn sessions apparently fill up fast and the seating is limited. You can reserve a table early for an extra fee. The schedule is here. The Dr. Sketchy’s sessions have been so successful that they have expanded to other cities and there are now over 20 locations. The Dr. Sketchy’s site has even posted a “How to start a Dr. Sketchy’s” page. There is a board where participants can discuss the sessions and post their work. There is also a photoblog, and a few short videos, including a “trailer” done up the scratchy black and white style of Reefer Madness, about “depraved students driven mad by art”. There is also a Rainy Day Coloring Book available, and Dr. Sketchy’s is accepting submissions for their first annual Anti-Art Show.

Obviously, this is not the venue for serious minded study of figure drawing, and is different from regular figure drawing sessions in other respects (no easels, no oil-based or other “messy” media, though watercolor is OK), but it looks like a fun alternative to the usual unsexy life drawing sessions most artists are used to. Plus you’re allowed to leer at the models. Too bad they didn’t have Dr. Sketchy’s when I was a teenager.

Note: the Dr. Sketchy’s site should be considered NSFW (depending, of course, on where you work).

[Note: Apparently the high number of visits from lines and colors readers has overtaxed the bandwidth allotment of this artist's site, and the site is temporarily offline. You may have to wait a while, perhaps several weeks, to be able to view it again. In the meanwhile, you can still access The Limner's Contract on Google Video, and many of the videos mentioned in the article by viewing the ones Suncage has posted on YouTube.
-Charley]

I will be the first to admit that, when it comes to painting “en plein air” (outdoors), I am a fair weather painter. Days when it’s even mildly chilly find me sitting cozily in font of a computer monitor, or the in the comfort of a heated studio indulging in the convenience of photographic reference.

That doesn’t stop me from admiring the determination of some dedicated plein air painters, and being outright amazed at others.

Suncage (pseudonym of UK painter Jon Hall) is in the latter category. He is astonishingly dedicated to painting outdoors regardless of circumstance; painting in wind, rain, cold, and all manner of unpleasant conditions.

His site and blog are a little short on introductory information, but some of this dedication may have come from a challenge he set for himself that he called “The Limners Contract“. (”Limner” is defined as someone who describes something by painting or drawing. It comes from a root meaning illuminator, from which we also get illustrator. Limner also can refer to ornamental painters in the American colonies.)

Suncage’s Limner’s contract was essentially a contract with himself to complete paintings from life, on site, every day for a year. In the course of the project he created over 500 painted sketches and chronicled the endeavor with photographs and video.

You can see come of Sungcage’s work in his online Gallery. He also maintains a blog, which is often devoted to Podcasts he makes about his plein air painting process.

His site includes a record of other painting projects, including ICE, the Robert Stephenson Awards in which he is painting a dozen icons of civil engineering in the country’s North East.

Last December, Suncage entered an open challenge form London’s National Gallery Podcast to create a piece of audio based on a picture in the National Gallery. He created the winning piece based on his impressions of the thoughts Pissarro may have had while painting a winter landscape in Fox Hill, Upper Norwood during his stay in London. Suncages’ own video about the piece, in which he intersperses the audio piece with his description of his own experience painting in the same location, may be a little confusing unless you’ve seen the original National Gallery Podcast in context (scroll down to view the Podcast. The segment on Fox Hill is a bit past halfway in the video.)

Suncage has provided numerous video accounts of his outdoor painting experiences. Those of you who, like myself, have seen one too many PowerPoint demos, may blanch as his overindulgence in iMovie/Keynote style video transitions, but the stories he has to tell about painting on location stand on their own.

He also has a preference for caging his voice in an echo effect and submerging it in electronica. Personally, I find these unnecessary distractions from his otherwise fascinating stories about painting on location and the challenges he has set himself in his desire to work under all conditions.

Of particular interest to me is his 12 Quick Exercises in painting the same scene repeatedly, as Monet did. Suncage works with this idea in multiple quick sketches on the same day, and in repeated visits to the same scene on different days, spaced both days apart and seasons apart. Within that process, he works in many different approaches to the application of tone and value (images above).

Alina Chau works as a 3D character animator, storyboard artist and concept artist. She also teaches CG animation classes at a university. When she’s not doing that she’s… drawing.

Her blog, Ice Cream Monster Toon Cafe, seldom features her professional work but is, instead, focused on the drawings and designs she does for the joy of it. These are often ink and watercolor sketches of everyday scenes around her adopted home of Los Angeles and travel sketches, as well as the results of her frequent participation in the Illustration Friday exercises.

You will also find life drawings, sketches for personal projects, cartoon drawings, and fanciful doodles of all kinds. The pieces I like best, though, are her quick, breezy sketches from life, whether from her immediate everyday surroundings or from her travels.

She has just released a book of her travel sketches, Alina’s Travel Journal, that collects her sketches of places like Las Vegas, Disney World Florida, the Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree State Park, San Francisco and San Diego, as well as scenes closer to home in Los Angeles.

I don’t think there is a specific “preview” of the book except in the form of the existing blog posts among her other designs and images.

Some of her designs show the influence of Chinese ink painting, and you can sometimes see the character of her concept design work, but her sketches from life are mostly straightforward, a quick ink line and watercolor capture of her immediate impressions of a scene. Her ink lines are accented, more than filled, with bright splashes of watercolor. Her colors are applied in a loose manner that suggests a quick impression rather than rendering, giving them a feeling of immediacy and informality.

All artists go through periods of difficulty, where the act of creation becomes more of a chore than a joy, or ideas dry up, or we reach those plateaus where progress seems to cease, or we are pressed with doubt or even fear about our abilities (or lack thereof).

When this happens, the logical thing to do is to look around for some way to change things, shake things up, wake up our muse (or have a fling with another) and get going again. Few of us though, will approach it so thoroughly as to draw up and dedicate ourselves to a systematic plan.

Laura Frankstone is an artist who has been posting her watercolors, drawings and sketches to her blog Laurelines since early 2005 (if not longer).

On January 1 of 2006, she embarked on a year-long plan of “self-apprenticeship” to revitalize her art life. She set aside each month of the year as a particular topic, January: interiors, February, food and dining, March: trees, etc. and devoted herself to doing a drawing a day through that period. (I mentioned that painter Jon Conkey os doing something similar with his Themeworks project in my last post on Painting a Day blogs.)

In addition she is taking classes in digital art, endeavoring to change mediums, even working in mediums she’s not comfortable with and trying to extend her reach in many directions.

She has managed to crown this program with a highlight that would be the envy of many artists, myself included, taking the month of October in Paris and dedicating her time there to travel sketches. The site also inclludes older travel sketches from other parts of Europe and the US.

I enjoy travel sketches to begin with, and particularly ones of Paris. Frankstone’s recent posts are filled with her direct, unfussy pencil and watercolor impressions of scenes around Paris and often in the Luxemborg Gardens.

You can view them in a gallery mode, but if you view them in place in the blog, you get the benefit of her description of the time and place and her approach to the sketch, which gives you even more of a feeling for being there.

It’s worth noting that even in the midst of the wonders of Paris, Frankstone finds worthwhile subjects in seedpods from trees and other simple objects.

One of the other ways to break out of an artistic slump is to ride along with another artist for a while, watching over their shoulder for inspiration, even if it’s just enough inspiration to say, “Yes, I should pick up my sketchbook and draw today”.