So – I’m working on a book. But not the kind you’d expect.
Hey all. It’s Sunday afternoon Monday afternoon here and I’m just taking a break from some work-work.
I don’t usually post just to chat about life, but I’m in the middle of something right now, and I wanted to talk a bit about it.
I’ve been working on a big illustration job for the last few months. It’s an art book – but not about travel sketching or watercolor or any of the things I usually talk about here.
It’s about my old life as a video game designer.
I’ve been slowly retiring from game design for about five years. Other than sketching designs for the Dragon Age games made by old friends at Bioware, I haven’t been looking for this kind of work.
I worked as an art director and conceptual artist for about 20 years before that. When we moved to Montreal from San Francisco, a goal was to escape the bounds of commercial art and go full time with my own drawing and painting.
That’s sort of a silly thing to say, because game designer is a great job. It’s creative. It’s very rewarding financially, that’s for sure (in the corporate version – not so much the indy space). And you work with some really great people. It’s a highly sought after position, so everyone involved is at the top of their game. No pun intended.
But I think an artist can only work for someone else for so long, before the desire to be on your own becomes overwhelming. If you’re lucky enough to be in a position where you have creative control, you can get some satisfaction. But there’s always market forces at work. If you’re making entertainment, it’s driven by budgets, sales, and whatever was the most recent mega-hit.
The trick is to navigate all that without just pandering to the fans. It’s very easy to slip into a mindset of just making the goreiest gorefest ever. Or putting a scantily dressed young woman in peril. Peril she usually escapes by dint of cheerful mass murder.
For me – I always loved the storytelling and the fantastic characters in our games. But I liked making up the stuff in the world more than I liked playing the games themselves.
The thing that brought it all to a head for me was when I started drawing on location. Video gamers are not known for their love of the outdoors. But I accidentally discovered I liked it. Liked being on the road, discovering new places, and digesting them through drawing. When I draw a place, it’s like I’m consuming it and will carry it around forever. Eating it up and chewing on every fascinating detail. It’s a kind of sorcery that expands your experience of world.
For whatever quirk of my personality, sketching unlocked that rampant desire to explore. Before location drawing, you’d have had to drag me away from my comics and D&D books. After becoming a sketcher, I’m finding it hard to stay home for two days in a row.
But here’s the other side of the coin – I think I have a unique perspective to offer.
There are lots of books / courses / videos on digital art. Both 2D and 3D. But being the sketch artist – the idea generator – it’s totally different from being the artist that makes the playable game content. There’s fewer places to learn about the thinking that fuels the whole process. And most of the books that do come out on concept development tend to be painting technique books disguised as design training. Teaching you how to draw well is not the same as teaching how to think for a living.
Concept art is a mindset. A kind of analytical hyper-creativity that isn’t about perfection, or skill of execution – but more like the polar opposite of artist’s block. You have to train the ability to be a fountain of ideas. A fire hose of concepts. There’s no such thing as ‘Sorry, just couldn’t come up with something today’.
You have to be able to produce a viable idea by the next morning, and keep doing it all week long, week in, week out. It’s hard work, but it’s also exciting. Knowing there’s a whole team of sculptors, animators, and programmers depending on you to invent something cool. And an army of gamers waiting to enjoy it.
So that’s why I have a video gaming book under way.
It’s written for students that are trying to focus their art school experience into this career. Or working artists that want to change fields from something more industrial, to something more creative.
Like my previous urban sketching book, it’s going to be very hands on.There’s much more doing, than reading. The goal is for anyone who actually completes all the work, to end up with a professional portfolio. A body of work that could get them started in the field. Depending where someone is with their drawing skills, it might take a bit longer. But there’s a kind of wax-on-wax-off learning that I prefer. If you just have fun doing everything in the course, you’ll discover you’ve mastered it without even trying.
But I didn’t start writing this entry to pitch you the book! I’m already regretting how much I have to talk about classes and courses in order to keep this blog alive :)
Mainly, I just wanted to say what was up with me. Because this is what I’ll be doing for the next few months.
The book’s completely written, and I have a publisher involved with the design and layout. So I’ll be spending the entire winter just making the drawings.
Unfortunately, that’s going to slow things down on Citizen Sketcher. Even more than it has for the previous months. I’ll still be talking to many of you in my Craftsy courses every day. And I hope to get out drawing at least once a month at our regular sketching group. Just to keep my sanity!
But if you feel things have been a little slow on the blog this fall – that’s the reason why.
We have big plans for next year’s sketching though! So let’s just get through the winter until painting season begins again. I can’t wait!
~marc
Announcing: New Workshop: Galway Ireland, July 2016!
I’m happy to announce our newest urban sketching workshop: July 2016, Galway Ireland.
Myself and my sketching partner in Montreal Shari Blaukopf will be joining Irish UrbanSketchers.org correspondent Róisin Curé, in her home town of Galway for three days of sketching.
All three experienced sketchers will be demonstrating our methods for on-the-street sketching, doing small works on location in pen and ink and watercolor, working in sketchbooks and on small painted sketches. I hope some of you will be able to come along!
Head over to the workshop page here for more info – and please do register early. Sketching workshops do tend to fill up fast.
~m
Book Review: Hand Drawn Halifax by Emma FitzGerald
I met Emma FitzGerald at a past Urban Sketchers Symposium. I forget if it was Lisbon? (No – it was Paraty Brazil).
One of the first things you ask at an international sketching conference is where someone is from. I’m always excited to hear someone is a fellow Canadian. She probably told me she’s from Halifax – but it’s complicated – as she seems to be from all over. Born in Lesotho South Africa, grew up in Vancouver Canada but now living in Halifax.
I’ve done a lot of city hopping myself, and I find being a transplant to a place leads naturally to obsessive sketching. You’re new to a town, you want to explore it. It can become a passion – finding new corners to draw.
Emma has recently released her book Hand Drawn Halifax: Portraits of the city’s buildings, landmarks, neighbourhoods and residents. She was gracious enough to let me review a pre-released copy – so I’ve only seen it in pdf format. But now it’s out, and we can all get our hands on it in print.
I was immediately impressed with her storytelling and sketching. The word that jumps to mind is “charming”. Her intimate sketches and poetic story-snippets of her now-home-town will absolutely charm you. You’d have to be an ogre not to fall for this town. Halfway into the book you’ll be packing to move.
I reached out to Emma to ask a few sketching-related questions. I’ll let her tell you about it in her own words and pictures.
MTH: So, you’re not from Halifax originally, but you’ve lived there over a decade. How long had you been in town when you began these drawings? And how long did the book take to write! It seem like you’ve been to every street and alley of your town.
EF: I started the drawings in 2013, so 9 years after arriving in Halifax. I had always drawn while travelling, but it took losing my job and the new necessity to create income, to get me drawing what had become my home town. Knowing where I wanted to draw was in many cases informed by years of ‘research’ going to different places in the city. Lots of places were completely new to me as well. Once I realized I was making a book about Halifax, the project took me two years to complete.
MTH: Each of these sketches has a perfect little story to go with it. How did you choose the places to draw? Did you find the story or location first – or – is there some other magic to the storytelling?
EF: A variety of factors informed what I drew. I wanted both the most ‘typical’ Halifax moments, and also, the things people wouldn’t think to notice. Most of the text was generated simply by listening to what was going on around me while I drew, though in some cases I referenced a previous memory, like Elvis in the South End, or turned to a reference to gather a few historic tidbits, like the history of the Ferry boat in the Halifax Harbour.
MTH: Your drawings are very direct, very economical, yet they have a feeling of immediacy. How did you arrive at your style? How much of your drawing technique is just capturing life as it happened, and how much is strategic?
EF: I think I developed this style through drawing a lot in small sketchbooks while travelling with friends who weren’t necessarily interested in drawing! I also spent hours looking at the drawings of Quentin Blake as a child, and that influence seems to have come through!
MTH: I love this answer! I think that’s such a basic reality about travel sketching. We have to find ways to make it happen, no matter what is going on in the moment :)
MTH: What is next for you art-and-book wise? And where can people go online to find out more about you and your work?
EF: I have a new book I am working on, about the South Shore, another beautiful area of Nova Scotia. I am also getting ready for a wonderful Christmas craft fair put on by Halifax Crafters, a local organization that is committed to local artists finding a viable economic outlet for their work! I have a website, at www.emmafitzgerald.ca, and just started an Etsy shop. Many thanks Marc! All the best to you and yours.
You can get a copy of Hand Drawn Halifax from the usual suspects. Your local bookstores can order from Formac Publishing .You can order from Amazon US or Amazon CA – or purchase directly from Emma’s Etsy shop.
Guest post over on Artist Network : with a free demo :)
Last week, when Artist Network began releasing my latest series of videos, they also offered me a chance to guest post on their blog.
I took that as motivation to get one more outdoor watercolor, before it gets too cold this year. We bounced out to Île Saint-Hélène and made a quick sketch of the Tour de Lévis sitting amid the fall foliage.
Head on over to Artist Network.com for the step-by-step demo and article! ~m
Just a note to say, I have a couple of my oil paintings on exhibition at the Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Pointe Claire as part of the 2016 group exhibition for their Art Rental Program.
This is an interesting service, in which the gallery offers a chance to take a ready-to-hang work of art home and enjoy it on your walls for a very reasonable monthly fee. Most works are available for under $20 a month. A great way to bring original artwork into your home while supporting a local artist.
These knife paintings were done last spring – here’s the original post about the paint out in Charlevoix. You might be interested to get a close up look at these works. They have a delicious surface, if I do say so myself.
The exhibition runs Oct 31 to Nov 29, and the vernissage is this Sunday, Nov 1 at 2 pm. Stewart Hall is at 176 Du Bord-du-Lac, Lakeshore Road Pointe-Claire, Quebec H9S 4J7.
As an added bonus, you can see some large-format photography by my wife Laurel Holmes. Work from our last trip to Newfoundland. This will be our first group show together! Very exciting for us :) Hope to see some of you there!
~m
USK:MTL : Aztec Archaeology
[A small ‘mask’ – part of a broken terracotta vessel. Depicts a man as a youth, aged, and in death].
The other day USK:MTL sketchers met up at the Pointe-à-Callière Museum for an exhibit on Aztec culture.
What a fascinating show! It is closed now – we met for our drawing outing on the last day of the exhibit. We were lucky to get this great collection of work here in Montreal. A miniature version of what can be seen in Mexico City of course – but impressive nonetheless.
I’m always inspired by the imagination and unique sense of design in the ancient South American cultures. I’ve always been more attracted to Mayan art vs. the more decorative Aztec – particularly when it comes to visiting archaeological sites. But in this show, I was exposed to a wider range of sculptural forms than I’d previously seen. This exhibit presented things as a continuum of design, rather than distinct periods.
I admit to spending my whole time looking and drawing – enjoying things in a naive way – rather than actually reading any of the informative panels. (Sorry museum people! You work so hard. I’ll have to do some after-the-fact-research to learn more about what I saw).
[Brush Pen Montage of Sculptural Elements]
Though there were many ‘in the round’ figurative forms on display – statues and clay figurines – I’m more intrigued by the solid shapes of the architectural carving. The designs are cut into cubes or wedge shaped masses of rock, making powerfully planar forms. Everything has such a massive strength.
Like most museum shows of antiquities, the items here were dramatically lit with top-down lights casting deep shadows. I love this presentation visually – it makes for great drawings of the sculpture.
It seemed very natural to sketch entirely with a brush pen – just drawing the negative and positive shapes of light. I came in after with some accents of watercolor – as of course we can’t paint inside the exhibit hall.
But I can’t help but think – as much as I like it – isn’t this an odd practice museums do? Why do they make these things look so moody? Some of these figures are rain-deities or female figures related to fertility and domesticity. Yes, some of them have to do with death and sacrifice – but not all of them. When we see things in this theatrical lighting, everything becomes kind of like telling ghost stories around the campfire. Shining a flashlight under your chin.
When we were in Singapore recently, I noticed how the Hindu temples wreathed the statues in fresh flowers. The Buddhist temples were brightly lit with gold decoration and colorful murals on the walls. If you put one of those statues in the dark under a spotlight – suddenly it’s an angry vengeful god. Put it in a sunny courtyard draped with colorful silk and flowers – and you get a different feeling entirely.
I think it creates a false impression of these cultures. Yes, there was human sacrifice involved at times – but I can’t help thinking everyday life wasn’t as grim as people seem to think it was. I’m not saying it’s a party for the guy getting his heart cut out – but I don’t think they did that every Sunday either. I guess I don’t know for sure – readers who are anthropologists – tell us what this is all about! Write us in the comments :)
BUT – all that being said – I did do a couple of fun watercolors playing up the dramatic lighting.
These are pencil drawings done in the exhibit on Fabriano Artistico, then painted back home. The drawings were fairly well developed, indicating all the shadow shapes.
These were sort of just playtime for me. I felt like using a tube of Payne’s Grey that I normally dislike. I had a bad experience with it and haven’t brought it out since. I’ve been meaning to just squeeze out a big blob of the stuff and use it up!
I paired that with a tube of Tiger’s Eye Genuine. A Daniel Smith Primatek color – which is in their ground-rock series. It seemed appropriate to paint carved stones with ground stone.
The background is painted with clear water and the Payne’s Grey is splattered and dropped with a fully loaded brush. The color floats on the water, and will not leave the wet area – so you get that nice sharp edge with the figure. You can get some nice floating effects if you get in while it’s wet. I actually did this twice – once with a paler tint, and the second time with full strength pigment.
I’m not sure what you’d use this effect for, other than an abstract treatment like this. But it’s fun to watch the color bloom!
Sketching Birds from Life : Video Demonstration
This summer I had the opportunity to make a series of sketching videos with ArtistsNetwork.TV – the video arm of my book publisher North Light Books. Art Net has a giant library of 4000+ videos showing artists-at-work in all media and styles. You can sign up for a monthly ‘all you can watch’ subscription – or, pick up just my videos individually on DVD or by Digital Download.
Here’s the trailer for the first episode on sketching birds from life.
We made all four videos in the Cincinnati area, each on a different field sketching topic – travel sketching, drawing panoramas, and sketching life on the street.
My editor at ArtNet managed to arrange a visit to Raptor Inc – a bird rescue facility near Cincinnati – where we spent the day drawing three fascinating animals: a Great Horned Owl, a Turkey Vulture, and a Falcon.
I took on each bird with a different approach, so I could demonstrate three ways I like to draw. Basic pen and ink drawing, then color washes over a water soluble drawing, and finally a sketch in watercolor – drawing directly with the brush.
I have had a previous opportunity to sketch birds from life. But it had been a while since then. It’s very different from sketching museum mounts. Birds move in their own strange ways, that are not immediately easy to draw when we’re used to drawing people.
Every time I do a workshop or a demonstration, I like to get out and do some practice work. So here’s a chance to show you the behind-the-scenes stuff I did to get warmed up. These drawings that follow are not done live in the video – they were for my own practice, and to have examples to show my thinking when I arrive on location.
The basic approach to sketching a bird is the same as any other subject. If you start with a very loose approximation of the silhouette (in pencil), it’s much easier to add details over that guideline. If you were to try and go right to the final drawing, starting with the beak and working downward, very often you’re going to develop problems with proportion. Small errors accumulate, and you end up with the head too big, or the feather patterns misplaced. By making big round shapes that describe masses – the head, the body, and the wings – I can adjust these simple pencil lines and know that they are right – (erasing if necessary) – so the permanent details that follow in ink are going to work out.
There is an indoor tropical greenhouse at the Montreal Biodome. They have parrots flying freely among the trees. This seemed like the best chance for me to observe birds in motion. They fly from perch to perch in a bit of a loop around the area. With a little patience, you can follow them around and collect sketches.
I wanted to practice with multi-tasking – working on more than one sketch at a time. When drawing animals (or people), you’ll find they tend to repeat behaviors. Taking a certain pose for a few moments then moving – but, after a while returning to the same, or similar postures.
Because I’d done some warm up drawings, I was able to relax and have fun with these poses. Going straight into ink. You’ll find the pencil stage helpful for a while – and I do it whenever I’m feeling rusty. You’ll know when you don’t need it anymore. If it starts to feel like the pencil is a chore that’s only slowing you down – then it’s time to try going straight to pen!
You might have noticed the small notes around the sketches. That’s me jotting down the colors in the feathers. It was too crowded in the greenhouse for me to paint on the spot – so I was making notes, and going out to the cafe to paint. Then back inside to sketch some more. I do this sort of thing in any place that doesn’t permit paints – like a museum or courtroom – or when I’m pressed for time.
The thing that I find the most fun about animals – they have such variety of shape and color. People, by and large, are all the same :) All our individual features and skin colors are within a fairly narrow range. Not like the amount of variation you’ll see between animals. The key to each bird is learning its silhouette with your practice drawings.
This is all the stuff that was fresh in my mind when we arrived at Raptor Inc. Maybe you’ll enjoy seeing me do it under the eye of the camera. The next best thing to coming to an Urban Sketchers conference!
It’s interesting to see the drawings come together from beginning to end. And a fun challenge for me. I had to do it right the first time and still keep up an interesting conversation. I enjoy doing these ‘performance drawings’, and hope I’ll get the chance to do more. So – thanks in advance to anyone who checks out the videos.
If you end up with any questions – these are not interactive like my Craftsy classes – so feel free to email me with questions.
~marc(dot)taro(at)gmail(dot)com
I’m excited to help spread the word: fellow USK workshop instructor and correspondent Stephanie Bower has just released an online course entitled Perspective for Sketchers in partnership with Craftsy.com.
I signed up for the course myself on day one (edit: full disclosure – as a Craftsy instructor myself, I get all the courses for free) – and have found it an excellent drawing tutorial. Perfect for anyone who wants to work on location in an urban setting, or accurately capture an inspiring interior.
I’ve watched first hand, as we sketched side by side in Venice, amazed at how Stephanie’s impeccable technical skills and elegant artistic sensibility allow her to capture a location full of sunlight and intricate detail.
Her seven part program starts from basic principles of sight measuring – how to see angles and correctly measure relative proportions – and takes you all the way through one and two point perspective drawing.
The concepts do get progressively more complex, but each lesson builds cleverly on the one before – the instruction is clearly demonstrated with multiple examples. Students benefit from Stephanie’s years of experience teaching these skills to architects and artists, as well as her own award winning architectural illustration practice.
In the later lessons, after all the perspective drawing theory, there’s a section on watercolor – with a focus on seeing the light and dark sides of architectural forms. It’s a great primer on making your paintings look three dimensional.
Finally, you follow Stephanie out into the city, where she does a few more examples on location – reviewing the drawing process from first measuring to finished drawing, to completing the painted piece in watercolor.
I hope you’ll check out her excellent online workshop, and stop by her blog and facebook for frequent updates about her own sketching adventures.
Sketching People in Action at the Cortona Flag Tossing Festival : Repost with real scans!
During this summer of 2015 we were in Tuscany on a painting expedition that happened to coincide with the Cortona Flag Tossing Festival. This event is a festival of color, a patriotic display, and athletic competition rolled into one. We were there for a week of plein-air painting, but some of us took the opportunity to take in the action with a small sketchbook.
I had blogged about the event on the day using cellphone photos – but we’ve finally found some spare moments to make real scans, so we’re able to bring it to you again with real color and sharper images.
Before the Flag-Tossing Teams marched in to the sound of trumpets and drummers, there was kind of a pre-game show. A troupe of medieval minstrels played bagpipes, and a team of falconers showed off their birds. The crowd started to gather – a mix of tourists in stands and the local citizenry coming out in costume to support their teams and be part of the show.
The flag event was the culmination of a three day historic festival including a crossbow competition and a recreation of a renaissance wedding – which I think was an important alliance between Cortona and a neighboring town. The cast of the recreation are all locals, drawn from the approximately 800 residents. Amusingly, the groom was played by a tall handsome gentleman who owns one of the local art galleries, and the bride by his beautiful daughter.
Earlier in the week we’d met the Cortona crossbow team. They were out early in the morning taking practice shots at a wooden plank leaned against the doors of the towns basilica. That seemed a little odd to me, but they were having a good time and nobody was stopping them. You wouldn’t see that over here in the Americas!
The flag tossing event itself was full of enthusiasm and intense competitive spirit. Each nearby town sent a delegation, their star performers marching in through a phalanx of crossed trumpets – like gladiators into the arena.
The event itself was a mix of tossers juggling flags 30 feet in the air while synchronized sprinters wove silk rivers of color around them. Every so often dueling pairs matched their talents in a kind of Kung Fu dance off. A squadron of drummers provided a dramatic martial soundtrack while flagpoles clacked like quarterstaves, whipped over ducked heads and below leaping feet.
In the final spectacle all the teams ran a tight double spiral, filling the small square with upraised 12 foot flags, then peeling back out a huge iron studded gate.
This night was a terrific unexpected bonus to cap our week of sketching in Cortona!
photo: Ryan
UPDATE: Have deleted the old info in this post, due to this superseding announcement concerning new plans for a replacement instructor.
photo: Ashley Coates
Citizen Sketcher 
