You Can’t Do That

“Who is putting up all of these teensy little drawings?” 
the Professor wanted to know.

He’d interrupted his erratic pacing mid-stride, in front of twenty or so versions of a person sitting in a chair, all from different angles, of all different sizes, taped to the wall in a haphazard row.

He grabbed the smallest picture from the line, a plain sheet of typing paper with a two-inch-high figure floating dead center. “I see one of these at every critique. Who is responsible for them?”

I raised my hand.

“You? What’s the matter - are you afraid to make a full sized rendering like everyone else?” Murmured chuckles sprinkled about the room.

“No, sir,” I answered. “It’s just hard for me to finish a large drawing in the time allowed, so I make several quick sketches, and put the best one up for discussion.”

“No one else seems to have trouble making big drawings.” he said, pausing to let the obvious conclusion sink in. “What’s your problem?”

“It’s not a problem, really, just a limitation of the medium,” I replied.

“Really? What medium are you using?”

“A ballpoint pen,” I said, holding up my trusty Bic for him to see.

Not a legitimate artist's medium.

“Seriously?” he scolded. “You’re using a ballpoint pen in an art class?”

Of course I was using a ballpoint pen in an art class. Why wouldn't I? I used ballpoints for every other class: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, History of the English Language. I usually carried at least three of them, color-coding each academic subject with a different combination of black, blue and red ink. The visual difference was quite helpful when it came time to study for exams. Why would this class be any different? 

Here in the Basic Drawing studio, it was the logical choice. I was not an art major. I was just a pre-med who wanted to learn how to draw in one semester – and make an ‘A’ doing it. If I wanted to learn the techniques of rendering forms and textures in an efficient manner, I needed to streamline the process, and focus on what I already knew how to do.

Until that day, my sketches 

had consistently elicited 

encouraging comments.

Charcoal, India ink, Conte´crayon… these were media that required an extra learning curve, additional time to master, not to mention an additional cash outlay at the college bookstore. True, they offered the advantage of covering large swaths of real estate at a single stroke, but that ‘advantage’ also meant I would have to buy large tablets of drawing paper – another infringement on my nonexistent art supply budget. I already had reams of typing paper collecting dust on my bookshelf.

“I didn’t know that there were size requirements on the assignments, Sir,” I explained. “And you did say that we could use any medium.”

Besides, even though my drawings were small, I felt I had managed to accomplish all of the goals set out for us in every studio exercise, representing form, texture, shading, etc., using my familiar, preferred technique.

Until that day, my sketches had consistently elicited encouraging comments.

He reached down and plucked the instrument from my hand, holding it up for everyone to see. “This is not a legitimate artist’s medium. You can’t make anything of substance with such a skinny black line. I don't want to see it in my studio again.” To underscore his point, he confiscated the offending contraband, freeing me from the temptation ever to use it again.

To his credit, the Professor was not being unduly critical. This was his class; he had every right to expect things to be done his way. And I could understand and appreciate his preferences: the man was a painter, who preferred to work on large-scale projects. It was not unusual to see him working on a wall-sized canvas, using a three- or four-inch wide paintbrush. Making artwork on such a miniaturized scale, regardless of detail, must have seemed utterly foreign to him.

Like any reputable instructor, I’m sure he wanted his course to be taken seriously, and probably felt that by refusing to embrace a variety of drawing styles and materials, I would be missing the opportunity to wring the full potential from this class.

Lesson learned, I reached into my pocket, and started constructing the day’s new drawing assignment using the skinny black lines of a No. 2 pencil. It felt good to be a legitimate student again.

Much to the Professor’s delight, I spent the rest of the semester exploring the monotonal worlds of graphite, charcoal, and ink wash, with illustrative side routes into magic marker, and creative photocopying. Once I had distanced myself from the wretched, divisive ballpoint issue, it became clear that my grade point average would be back on track as well.

It was perhaps understandable then that I did not tell my new mentor about the several drawing projects I still had underway in my dorm room, where I struggled on my own to work out the graphic potential of skinny ballpoint lines.

One of these pieces, a whimsical study of a cartoon ant on crumpled beer can, seemed especially pleasing, and worthy, I thought, of submission to the campus literary magazine. The student editorial staff liked it too, and awarded my drawing First Place in the visual arts category – an honor that included publication in the journal, and a cash prize as well.

Twenty-five dollars may not sound like a lot of money today, and it probably wasn’t very much then, either, but to a college student in the early 1980’s it meant a full tank of gas, a six-pack of beer, and at least one dinner date at a decent restaurant.

It also meant that a ballpoint pen was capable of producing artwork that had audience appeal, and real earning potential. I had no idea how important that realization would become in the years following my brief tour through medical training.

Years later, I was fortunate enough to re-make my acquaintance with my former art professor, this time on even friendlier terms, both personally and professionally. My career as a ballpoint artist was rounding out its second decade, and the studio was producing a picture book to mark the anniversary. He was gracious enough to write the introduction for the project.

Of course he took full credit for my artistic career:

Edward Hill, in his ‘Language of Drawing’, stated that the student mirrors his teaching – often through opposition.  When Don Stewart was a student in one of my drawing courses at Birmingham-Southern College many years ago, he was chided for the ‘improper use’ of a ballpoint pen.  Illustrating Mr. Hill’s theory perfectly, Stewart has investigated, tested, and polished the applications of the once-lowly instrument – seeking a new potential rather than settling for the ordinary.  Feathery lines and nubby textures supplement his definitive lights and darks, enticing the viewer further to seek their objects’ whimsical presence.  The visual puns of his devious mind are delivered with a wit and intelligence seldom seen.  As I have half-jokingly related to co-appreciators of his work, I feel personally responsible for his success.

Robert Shelton,

Professor of Art

Birmingham-Southern College

Birmingham, Alabama

I couldn’t agree more.

The Visual Humor of Don Stewart

“I Can’t Draw Stick People.”

Yes, You Can.

The real question is, how bad do you want to?*

 

Handle With Care

Frankly, I’m not sure how well I can draw a stick person, either.  I’ve seldom been asked to. Hands, though, I’ll grant you. Hands are hard to draw. Lots harder than stick people. I know this because aspiring artists tell me all the time. Hands are just impossible.  

“I tried to draw my hand once, and it looked AWFUL,” they say.

“I know,” I tell them. “But how did it look after you drew it 100 times?”

Trust me: If you have an interest in drawing, and you take the time to draw the same thing eight or nine dozen times, the later attempts are going to look better than the first ones. It’s one of the overarching rules of art: “Practice Makes Perfect Better.”

No, I’m not saying that repetition alone will make you better. After all, doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results won't just drive you crazy, it is crazy. But practicing your craft, hour after hour, day after day, cannot help but make you a better artist.

Pausing in between drawings to look – really look – at how hands are constructed, looking closely at photos of hands in magazines, finding art books or online drawing lessons that help you see how hands are constructed, then studying the anatomy to see why they are constructed that way – these are the steps you take as a seriously curious person to become the artist you want to be, and to solve the difficult problem you have set before yourself. This is what helps you to see and understand your subject, and improves your ability to draw.

If, after drawing your hand 100 times, your work hasn't gotten any better, now at least you know that drawing probably isn’t your thing.

Unless – and here’s another caveat – you actually enjoyed drawing your hand badly a hundred times over. Some people do. Some folks enjoy making lousy art, and have no problem telling you so. If you’re one of those people, draw on, my friend. Have at it!

Because frankly, that’s who we all are, to one extent or another. We all have things that we draw well, and things that we have trouble with. And few of us can ever draw anything well enough to satisfy our worst critics – the ones who live inside our own heads.

I can’t draw cats, but that doesn't stop me from drawing a lot of them, badly. (Other people might tell me they look okay, but I know the pictures suck. I know what they were supposed to look like, and how far I have to go to achieve that level of accuracy.)

Happily, all of us can get better, and we will if we practice, and pay attention, and work on improving every time we sit down to amuse ourselves at the drawing table.

Ira Glass explains it really well, here.

Remember, your standards for excellence are already unreasonably high, or you wouldn't be trying to achieve the impossible – trying to make art. After all, art, to most people, is simply another form of magic.

Like everything else, being a good magician takes practice. Fortunately the best part about practicing drawing is… you get to draw while you're doing it.

*(Yes. That was written badly. Or at least it should have been, to be grammatically correct. I chose instead to be conversationally correct. I promise to stay after school and write the sentence properly, 100 times.)

How to Draw a Cat (When You Figure It Out, Let Me Know)

I don't usually give drawing lessons, since most of the time I'm still too busy trying to figure the whole process out for myself. You can't teach what you don't know, and in spite of thirty years of evidence to the contrary, I don’t know much.

Take animals, f'rinstance. I do my best to keep them out of my drawings entirely. All those wavy lines that change whenever a critter gets the notion to move a sliver of an inch, the bones and muscles underneath that insist on wiggling and shifting and changing shape, they confuse me. And faces – just forget it. (I don't do faces. God made portrait artists  specifically to relieve me of that burden.)

Give me something with measurable shapes and hard edges to draw, and I'm much happier.

White Buffalo Wing

That’s why a couple of projects have lately given me the fits. I once managed to struggle through an animal-shaped Buffalo Wing - a design heavy on wing and only slightly suggestive of buffalo. 

I’ll admit this was cheating, since drawing a wing is actually more artist-friendly than one might expect. 

Connected to a live bird, somewhere up in the air, a wing might have the tendency to move around a good bit. Frozen on the page, though, it’s really more like a round-edged machine, built in layers, and limited in its ability to fluster the person who is trying like the dickens to render its repetitive lines and curves and shadows. With a little practice, the artist is able to see that one feather is pretty much like another (learn to draw one and you can draw a hundred); lay them down according to a predictable pattern, and a wing is what you get.

Not so the animals of the mammalian variety, with their fur of varying thicknesses and lengths, along with legs and bodies and necks and noses and heads and ears and tails suffering the same capricious qualities. We can tell a dog from a cat from a squirrel by sight, but just try and communicate that to the pencil point you’re sending across the page to capture one of these creatures in simple lines. Not so easy, is it? A few brisk strokes, and your cat soon looks like a squirrel, with a dog’s head.

If you're lucky, you can find something mechanical, like a pigeon’s wing – that’s already shaped like the buffalo you’re trying to draw. Then half of the work is done before you even start, and the hard half at that. I do that sort of thing as often as I can.

If you’re not so lucky, and are tasked with drawing a bunch of cats, for example, you wind up studying a lot of animal pictures, and wasting a lot of time generating reams of redundant sketches, trying to figure out what makes a cat a cat, and not a ferret or a hamster. (Forget about studying the cat you have at home. The minute she sees you drawing, your pencil point becomes the most interesting thing in the room, and your cause is lost.)

Such was the case a decade ago when I designed the Tiger Swallowtail – an imaginary butterfly made out of tigers. 

Tiger Swallowtail

Photographs were studied. Sketches were drawn. By force of will and dogged (sic) persistence, that design was eventually rendered successfully. Unfortunately, nothing of a permanent artistic nature appears to have been acquired by the artist in the process.

Cat Scan

Thus my latest project demands that history, since it was not learned from, must be repeated. This time I have tasked myself with creating a drawing of a human brain made out of cats, the proverbial Cat Scan. I had no choice. The pun is too rich to pass up – especially when one x-ray slice of cranium looks very much like a roaring… or yawning… lion.

As its name implies, this drawing demands nothing less than the rendering of some three dozen feline figures, obnoxiously cavorting about in every conceivable kitty configuration, in order to approximate the various bumps and curves and fissures that make up a cross-section of the brain. (Can't see them in there? Neither could I, at first.)

Cat Scan, (WIP) © 2015

No, I do not feel up to the task, nor have I for the several years that I have repeatedly attempted, and subsequently abandoned, this particular drawing, only to return again to test my patience and ability. Now, by leaning heavily on the assurance that practice does make perfect, and applying the same canine determination employed to complete the tiger drawing, I’m finally beginning to see some progress on my kitty-cat brain picture. In the process, I’ve uncovered a few basic concepts that have consistently helped me to keep my finicky cats from going to the dogs.

Some of these lessons, it turns out, are pretty darned simple. They may even be dependable enough to be called rules by people who find comfort in useful, predictable, reliable, and reproducible concepts. I’ll share just a couple of them here:

1.  In profile, dogs and cats differ mainly by the length and position of the snout. If the head and ears are the same (think tabby and Chihuahua), a cat’s short nose emerges from a low brow, well above the center of the face, and curves back abruptly to form the jowl.

Cat                                                                             Dog

By comparison the dog has a more pronounced brow ridge, and a longer snout that drapes lower in its sweep back to the head and neck.

2. From the front view, dog & cat faces are very similar, with one notable difference. The curve of the cat’s eyebrow and upper eyelid follows an unbroken line along the side of the short snout, until it blends seamlessly with the outer edge of the nose.

Cat                                                           Dog

The dog’s eye lines deviate from this pattern, turning off the direct the path to the nose, instead forming an hourglass shape as they fall to either side of the snout.

These observations may appear to be as silly as they are superficial, but they have been extremely helpful in keeping my felines from becoming canines. Preventing these cats from becoming ferrets or foxes or squirrels will surely require the guidance of other, similar rules, useful guidelines which I sincerely hope to discover before this project is complete.

When and if they make themselves known, I'll be sure to pass them along.

Video Killed the Blog Star

Wow. It’s been weeks since I’ve written a blog entry. Which is a little ironic, given that just about all I have been doing every day lately is writing.

There are all kinds of writing, of course. These days I’m doing less (make that none) of the stories, and more of the administrative stuff: ad copy, correspondence, e-mail, social media – almost all of which (compounding the irony) has to do with promoting my book. Of stories.

We’re right in the middle of our crowd-funding campaign, doing whatever we can to expand and communicate with our network of personal and professional contacts to make sure 1) that they all know about our effort to publish Past Medical History, and 2) that we want to use their money to do it.

It’s not a charity project. (Not entirely, anyway.) We have lots of incentives, premiums, prizes, if you will, to try and encourage people to come on board and help us print this book. Which can be done by visiting our Indiegogo campaign.

This is the kind of thing I’ve been writing.

Wrote a lot of other stuff, too, leading up to the kick-off of our campaign: Project descriptions, press releases, perk lists (these are the prizes mentioned earlier), and something else I’m not much used to at all:

I had to write a script for the video. This should have been a fun little project, a very short story telling people about our book project, and convincing them that we had the know-how and experience to follow through with the publication, if they would trust us with their money. Simple.

Correlate that story with views of a talking head (me), decorated with a bunch of entertaining artwork and informative graphics, and voila! we have it. (Oh, yeah, that required a storyboard, so I’ve been doing a little drawing, too.) 

The whole project only took a month, maybe two, but it worked. After all that effort, it occurred to me that a video script might make a good blog post. Then it occurred to me that the video itself would make a better one: