blog: musings

Submission: first doodle ever

please save our village

This is by my wife Nikki, drawn in one of her makeup classes (she’s in school learning special-effects movie makeup and often comes home wearing beards or bizarre noses). She told me that she’s always wanted to be able to doodle, but over the years has never been able to come up with anything particularly interesting — interlocking lines, or curlicues at best.

However, she’s been doing a lot of drawing and rendering for her various class assignments, and so she’s been flexing that drawing muscle in new and exciting ways. She was positively glowing when she came home and announced that she had actually generated this fun little guy during a lecture in class. Ladies and gentlemen, Nikki’s first doodle.

Everyone has different levels of intrinsic drawing talent, but anyone can learn to draw — really it’s much more about practice than pure inborn talent. Some have an easier time than others, but learning the skill isn’t off-limits to anyone willing to put in the time.

Drawing: grab yer ankles

MAN HANDS

I am firmly of the opinion that drawings from life (even poor ones) have more artistic liveliness than drawings from photographs.  The process of transposing three dimensions into two gives the work an energy that cannot arise from simply copying shapes from paper.

Over time, drawings from life continue to live on and remain in many ways vibrant, regardless of whether or not they resemble the model.  And often an expressive resemblance to the model remains even when details are inaccurate — this can be seen most clearly after the passage of time, when the drawing can no longer compared to the real thing in front of it.

Drawing: evil doggie

PUPPY WUVS YOU

The most disturbing part of this isn’t the picture (so much) — it’s the selling points sprinkled about it. Even before I defaced this image, the animal pictured is some horrible, mutated amalgam of domesticity named “Scoozie”, an engineered “pet” whose native land is the Uncanny Valley that cuts deeply and disturbingly between nature’s own reality and the endless wakefulness of the soulless automatons.

“…and, of course, cuddle-ability!” Yeah, right, until you wake up with its teeth lodged in your jugular, its ears wagging happily, “responding to light and sound” as you batter at its plastic face with ever-weakening blows, the sight of its deranged gaze the last sensation to enter your mind before the “emotive animation” chalks up another point for the monsters and the balance of power between us and them shifts slightly but inexorably towards the Scoozie faction.

Drawing: sumo smash

hirstutism is a treatable condition

It’s hard to see, because the scanner flattened it out, but this dude started on one page of a memo pad and grew right off the edge. I had to tape two more sheets to the first one, and even still it wasn’t quite enough (his hand is a little cut off, there). I’ve found that drawings tend to grow, and it’s actually pretty fun to just slap some tape on the page and keep on going right off the edge (instead of trying to squeeze into the corner and ending up with a character with tiny feet).

Check out: Mary V. Marsh

courtesy artincontext.org

I’d never heard of the artist Mary V. Marsh until about a week ago, and right now what I do know can be summed up in three sentences:  For 365 days she drew on things.  The work was exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art in 1998.  I don’t know anything else.

But it is pretty interesting!  I am not alone in this idea that you should draw on whatever you like without regard for its “appropriateness” as a canvas.  There are some more great Marsh drawings here.