My daughter is taking an art class in fashion. So she was excited when I volunteered to share some of her drawings in a post:
A few questions came up regarding the class. It seems that her art teacher used words to which she was unaccustomed to talk about the human body (the main word in question is b-*-*-b-s). It sounds like her teacher even pointed to that part of the human body while using this language. To give a little background, my daughter and her friends attend a modern Orthodox Jewish day school. So they are unaccustomed to hearing such language in the classroom. One friend felt it was OK to talk that way; another said it would be OK for a science teacher to talk about those parts of the body. I pointed out that sometimes the science teacher talks about the science or anatomy but doesn’t bring up the feelings that the words might elicit.
In addition, my daughter told me she was careful to draw dresses that are what is called tznuah – modest. My daughter wears short-sleeved shirts, as I do, but not sleeveless. We also wear skirts that reach close to our knees. In school, she has to wear quarter-sleeves or longer and skirts below the knee or longer. She sometimes wears pants, but she is not allowed to do so in school. As opposed to feeling trapped by these rules, as some girls do, I think they make her feel safe. The one drawing on this post that is sleeveless she explained to me is a bathing suit. In her most recent dance school she was required to wear a dress that had hardly any top at all, so it made her feel naked. She was very unhappy about that outfit.
A Discussion on Fashion and Modesty
With the view that people have different cultural norms, and certainly anyone reading this post may have a different viewpoint, upbringing and outlook from my daughter, myself, her art teacher or her science teacher, I have a few questions for you.
Have you ever given much thought to how you dress?
Would you be comfortable with the use of the word b-*-*-b-s in the classroom?
Feel free to discuss in the comments anything I have mentioned. The point is to understand someone else’s point of view.
Tell Us Your Favorite Fashion Design
On a lighter note, you could comment on your favorite outfit on this post.
Today is a fast day on the Jewish calendar: Shiva Assur B’Tammuz (the 17th Day of the Month of Tammuz). I have been planning to post some nature notes of jacandra tree blooms and other nature in the Galil, but that will wait until next week. Above is a photo I took when I was in Jerusalem last month. The photo (near the main bus station) shows an example of the mix of architecture in Jerusalem, although if you really want to see the old, old of Jerusalem, visit my post on the City of David. Other posts on Jerusalem: Jerusalem Day and Jerusalem in Ruins.
What happened on the 17th of Tammuz? According to this Chabad article, there were five tragic events on this day, but I will mention this one:
The walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Romans, in 69 CE, after a lengthy siege. (Three weeks later, after the Jews put up a valiant struggle, the Romans destroyed the second Holy Temple on the 9th of Av.)
I’m going to re-post my watercolor from 2011 – you can learn more about its significance on the post Fox in Ruins.
I did a sketch/drawing last Sunday of the boy talking to the fisherman. You can see the first sketch and learn a little about the background of the subject matter: a colored pencil drawing. I keep thinking I should perhaps go back to oils to get more control, especially since I am working on human beings. But oils take a lot of preparation time just to get started painting. Maybe I will try ink and some watercolor. Or some other combination.
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
It’s been a while since I posted a bit of art. I took a photo of a boy talking to a man fishing by the edge of the Raritan River. I decided it would make a nice subject for a painting, so I did this sketch with colored pencils. It has a similar feel to the watercolor I did last summer of two men relaxing by the Raritan River (presumably, they had been fishing at the Raritan River before relaxing).
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 this portrait of Jill with colored pencils and ink pen at the first meeting of our artist group. I set up a still-life for the group to sketch, but then I asked the group if it was OK if I drew one of the members. Jill said it was fine, and she also approved my posting this particular drawing on my blog. I did two others, but I felt this one looked more like her, although maybe a Jill Caporlingua who is twenty years younger. I left the spiral on the left of my sketchbook in the reproduction for the web to give the viewer the idea that this is a sketch and not a finished portrait.
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 hope you like onions. This post features onions. One onion is red. One onion is yellow. The scallions are green. The garlic clove in the photo is white (but it doesn’t appear in the art below).
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.
I have been reading a lot of writers’ websites. I’ve noticed as they make their lists, I often say, yes, artists think that way as well. For example, A. K. Andrews asks, Can Your Computer Drain Your Creativity? One could certainly make this argument for writers or visual artists. In this post, I’ll explore what artists and writers share in common.
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.
Welcome, Adam! Readers, enjoy this interview with Adam Gustavson, illustrator of the award-winning children’s book Hannah’s Way; the interview is part of the Sydney Book Awards Blog Tour.
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.
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.
In my efforts to increase my posting of rough sketches (and to continue to inspire my own drawing on and off the computer), I am presenting three sketches. The one above is done in pen on paper – it is a copy of a John Neill drawing from Tik Tok of Oz, a book by L. Frank Baum. The character is a talking mule called Hank (he is the mule of Betsy Bobbin).
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?
