Writing about artwork during a global pandemic really isn’t something I expected to be doing at all. Yet here we are in an escalating health and financial crisis and I’ll probably be sharing some art over the next few weeks. I have lots of thoughts on this situation, but I’ll try to keep them somewhat organized. My wife and I
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Welcome to part two of this reckless “drawing two things at once” series. Basically, I was so pumped up from feeling like I’ve actually been improving, I decided to sketch two scenes concurrently. This was not my best idea, as I felt compelled to finish too much too quickly. The smaller sketch suffered in quality partially because of that. The
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I’m in an unusual place with this sketching hobby right now. I can see improvement in the results to some degree, and it’s making me excited to draw more. But, I’m still not that imaginative in terms of subject matter, and I am sort of running out of ideas. A natural place my brainstorming goes is, “which people/family member combinations
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At the beginning of this month, I started something I referred to as a “hometown series” of sketches. Basically, I tried to capture some scenes of friends from my hometown, mostly from old (really? 10-15 years is old?) photographs I have. I sketched some of us in a football huddle, a couple guys chatting, and a group shot. One common
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The next sketch on tap, as I mentioned in the last post, was another “hometown series” sketch. I’ve done a football huddle scene, and one with some old friends chatting. The next sketch I started with was a close up of a couple of guys, but I realized it once again featured my buddy who was already in the first
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Continuing on with my “hometown series” of sketches, here’s part two. In the first drawing, I included a few of the guys I used to play football with. It feels like it wasn’t very long ago, but we are closer to measuring that as a decade ago than just a handful of years! Part two features a couple of buddies
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It’s been about seven years since I moved from the ol’ hometown, where I spent the first three decades of my life. During my 20s, I spent a good chunk of that time hanging out with a great group of people. I had a blast with this crew, and have great memories of all the typical “hey we’re finally adults“-type
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This is sort of a part two from my post Friday night about drawing my wife, and the challenges of art involving people you are close to. Basically, the goal I’m striving for is to get some more accurate sketches of my wife, since several I’ve done in the past didn’t quite look like her. The first attempt I
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I have drawn four total sketches of my wife. From what I can see looking at these previous drawings, I don’t think I’ve ever quite captured her accurately. Years ago, I did one of me and her together, and it wasn’t bad. I also did a rough sketch I used for my proposal, which looked like her but was no
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I’ve got some random recent sketches on hand, so I thought I’d just combine a couple unrelated ones into a single post. My favorite of the bunch is a drawing from the movie Willow. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a fantasy-genre movie from the late 1980s, starring Val Kilmer and Warwick Davis. It was directed by Ron Howard,
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What’s the most commercial inspiration for art you can think of? Maybe a series on Walmart groceries? The magic of broken shopping carts? Or perhaps drawings about Applebees would fit the bill. I think someone could argue convincingly that the Gap would be a great choice for a generic corporate entity. Well, if suburban commercial-inspired sketches happen to be in
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I mentioned in a post last week that video games sometimes inspire my sketches. I’m not great at drawing from my imagination, but if I get a spark to do so, it often comes from video games (books play their part too). Previously, I’ve done sketches inspired by Final Fantasy and Warcraft, but another favorite is an old Super NES
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Welcome back for part three of the “old sketches from Jon” series. Previously, we looked at my high school drawings and some study aids I used in college. This is the last “old sketch” phase, covering the time after high school until age 20 or 21. Around then, life started giving me more stuff to do and seemingly less time to
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In part two of this series on art time traveling, I’m going to look at some study materials I put together. Although, I can’t remember if I made these for college or graduate school. It really could have been either; I was a Biology major as an undergraduate, and my Master’s was in Biomedical Science. I took a bunch of
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I was doing a little website housecleaning, and saw I had uploaded a bunch of old sketches but never made posts about them. They mostly consisted of sketches from when I was in high school and my late teens, before I took a 15 year break (wow, sounds bad when I say it like that) from drawing. The photo image
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