Commonplace and sketchbook keeping for artists

Keeping a commonplace.

Whether it be a scrapbook, sketchbook in which you also write notes to yourself, a notebook that you keep on your person, or any other conceivable system for keeping records of your ideas, I think that a commonplace is an essential requirement for an artist of any seriousness. 

What is a commonplace? Well I think the Wiki on it is a great explanation, but basically it is a granary of ideas. Ever get stuck for what to do? Hit your commonplace and mine it for thoughts. It's a way of preserving ideas when you have plenty, to hoard them against the inevitable lean winters of creativity. 

If you don't have a commonplace, and want to get one, I recommend the following: get a notebook with blank or squared paper, as big as you can manage and still be able to take it everywhere. I recommend that it be beautiful to you, made by someone you like and admire or maybe make it yourself (more on that in the future) . Many people like Moleskines for that - while it might be a bunch of bollocks that by they are replicas of famous people's notebooks, they also have fine quality paper and highly tactile covers. I also recommend the durable and well made Leuchturm 1917 and Fabriano ranges of notebooks, which happen to come in variety of pleasing colours. 

Since you're going to be porting it about all over the place, and most people glue interesting scraps into them, you'll want to get one with good strong paper and covers, perhaps a pocket in the covers. 

Personally, I like to keep my sketchbook as a visual commonplaces with notes, especially if I am studying something like composition, and I keep a text commonplace full of lists of materials, interesting ideas, bits of knowledge and things I overhear that amuse me, plans for constructions etc. 

With one of these to store ideas whenever . You have a glut, you need never go without inspiration. Go forth and harvest your own braingarden!

Painting Step by Step - Beach flower

Beach Flowers at Aberdeen city Beach

I wanted to try to keep this blog to a reasonable ratio of theory and practical posts. Now bearing in mind that, I am putting up a process series of pictures from a painting I did the other day. I actually don't think it's a very successful painting, but an important part of learning is to look at your work and try to analyze your mistakes and omissions, and it would be remiss of me to post only when I think I have done a really good job. 

After doing a light drawing as a guide, and adapting it from my reference material, I used a brush and dilute Indian ink to sketch out the darks in the image. 

In this drawing I have used washes of the dilute Indian Ink to establish more of the tone. I use the Indian ink as it will still show through the early layers of acrylic paint, allowing me to still see the guides later. \As you can see at the top of the paper, I wrote myself little notes on the masking tape to help me remember what I wanted to do with the colour. 

After an initial wash of Pthalo blue acrylic, I then washed in a sandy colour made mostly from raw umber and yellow ochre. I also spent a little time dabbing at the sky area to change how the paint sat, and allow some of the white to show through more than other areas. 

In this image I have worked on the sky area as the first bit after the establishing work. When painting in opaque acrylics like this, it is commonly recommended that one generally should paint from the furthest back thing to the frontmost thing, so the sky is what happens first. The sky doesn't get much more than tweaks after this stage. 

At this point I have stared to work on the sea area, the shore in the background, and the beach area behind the plant. A lot of it is trying to bash in the colours about right, and working different sorts of colours into the whole thing, greens and ochres and blues and umbers, etc to try to give the thing some texture

The plant in the foreground was starting to get a bit obscured so I re-established it with some simple colour, trying to redraw it from the source material rather than covering the ink lines I could see.

This was a really long step- adding the rocks and debris on the beach area, and trying to work in lots of shadow tone and texture so it's interesting to look at. Only the foreground and a few details to go after this!

This is a scan of the work once finished rather than a photo, which is why it looks so different - my scanner seems to have a super bright light that washes out things a bit. as you can se, I have worked more contrast into the plant in the foreground, adding in the highlights and a variety of shades of green for texture and fun

Learning conclusions:

The Bad: What really strikes me about the final image is that the foreground flower barely seems to stand out at all - and to fix that, I need to be more careful about arranging a strong contrast in both colour and tone. Having strong tonal contrasts always makes everything look better, and I really haven't managed it. I think doing a careful, through underpainting in burnt sienna and umber would probably do the trick, but will add a lot of time to the work, as I would basically be painting it twice. Still, that's the price of painting. 

I also think that it would have worked better in a square painting, rather than a rectangular one. Although I put some work into planning the composition, I thought it would turn out better than I think it dd - and for some reason I think that square would suit it better; chopping off the extraneous bit of boring foreground at the bottom would probably give the composition better balance overall. 

Probably the colour of the sea is wrong. It looks too intensely blue, although I promise it was super blue when I saw it. It's one of these things that's needed by artists - not slavish devotion to the source material but the judgement to interpret and alter the image in order to make it look better. 

The Good: I like how the sky turned out, and planning the painting in stages really helped me work through it sensibly, rather than looking at it halfway through and wondering what to do. I also liked working lots of texture in all over the painting to contrast with the smooth plant  stem and petals. 

How I'll improve this: I'll be redrawing it with more sketching, and altered composition, worked up with careful eye on the tones before the colour goes in. At least with acrylics, you have the substantial advantage of a really fast drying time, so you can work in layers very quickly . 

Practical things I have learned about being an artist - Part 1

Recently, I was asked questions by a pair of young artists (well, about a decade younger than me). They were patient and polite as I waffled on and on about all manner of things that came to mind, and indulged my tendency to run off at the mouth with very good grace. They wanted to talk about what it's like to be an artist. Well, shit, guys I barely think I know. I thought, though, that  I would write a few posts on this blog for those who are interested in hearing what I have to say - I've always rather liked reading other people's thoughts on the subject - who's to say it's such a terrible idea?

Part 1 Get yourself a routine. 

Are you an artist who wakes up, wanting to do your art, but you seem to get distracted, or lost in a muddle of various little chores when you're back from your day job? I have been there, a lot. I am still, sometimes. 

Some of you will have a routine - you know, get up, make tea, draw for an hour or so before going to work, that kind of thing. If you don't, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you try to, though I am aware that for very many people it's very hard, what with irregular working hours, or dependents that can alter your planned activities without much warning. 

When I got my current, office-based day job, productivity really increased artistically too, because suddenly I knew when I was painting, when I was working, and not having to snatch time in-between last-minute shifts. I could organise my life, at last, around unvarying structures.

This is probably one of the most important things that has happened to me as an artist, ever. It applies to all kinds of art, of course, not just visual. Whether you're a musician, writer, sculptor, baker, whatever - it'll really help you.

The things is, I think, that humans by nature prefer to take the path of least resistance because thinking, planning, feeling emotions; these things all take literal chemical and electrical energy, and we have evolved to conserve that. That's energy you could be using for making your work. So what to do? Well, if you have a routine that you do, unvaryingly, you don't have to spend any energy planning when you are going to work, or when you can grab a little time here and there to do that project. You just kinda turn up at your workspace, at the same time, on the same day, each week. It makes your life easier. 

Maria Popova writes Brain Pickings and seems in particular to love trying to understand the routines of writers and other artists. It may interest you to see how varied these are, and maybe make you think about how you spend your time. 

Now, of course I wouldn't like to suggest that you should write yourself a strict, inflexible schedule unless you really want to. I think it's important to build in blocks of time to your schedule that are set aside for anything you need it for. The important thing is the structure, and the way that foreplanning saves you energy and time.

Where can you practically start this?

 Nearly everyone has repeating occurrences in their weeks and months, so I'd suggest writing out in a diary, blank page or word document what you do each week, with days and times that you do things. This will help you understand the distributions of your time and energy, and allow you to identify where you could fit things in; for example, mine looks a bit like this:

MONDAY (FRIDAY is the same, except it starts at 6am and everything is set back an hour)

Alarm 7am, Breakfast and get ready . Dog goes to daycare at 8am, then walk to work,          9am to 5pm, day job, walk home. 6pm - 7.30pm, cook dinner and eat.

7.30pm to 9pm, TV with wife, usually while sketching. 9pm to 10pm, let dog settle down to sleep while reading. 10pm try to go to sleep quickly. 

TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY

No alarm, but body clock wakes me up at 7 or 8 anyway. Breakfast and walk dog. Sketch or write any cool ideas I had in the night. Coffee or tea, start working on current project or planning next project. Take dog to beach or hill for an hour around lunchtime. 

TUESDAY VARIATION

Still working on whatever project I was working on in the morning. This is usually a good time to hang out with Cat the Oil Painter, who lives nearby and is revitalizing if things aren't going well, or go to the Owlcat Artists Collective Studio up the road and spend some time with Kev and Jim.  About 5pm, Walk dog, then cook and eat dinner with Vicki. On Tuesday evenings, I go to a local Roleplaying Games club. This is a good social outing, as it's easy to get isolated as an artist. Using your imagination, meeting new people and getting out of the flat are good for anyone.

WEDNESDAY is the same as TUESDAY, except that in the morning I do admin work - scan pictures, take pictures, meet clients, do accounts, emails, stock takes, any old thing that needs to be done but isn't drawing. 

THURSDAY, the dog goes to day care again, so I spend all day at the Owlcat studio if I can. Usually I tidy up and clean things around the flat first, though, which ofen means a late start.

WEEKENDS I don't generally schedule anything, but often end up drawing and painting anyway. I try to use weekends for DIY and maintainance around the flat, and hanging out with Vicki. 

Of course, things can crop up and change what you're doing on any given day - appointments, emergencies, shopping, bank stuff, that kind of thing. But because I have a schedule, I can get back to the things I meant to do after being distracted. If some of the things I do run a little short, or a little long, I can change what I do to accommodate that easily enough. Flexibility is built in. 

At first it felt silly to schedule myself, and deliberately plan what I was going to do all the time like this, but it made sense in lots of ways - nearly everyone falls into a routine anyway, so what's the problem with intentionally tweaking it to be more in your own favour? How would you make sure you got enough time to work if you didn't carve yourself out a space to do so? 

It's not always easy, and I am guilty as hell of letting my schedule fall by the wayside, but it remains a target I can always return to shooting for, and alter to suit whatever needs I have on any given week.

I hope this post has been amusing and or informative, and not so rambling that you are bored and put off. I hope that you are inspired to examine your daily activities, and decide whether you want to be doing things like you are. Maybe with a little thought, you can make yourself happier!