The future of illustration?

This week's New Yorker arrived with an interesting surprise: two variants of the same cover:

The printed one.

And a bonus interactive version with the iPad download.



The interactive version was fun to play with. I spent a minute or two making that wheel drop a bunch of apples on Newton's head.

This is the kind of stuff that my kids take for granted. But, to this 43-year-old, it still feels a bit like science-fiction -- I can make the artwork come alive with my fingertip!

I thought, is this the future of illustration?

Not really, it is the present.

The cover, titled "Eureka!" is by illustrator Christoph Niemann. Where did his inspiration come from? See his step-by-step visual explanation and the cover artwork in motion here.

Keri Smith: "Perspective is everything."

What stood out from my Internet consumption this week, visually speaking:

1. A charming and thought-provoking set of hand-drawn signs by guerrilla artist Keri Smith, of Wreck This Journal fame.

By Keri Smith

The captions Keri writes to each sign on flickr are just as good if not better. "Move over a little bit," reads the one for the sign above. I'm going to remember that, not just for sketching, for anything.

If we all "moved over a little bit," instead of being set in our own ways, we'd see things differently. We'd be more open-minded and tolerant, wouldn't we? Perspective is everything.

2. Fifteen cartoons that changed the world, some of them inked more than 100 years ago. [Via Cartoon Movement.] Powerful stuff ... Share it with anyone who may think cartoons are silly or irrelevant!

3. A post on Craftsy.com by Paul Heaston on how to draw those ellusive ellipses. That's how it's done!

Keys to Drawing

I often check out art instruction books from my neighborhood library. But I never spend enough time with any one in particular before they are due back. Keys to Drawing, however, has me hooked from the start. I'm enjoying it so much I may just end up buying a copy to own.

Dodson emphasizes a fundamental principle: Drawing what we see, not what we know. Such simple advice, right? Yet it doesn't get old. Trust your eyes, he says, and spend more time looking at the subject than at the paper.

"Our goal in drawing from observation is to capture the richness and variety of the visual experience. We should draw, for the time being at least, as if we know nothing, and were obedient to only to what our eye tell us to draw."

In other words, forget that people's heads are positioned above their shoulders (what we know.) If the person we are drawing is bent foreward and looking down, that anatomical knowledge won't help. Just draw what you see.

Or forget that hands have five fingers. Try drawing your hand with your fingers pointing directly at you and think only about shapes, lines and angles. Below is my own result from doing that exercise suggested by Dodson. (In case you are curious, the unrelated sketch on the top left is my son looking at the iPad.)

Here's another excerpt of great advice to cope with the frustations that often arise in the process of drawing:

"At each point of frustration or confusion, ask yourself: What do I see?"

The journalistic illustrations of Robert Weaver

The late Robert Weaver is known for his journalistic approach to illustration. The artwork he published in magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Life and Esquire was based on sketches he drew on the field.

This week I especially thought of Weaver's work when I was making some behind-the-scenes sketches of Opening Day at Safeco Field for my Seattle Times column. Back in 1962, Sports Illustrated sent him to Florida to cover spring training and he produced a series of paintings for the magazine (see a tearsheet in this post on D. B. Dowd's blog Graphic Tales.) Above is a screengrab of a slideshow of his spring training sketches published by the New York Times in 2008.

The idea of creating new images based on my sketches had never crossed my mind until I discovered Weaver's work. Now I can't wait to give it a try.

Here's my list of links to Weaver's work so far:

• Leif Peng: Rober Weaver flickr set
• Today's Inspiration: The incursion of the Avant-garde: Robert Weaver
• Today's Inspiration: Robert Weaver: "It was the ponytail period in American culture."
• Today's Inspiration: Robert Weaver The anti-Wyeth
• Today's Inspiration: Robert Weaver: "Illustration is an essential to a great painting."
• Today's Inspiration: Robert Weaver: "The artist... should be the reactor.".
• Today's Inspiration: Robert Weaver: "I saw illustration as a real calling."
• Graphic Tales: Drawing Lines––Robert Weaver at Olin Library
• Graphic Tales: Robert Weaver, ACL Game 7 special
• Graphic Tales: Super Tuesday: Robert Weaver's Kennedy Suite
• Graphic Witness: Robert Weaver
• Art Directors Club: 1990 Hall of Fame Special Award
• PourPorter: American illustrator Rober Weaver
• Washington University St. Louis: The Work of Robert Weaver, by Noah MacMillan
• New York Times: Spring training sketches slideshow.
• New York Times: Obituary

And here's a pic from one of my sketches in progress last Monday during Opening Day. Drawn from Safeco Field's press box.

The Melton Prior Institute for Reportage Drawing & Printing Culture

I recently discovered the existence of an institute dedicated to reportage drawing: The Melton Prior Institute.

It is named after Melton Prior, an English artist who worked for the London Illustrated News back in the days before photography, when newspapers relied on artists to produce visual records of news events.

The institute's website is a gold mine of resources about illustrated newspapers, war artists, reportage illustrators and graphic arts in general.

Artists keen on the narrative powers of illustration will enjoy digging deeper into the site. It's a real time sink, but certainly inspirational for those of us who work in the crossroads of art and journalism.

The Melton Prior Institute also has a page on Facebook. I hope it gets a few more likes after this post!

Drawn together in North Carolina

Meeting fellow urban sketchers when you are away from home can be a very rewarding experience.

I recently met two of them during my spring break vacation in North Carolina: Jessie Chapman, an architect from Charlottesville I first met at the Santo Domingo Urban Sketching Symposium last summer; and Steven White, a web designer from Blacksburg, Virginia.

Though it was only the second time I met Jessie in person and the first time I ever shook hands with Steven, the connection was instantaneous. It felt like meeting dear cousins or old college friends.

Steven was just as funny and genuine as I expected — I've known him since the early days of the Urban Sketchers flickr group. "C'mon, give me a hug!" he said in the characteristic friendly style of his online persona, "SketchySteven," as soon as he saw me. And Jessie was just as excited as Steven and I about our little sketching meetup, which took place under beautiful sunny skies and pleasant spring temperatures.

The meeting location was Statesville, a small town about an hour north of Charlotte where my brother-in-law, Jeff Archer, opened his mountain bike shop more than two decades ago.



Jeff's First Flight Bicycles business now occupies a historic building in the heart of the city and attracts customers from all over the region and beyond. Sketchers? Not so much. That's probably why he tipped off a local newspaper reporter who promptly showed up to interview us for this story.

After a quick lunch, we set out to sketch across the bike shop as Jeff was busy attending customers who pop up from everywhere. For instance, a New Yorker who took a detour on his trip back home from Florida just to visit the bike shop; and a father and son from Charlotte who spent three hours browsing the shop and Jeff's collection of vintage bicycles, also known as the Museum of Mountain Bike Art and Technology.



The bike shop and other impressive buildings in downtown Statesville kept us busy sketching all afternoon. Then we wrapped up the day in typical sketcher fashion, having a drink at a local bar, the Wine Maestro, that Jeff recommended.

If you ever find yourself near Statesville, make sure to stop by First Flight Bikes and get a sketch or two done along South Center Street. Like Jessie said, it's a town that ranks high in "sketchability."

Picture it: The art and teachings of Fred Lynch

11:10 a.m., July 25, 2007. Viterbo, Italy, by Fred Lynch.

Sometimes you find artwork on the web that stops you on your tracks. That was my experience when I first stumbled upon Fred Lynch's timeless and peaceful scenes of Viterbo on flickr.

Fred didn't turn out to be an English or American ex-pat living in Italy. He is an artist and educator who teaches at some of the best illustration programs in the U.S., at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Mass., and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.

My curiosity about Fred's art and teachings, which he generously shares on his blog Picture It, led me to do this Q&A with him that I first published on the Urban Sketchers blog in 2009.

Though the post is four years old, Fred answers' are just as valid today and I think you may enjoy reading them again, or perhaps for the first time, in this new "Show and Tell" phase of my blogspot.

How did the idea of drawing and documenting Viterbo come about?

Montserrat has been taking art students and enthusiasts to Viterbo, Italy, for many years to study landscape painting and photography as well as art history and journal writing. The director of the summer program asked if I'd like to create a drawing course … and I jumped at the chance. That's when I came up with the course "Journalistic Drawing in Italy."

Throughout history artists were valued correspondents for every publication that featured visuals. They recorded visions of wars, foreign lands and historic events. Paul Hogarth, the great British illustrator, wrote well of the history of this genre in his book, The Artist as Reporter. But, until recently, it seemed that the value of on-site, journalistic drawing had been decreasing, losing prominence in the editorial world to photography.

Now I see that eyewitness drawing appears to be enjoying a renaissance, particularly online with blogs, websites and image sharing sites such as Flickr. Urban Sketchers is certainly a great example. My class in Italy aims to discuss the history and contemporary trends of sketchbooks and visual journalism and to use Viterbo as the subject (and inspiration) for visual essays and observational sketches.


Top: Drawing by Heather McCoy. Bottom: Leeza Masia drawing in Viterbo. More students' sketches at Drawing Viterbo. Photo by Deb Venuti.

How is Viterbo like? How is it like to sketch there with your students?

Viterbo is a small ancient city, with a population of about 60,000. The old part of the city is contained in walls that were constructed in the 11th and 12th centuries. The city is both old (with a wonderfully preserved Medieval Quarter) and new, with modern shopping, fashions and lifestyle. What makes Viterbo particularly great for us is that it is off the beaten path of tourism. As visitors, we get a pure Italian experience and have no competition for interesting sites.

Students draw constantly throughout the month long trip, both in and out of class. They are encouraged to act as sponges soaking up everything and wringing it out in their sketchbooks! They visit Rome, the Mediterranean and Florence with their sketchbooks. In a foreign place, one’s senses are heightened and almost everything is interesting to draw. We talk about how we need to take that quality of seeing back home to our own ordinary lives.

What is your sketching process and technique. How long do you spend on each drawing. Why is it important to caption them with exact time and date?

Ordinarily, I'm an oil painter, working slowly and making many corrections and changes. But when I sketch, the focus is on the moment and on the place.

Because light changes as the sun crosses the sky, I work as quickly as I can (shadows move quickly in the city). I want very much to finish the work on-sight in one sitting. Each drawing ends up taking about an hour to complete. At the end of the drawing, I write the time and the address of the spot where I am. I don't revisit the works later. The work represents its point in time, an eyewitness account.

I currently sketch with either ink (Windsor Newton, nut brown) or black ballpoint pen. The ink drawings are washes and are created with brushes and ink watered down to start and darkened as I go. From time to time, I'll paint with watercolors from a small Windsor Newton travel kit. I work in a Moleskine watercolor sketchbook or on a small, 7x10" Arches watercolor block (hot pressed). Pencils, erasers, a quill pen, a rag, a big water bottle and sunblock are essential supplies too!

Each sketch starts with a 10-minute inspirational light pencil drawing to interpret the scene, followed by 50 minutes of perspiration. I work the entire surface from the general to the specific and from the light to the dark. While I strive to capture the scene as I see it (to get it "right"), I'm not all afraid to impose my personality to the works and to be comfortable with the work’s overall lack of finish. Each and every time I sit and draw I wonder if it will work out in the end. Happily it almost always does and I usually feel satisfied in the end. That said, I don't love all of my drawings and I wish to push myself further each time I work, which is easier said than done! I’m never comfortable. I'm drawn to the difficult, I guess.

• Drawing Viterbo on Flickr.
• Drawing Viterbo students' blog.
• Fred Lynch's website.

P.S.: Fred will be giving a lecture at this year's Urban Sketching Symposium in Barcelona. If you are planning to attend, make sure not to miss it!

Urban sketching as creative fuel

Urban sketching is mostly a hobby, but it can also benefit many people in their professional occupations. In his new book, Freehand Drawing and Discovery ($65, Wiley & Sons), urban designer and educator Jim Richards gives urban sketching his stamp of approval as a tool that can help architects, urban designers and creative professionals throughout their careers.

Jim, an associate professor at the University of Texas School of Architecture, makes a simple but powerful point in this beautifully illustrated, 265-page manual, that the more we draw the things we see, the better equipped we are to draw what we think, to translate abstract concepts into easy to understand visual communication. That's why he defines urban sketching as "creative fuel," offering this quote from professor Frank Ching to further illustrate his point: "If you draw 1,000 trees from life, then the tree you draw from imagination will have integrity."

Jim's book offers a great mix of thought-provoking narrative about the value of freehand drawing in the digital age and practical drawing instruction. In the section titled "Learning a Language," urban sketchers of any skill level will find useful step-by-step sketching tutorials and drawing tips (work small, simplify technique, draw people first.) Jim has gone as far as redrawing his own sketches to reveal the steps he took to make them while on location.

Work by several urban designers (i.e. Michael Vergason, Kevin Sloan) and sketchers (i.e. Luis Ruiz, Liz Steel) is also featured in the book. I am honored to be one of them, but even more delighted that someone of Jim's professional standing has given a nod to urban sketching in such a prominent fashion.

I first met Jim in person at the 2nd International Urban Sketching Symposium in Lisbon and I have followed his artwork online ever since. Jim has a long career as an urban design consultant and this is his first year stepping into the world of academia, where he is sure to get students excited about drawing on location. Jim also serves on the board of the Urban Sketchers nonprofit and is founder of Urban Sketchers Texas.

The spirit of urban sketching

The way I see it, being an urban sketcher isn't merely about drawing cities, big or small, urban or rural, with a pen or with your fingers on an digital tablet. It's about drawing places that can be put on a map, and everything that happens in those places. It's about showing the world with drawings, taking people to locations they may never go through artwork only you can create. You were there, you saw it, you sketched it, you told us what happened with your hand drawn art, sketched in the moment but perhaps touched up later because you ran out of time or can't resist the urge to fix something up. What matters is that you "draw what you witness," as my fellow sketchers in Indonesia like to say.

Those beautiful vases of flowers or the bowls of fruit on your kitchen table are sure great subjects to draw, but do they tell me something about a place I can put on a map? There are countless of beautiful sketching subjects to be drawn from observation that don't quite fit the spirit of urban sketching: an out-of-context portrait of my friend or her cat or her baby or her baby's shoes, for example.

But there's no point in making lists to define what urban sketching is or is not. You know what it is already, you've probably been an urban sketcher for a long time!

Rendered Rooms: The Art of Mike Daikubara

Daikubara attaches a sheet of hotel
letterhead onto a clipboard
and gets to work. This photo was
taken at Le Meridien Pyramids
 in Cairo, Egypt.

Urban sketching enthusiasts relish the opportunity to draw a new city while on vacation or on a business trip.

Mike Daikubara, an industrial designer based in Boston, took up the hobby in 2000 and is no exception. But he also likes to add another dimension to his travel sketching.

At whatever hotel he stays for the night, the first thing he does is ask for a sheet of stationary to draw his room. He may only have time for a blueprint-like sketch. Or he may spend several hours to create full-blown three-dimensional diagrams in striking bird's-eye perspective. Either way, his rendered rooms are full of detail. Bathroom tiles, wall decorations, and even the refreshments inside the fridge are carefully sketched in ink and watercolor.

The result of eight years of hotel-room sketching is Hotel Sketch Mike Sketch, a book with 67 sketched rooms and other drawings from his travel journal, and an exhibit which opens March 14 at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, Mass.

Mike's goal is to create a record that will help him remember what most of us forget: how the rooms we stayed in looked. His drawings, though, have a bigger effect for those who see them for the first time.

"Each room tells stories about the hotel, the country, the culture and I hope to share those stories with everyone," says Mike, who has sketched rooms in 11 countries spread over several continents.

Mike and I share the same birth year, 1969, and I have followed his work since we met at the 1st International Urban Sketching Symposium in Portland in 2010. The news of his exhibit gave me a good excuse to say hello and do this little Q&A about his fascinating world of rendered rooms:

What prompted you to start sketching hotel rooms?
I've been urban sketching since 2000, mostly in the beginning as a practice to be able to sketch faster and communicate better in my day job. In a matter of no time, that turned into a passion and hobby.

Since I used to travel a lot personally and on business, I used to sketch parts of the hotel room I stayed in, then started to sketch plan views by freehand which didn't capture the room very well. This lead me to buying measuring devices to start measuring for accuracy.

How long do you spend on each sketch and how do you measure the rooms?
This varies anywhere from about 2 hours to 5 or 6 hours. Have a look at this image showing a flow chart on how I make decisions on this topic.

In the beginning I used to measure by just using a tape measure. When the distance got long, I sometimes had my wife hold the other end. Then I heard about a laser measuring device where I just point to the opposite wall and gives me an exact digital reading of the distance! This was a little expensive but well worth it and I love it.

Do you ever show your sketches to the hotel staff? Have you ever been approached by the hotels later?

Not really. For some reason I've always been somewhat scared of showing people my hotel sketches. For years I never even told my co-workers whom I traveled with that this was what I did at night in the hotel room. After a long day of working, they would go out for a drink and a nice time out in town and I would head back to my room to sketch — I know how antisocial this looks so I've kind of kept it a secret.

Since releasing my book "Hotel Sketch Mike Sketch" things have started to change though. Everyone knows this is what I do and they encourage me.

Recently the design director of Marriott bought my book and even sent me a nice note about how much he liked it.

With my current employer, we also do business with numerous hotels in providing custom bathroom fixtures (including Marriott) so this relationship with him turned into a good thing.

How can someone explain to their travel companion that they want to sketch the hotel room instead of being outside?

Haha, this is a tough question and something I'd like to learn more from fellow sketchers that have non-sketching partners.

During the daytime when I'm traveling with my wife, this can be tricky in finding the right timing to sketch.

Sketching the hotel room on the other hand is actually easier. The time I sketch is at night after we come back to our room after a long day outside or I wake up 3~4 hours earlier than my wife in the morning to sketch while she's still sleeping. I'm a quiet sketcher so she never wakes up.

Any fun anecdoctes from hotel sketching?

Wow, I have too many since each room has a story to tell! But most of them relate to my findings, which I would never have found out if I had not sketched the room.

An example is with the Kotosankaku hotel in Japan. No matter how many times I measured and remeasured the area around the bathroom, the numbers did not add up and it was driving me crazy. I eventually found out that there was a small hidden space between the bathroom and the toilet containing pipes for plumbing and it was accessed through a small wooden panel with rice paper hanging in the toilet wall, which I originally thought was there just for decoration.

I think Hotel Arena in Amsterdam would have been a great one to sketch in perspective view, especially with the 14-foot-high ceiling in the bedroom, but I decided to do just a plan view drawing. This relates to my sketching flow chart in that I had too little time and the room would have been very complex.

Mike's great grandfather was an urban sketcher.

What's your next project?
Once again I have too many and need to start giving priority. I want to do Part 2 of "Sketch Mike Sketch." I want to complete translating and publish my great grandfather's diary containing tons of brush sketches — I have four books made by him. I also wrote a graphic novel with my friend 20 years ago, which I want to bring to print too.

Follow Mike Daikubara:
Blog.
Flickr.
Website.
At urbansketchers.org.

EXHIBIT INFORMATION

Gallery 263 (www.gallery263.com)

Rendered Rooms: Hotel rooms drawn on location by measuring
On view:
March 14–April 6, 2013
Reception:
Saturday, March 16, 5-7 PM
I'll be at the gallery every Saturday from 2:30 PM -5 PM

Gallery hours:
Th/F, 1-6 PM; S/Su, 12-5pm