Meanwhile, thank you for reading/looking/commenting. If you like, you can take a stab at this question: What the fisherman is thinking?

Boy and man fishing by the Raritan River, drawing in colored pencils 2013 by Leora Wenger

When you look at the boy and man, what do you imagine is the relationship between the two? I’ll let you in on the setting: it was taken at the community Lag B’omer event (the 33rd day of the Omer, a day of celebration in the Jewish calendar) in Donaldson Park. I’m assuming the boy was there because of Lag B’omer, and the man just happened to be fishing nearby.

I also started working on an “urbanscape” – a painting of “downtown” Highland Park, basically a piece of Raritan Avenue. I’m not terribly happy with the composition, so I may put it aside or work on one piece. I have three busy weeks ahead, so I will have little time to do art for a while.

Happy Mother’s Day to those who celebrate. Happy Shavuot to those who celebrate. Enjoy a beautiful spring day, if you are lucky enough as we are in New Jersey to have a gorgeous one outside.

I did the pen part of this drawing without looking at the paper; I just stared at Jill’s head and let my hand do the work on the paper. This is called “contour drawing.” It is a great way to learn how to draw.

In case any of you would like a drawing exercise, here’s one for our next artist group meeting:
Draw (or paint) an everyday object. It can be depicted as realistically or as abstractly as the individual desires.
Suggestions: scissors, salt shaker, pillow, curtains, stapler, fork

I did a few sketches and then I did a painting of a salt shaker. I looked in Google Images – lots of other artists have also drawn salt shakers as a subject.

I am showing the onions art in the reverse order that I did them. I am so happy with this watercolor. It is painted in a sketchbook of textured watercolor paper that Jill C. gave to me. I have a drawing of Jill that I did at our first artist group, and I will show in a separate post. I don’t want to take it out of the book, but it does mean I have to photograph the art instead of sticking it in my scanner, which is easier.

I did this drawing of the onions and scallions with an ink pen.

Red and yellow onion are drawn on paper with colored pencils. With colored pencils, it is good to work with different shades of a color and with different colors within an object to produce form, texture and light. I erased a bit to get the light to shine on the onions.

Here is my list:

• If you don’t write, you won’t have good or bad writing. So write. If you don’t draw, you won’t have a good or bad drawing. So draw.
• Creativity drives the work of both artist and writer. Artist’s block or writer’s block can hamper that creativity.
• Artists and writers can both make use of blogs as platforms to show their work.
• Inspirational exercises can stimulate both artists and writers.
• A blog can be used as a platform to teach art or writing. An artist or a writer can thus demonstrate their skills.
• Artists think in images. Writers think in words. Both tend to hyperfocus when at work.
• An interviewer asked Hemingway, why did you rework the ending so many times? What was it that stumped you? He replied, “Getting the words right.” An artist in a similar fashion can rework a painting many times, especially one or two details.

What do you think – what do artists and writers share in common? How are they different?

Note on the drawing: I found the drawing of a young girl in a sketchbook – it must be from almost ten years ago, when my daughter was a toddler.

Description of the book: After Papa loses his job during the Depression, Hannah’s family moves to rural Minnesota, where she is the only Jewish child in her class. When her teacher tries to arrange carpools for a Saturday class picnic, Hannah is upset. Her Jewish family is observant, and she knows she cannot ride on the Sabbath. What will she do? A lovely story of friendship and community.

How did you decide how Hannah should appear? her family? the scenery? Did you do research on the period’s clothing and style?

That a good question. Before I even picked up a pencil, I immersed myself in images of people from the 1930s. I looked at as many ancestry web sites as I could and thumbed through books of costumes and period photography. I also dug as far into Orthodox Judaism as I could, just trying to make sure the family in the book didn’t fly in the face of some hidden clause from Leviticus that I didn’t know about.

I looked at lots of sale items on ebay, trying to keep in mind that the era a story takes place in isn’t really the era of the stuff in it, it’s the cut-off date for said stuff. The couches, the lamps, the architecture, all of that has to predate the story. And if someone in the story is dressed in hand-me-downs, well, now we’re looking at fashion from the late ’20s…

As far as the characters themselves, I rely as much as I can on instinct. Granted, I research hairdos and ethnic bone structure and think about people I know or have known that fit a temperament or demographic, but one of the really important aspects of being able to draw the same person, active and emoting for 32 pages, is to really believe that they’re the right person for the job.

How did you team up with the author, Linda Glaser?

Illustrating books is a sort of funny thing; the whole affair is orchestrated by the publisher, so as it was Joni Sussman at Kar-Ben who contacted me about illustrating the Hannah’s Way.

What inspired you to become an artist?

I’ve always drawn; my mother was an artist when I was growing up, and my brothers and I drew like most other kids would play ball. It was a big part of how we played together. My father, an engineer, used to come home with art supplies he’d picked up for us on his way home from work. I grew up in the only household for miles and miles where a crisis consisted of my mother trying to find out just who took her kneaded eraser.

When I went to college, the toss up for me was between becoming an artist or becoming a musician. So again, I was pretty much the only person I knew who went into art because it was the more practical choice.

I love the illustrations you did of commuters on a train
(see http://adamgustavson.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-summer-in-mostly-mass-transit.html).
What advice would you give someone who wants to improve his/her drawing skills?

There are two things I’d say; the first and foremost is to draw everything all the time. The way I put it to a student recently was that if what you really want to draw is Spiderman, at some point you’ll have to figure out what kind of furniture Aunt May has in her living room. A big part of making art is experiential, which is to say you don’t really know what something looks like until you try to draw it, and really explore it in your drawing.

Another important aspect is to be influenced by things that aren’t specifically what you want to do. This goes for technique, subject matter, and high falutin’ compositional stuff. A high profile example of this idea at work is in Van Gogh’s love of Japanese woodcuts, and the way that it translated into how he used paint, but it exists to some degree almost everywhere.

What projects are you working on now?

I’ve just finished a really sizable project for Holt’s Christy Ottaviano Books imprint, called “Rock and Roll Highway: The Robbie Robertson Story,” written about the co-founder of the Band by his son, Sebastian Robertson. It involved over thirty oil paintings and real life protagonist that had to age about 30 years in the course of the narrative, which was a bit of a challenge.

You seem like you have worked on many books and illustration projects – which were your favorites?

My two all time favorites have been Leslie Kimmelman’s “Mind Your Manners, Alice Roosevelt!” and Bill Harley’s “Lost and Found,” the latter of which just came out this past fall. From a concept, design and storytelling perspective (the Alice Roosevelt book was very research heavy, to boot), both projects had a lot of freedom involved and called for a really dynamic range of images. Any project that calls specifically for a 1904 Studebaker or leaves room for a stuffed flying badger can’t be all that bad.

Can you tell us a little about the zombie project? How did you get involved in that one?
(see http://adamgustavson.blogspot.com/2012/11/what-do-pete-mitchell-bryan-ballinger.html)

I was invited by illustrator Bryan Ballinger, a friend of Pete Mitchell, a cartoonist and the singer for the band No More Kings, to participate in an anthology of zombie comics, which was an impossible thing to say no to. The idea as I understood it was to have the book available for release at the same time as the band’s latest album.

I batted around several ideas over the course several months before writing up a conversation between two undead companions, one of whom was having an existential crisis.

What is the hardest part of illustrating a book? What part is the most rewarding?

The hardest part is not the “getting started” part, having 32-40 blank pages staring back from a computer layout, though sometimes it seems like it could be.

The hardest part for me is the part I call Page 28 Syndrome: being in the home stretch of something that has been lived with for six to nine months, and putting finishing touches on that scene that every book has that happens right after the conflict is resolved but the story hasn’t ended yet. It feels like 101st mile of a 100 mile run, where instead of running you’re just consciously lifting your knees to get to the end, and trying not to trip. That right there, that’s the hardest part.

The most rewarding part for me was always the moment before a project was shipped off the the publisher, looking at everything spread out on the floor in order.

But truthfully, grade school appearances are really the thing that does it now. The whole process of making books can be so isolating, so much about high minded professional practices done in a cave, that it’s not hard to lose sight of who these things are really for. Wandering around among actual humans ‹ preferably short ones ‹ with a book is really my favorite part.

And I think it’s a reminder of why that page 28 syndrome thing is important to get through. There are plenty of examples out in the world where adults cut corners or cheap out on things for children because they think their target audience won’t notice. And often they’re right. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? Children deserve better things than that, whether they’ll recognize it or not.

The worst thing we can do as people in the creative class is willfully accustom our audiences to mediocrity.

• • •

To learn more about Adam Gustavson, you can visit http://adamgustavson.blogspot.com/. About the book Hannah’s Way, see: http://www.karben.com/Hannahs-Way-Paperback_p_502.html

This one is of my daughter, although she looks at least five years older than she is in real life in this quick colored pencil sketch. The challenge (from the book A Drawing a Day) was to choose five colors not necessarily in the image and draw.

This is my favorite of this post: a drawing done with iDraw on an iPad mini of my daughter’s boots. I am quite pleased with the result. Using iDraw is like a cross between finger painting and Photoshop.

Someone wanted recommendations for books that teach drawing. I will mention two that I own:

• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards
• The Natural Way to Draw, Kimon Nicolaides

Both emphasize learning to see. We may think we are seeing, but usually, we are creating a symbol for how our left brain thinks an object should be.

Thanks to everyone who has made suggestions for renaming this blog! The blog renaming process may not happen for a bit, as I’ve been busy with paid gigs, I need to redo the header for this blog (which takes time), and no one is paying me to redo my own blog header.

Crayon drawing inspired by the exercise A Child Could Do This

Book Review: One Drawing a Day

I took a wonderful book out of the library called One Drawing a Day. The book, written by artist Veronica Lawlor with the help of other artists, has over 42 drawing exercises, some color, some not, some outside, some for at home. I soon discovered that there was no way I was going to keep up with a drawing every day, so I am trying to content myself with one drawing per week, as the title of my post suggests.

There is an accompanying blog to go with the book, also called One Drawing a Day. However, it seems to be examples of drawings as opposed to more exercises, so if you want the exercises, get the book. I may just need to purchase the book, because there is only so many times I can take it out of the library.

The exercise on the top was done with children’s crayons. It is called a Child Could Do This – you are actually supposed to ask a child for suggestions. I just sorted out some of my daughter’s crayons and used those. Scribble and make shapes a kid would make was part of the suggestion.

Below is a sketch of a family member on the computer:

You are supposed to concentrate on the person you are observing and not spend all your time staring at your paper. I did the sketch with a drawing marker.

This was the very first exercise in the book, observing objects in one’s home:

The flower was actually a design on our sofa cover. What objects do you see?

[Show as slideshow]

1) When did you realize you wanted to be an artist?
I loved art from an early age, and my high school art teacher told me that I should seriously pursue art, but by the time I reached my teens, I somehow developed the idea that art was not a valuable profession and decided that I wanted to do something medically related as a profession, and art would be my hobby.

2) Please describe the work you do.
I’ve worked in various media over the years – calligraphy, paper cutting, polymer clay, and, most recently, fabric.

When I was younger, I loved the exactly measured type of calligraphy that I did then, but after a while, I felt a need to work in a softer and less exacting medium. I was living far away from my children and grandchildren at the time and wanted to make them things for them that they could cuddle with and wrap around themselves and not just hang on their walls. This led to my beginning to work with fabric.

My “bread and butter” work involves making Challah Covers and Platta Covers, and I guess they fall more into the design category, but in between producing these, I like to work on new art ideas, often involving Hebrew quotations. I’ve had a running list in my head for probably 35 years of some of my favorite quotes and i enjoy interpreting them in the various media that I work with. There are also some basic design ideas that I’ve used over and over with variations, and I’ve come to consider them as a basic part of who I am an what I’m doing in the world.

I enjoy making family trees, often ordered by customers as gifts celebrating 50th anniversaries. It’s a pleasure to help people celebrate their family life. Over the years I’ve done family trees as paintings, paper cuts and fabric art.

I’m currently experimenting with combining my two favorite types of art/craft and doing brush calligraphy on fabric and also reinterpreting some of my paper cut ideas in fabric..

3) How have you used social media (Facebook, blog, Twitter) to promote your art?
I use Facebook and LinkedIn, but I really have to work on that. I have a tendency to use these social media once in a while, and then forget about them for long periods of time.

I love www.etsy.com (see http://www.etsy.com/shop/debrawalk), the online crafts marketplace comprising hundreds of thousands of crafts shops. It has revolutionized the crafts and handmade market, offering international exposure and highly attractive terms of sale for artists and craftspeople and I truly have only good things to say about it. It also is a social medium in its own right – you can follow artists of your choice, correspond with them, “heart” their stores or work and even create your own “treasuries” of favorite items that may be shared with others.

I must also mention Pinterest (see http://pinterest.com/debrawalk/), not as a means of promotion, but as a fabulous way of enjoying the vast array of visual treats available on the intenet and collecting visual ideas. It’s hard to express how much I enjoy looking at the stream of exquisite photography, whether landscape or wildlife, gorgeous gardens, waterfalls, forests, etc. I actually have begun to recite the phrase “מה רבו מעשיך ה’ כולם בחכמה עשית, מלאה הארץ קניינך” “How many are your works Hashem, all made in wisdom, the earth is filled with your creations (loosely translated)” as I surf the Pinterest boards, enjoying my armchair exploration of the wonders of the world.

4) What is your favorite part of being an artist?

Self-expression, work is fun, I feel as if I have little pieces of myself in homes around the world, at people’s Shabbat tables, etc.

5) Where do you look for inspiration?

The many art books I own, Pinterest, as described above, nature, various man-made goods I encounter in the world around me (textiles, housewares, children’s books). I also am an avid reader of “middle-brow” fiction, which nurtures my soul and thus, in some way, inspires me.

6) What are the hard parts of being an artist?

Discipline, disciple, discipline…I’m not naturally disciplined.

As someone who has a very strong critical voice in my head that tells me, among other things, that being an artist is a silly way to spend my life, I’d like to share a teaching that I once learned from Sarah Yehudit Schneider of A Still, Small Voice.

Sarah Yehudit takes the second half of the verse from Psalms, “פותח את ידיך ומשביע לכל חי רצון” and instead of the usually interpretation that seems to state that God fulfills our desires, says that it means that He provides each of us with our (deepest) desires, the ones that are connected to each person’s individual purpose in the world. thus, if one loves to play with fabric and color, that is somehow connected to that purpose.

That has become how I talk back to that negative voice.

I hope you have enjoyed this interview with fabric artist Debra Walk.

Tea cup in watercolor by Leora Wenger, December 2012

Here is the story behind the tea cup. I’ve been cleaning out my father’s apartment. My daughter and I found a lovely tea cup; I assume it once belonged to my mother? I don’t remember it from childhood. It must have stayed in the china cabinet. We (my daughter and I) drink tea much more often than I did as a child (our favorite is green tea with mint – do you like tea? What kind?). So every so often my daughter says, can I please drink from a teacup? And sometimes I say yes.

Looks like one can say both tea cup or teacup. But there is no word ‘coffeecup.’ Besides, I drink coffee from a mug.

Below is the version I used on my guest post submissions rant – I do want to welcome people to my blog, either of my blogs, actually. But you will need to know how to spell teacup.