It's a Bird! It's a Pla...What is it?

Still playing with blind contouring, finding imaginary creatures in blobs and trying to learn to have fun with art.  I so wanted to be (among many things) an artist when I was younger.  In particular, I wanted to be an artist like my mother, who was a natural at it.  But I was a perfectionist.  If it didn't look realistic, like my mother's drawings, then it wasn't good.  If it wasn't good, it wasn't art.  So, after many years of struggling to be as good an artist as my mother, and failing - in my eyes, anyway - I quit trying.  Then I stumbled upon some drawings and paintings by Carla Sonheim (previous post) and was inspired to try again.

Will I ever become as good as my mother was?  No, on many levels, including art.  But it no longer matters.  What I do now is for me, for fun and to share with friends.

The drawing in this post was an attempt to do another blind contour drawing, where you close your eyes (or at least not look at the paper or other surface you're sketching on) and just let your hand/pencil go where it will.  The key is to be loose, relax - trust the process, instead of trying to control the outcome.  Have fun.  Live in the now, in the moment.  (Good life lessons, too!)  The sketch below was intended to be a bird.  No one type of bird, just whatever developed. 

Well, what developed didn't strike me as a bird, but it made me laugh, laugh hard, so it served its purpose.  Meet Rico.

 

 

When Rico hatched from his egg, his parents knew he was special.  His siblings, all normal-looking tadpoles, asked if 'special' was another word for weird.  His father said he couldn't believe that millions of years of frog evolution could be undone in one instant.  Rico's mother worried that having his gills on top of his head would make him an easier, more visible, target for the fish which preyed upon tads and young frogs.

 

As his brothers and sisters grew legs and lost their tails, moving through the expected stages of froglet development, Rico simply grew larger, eventually reaching a mass of nearly a kilo and a length of half a meter.  As you can imagine, his size, not to mention the strange placement of his gills, dissuaded other creatures from trying to eat him. 

 

His brothers went on to chase female frogs every spring.  Rico chased bubbles.  He was obsessed with them.  Rico knew everything there was to know about bubbles: what caused them, how they were able to rise from the depths of heavy water to burst upon the surface, their usual lifespan; how they were, in fact, an engineering and physics marvel - like bumblebees - and all the wonderful things that could be made using the bubble shape.  He liked to point out that frogs' very lives began in bubbles, that there would be no frogs, or toads, or salamanders, perhaps all life, were it not for bubbles or bubble technology.

 

Rico lived to be 17 years old, having outlived several generations of siblings and their offspring as well as his parents.  He contented himself chasing and studying and admiring bubbles until the day he died. 

 

Death came swiftly to Rico.  He got caught up in the cavitation produced by a 300-horsepower Evinrude, so focused on the bubbles that he didn't see the spinning propeller that produced them.  He never knew what hit him.

Start with an Eye

I don’t know if it’s the heat, or facing another rapidly-approaching birthday or what, but I’ve been in a foul temper of late, finding it difficult to be grateful for anything.  I hate when I get like this! 

However…

…to distract myself from my grumpy state of being, I am turning to art.  Rather, I am trying to learn a new art form – illustration and watercolors.  While cruising the Internet for info on an unrelated matter, I followed several links to various sites until I stumbled across a silly-looking bird drawing that made me laugh out loud, a loud, long and joyful laugh, like I used to have when I was a kid.  (I have no idea how I ended up at that site, but I’m glad I did.  Oh.  I guess I am grateful for something, after all.)

The artist is Carla Sonheim.  She’s written a couple of books I now have in my library: Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals and Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun.

Just perusing the first one had me in stitches, my fingers itching to grab paper, pencils and ink to see if I could make silliness happen for myself.  I’m no Sonheim, to be sure, but I had a blast.  Each drawing has a story that came together as I finished adding ink lines.

Carla advises us to start with an eye.  I love the eyes on her blobimals (blob-animals), which are not that easy to accomplish – leastwise, not for me.  Here’s my first attempt.

(This eye belonged to an alligator that had been trained by the US Navy to retrieve underwater explosive devices [UEDs, for short] and take them out to sea where they would be detonated away from ships.  This gator was the slowest one in his class, and didn’t remember he was to spit it out when he reached the destination.  The alligators were supposed to drop the UED, then swim to the reward buoy, where they’d receive a whole turkey.)

Another technique I tried is blind contour drawing, though I think it’s called something else.  You close your eyes, pencil to paper and begin drawing a shape – animal or plant or anything.  Some of Carla's funniest looking creatures started out unintentional; no particular form in mind.  Alejandro was my first attempt. 

Carla states there are a lot of three-legged dogs in her neighborhood.  Same in mine, evidently.  Our minds seem to forget that fourth leg!  (Alejandro is a Chihuahua.  He lives on a Basque sheep ranch in Wyoming.  Alejandro weighs about five pounds/two kilos and is the prime herd dog for his owner.  In fact, he is the only remaining sheep dog.  Sheep ate the others, and tried to take Alejandro down, but he escaped…with his attacker’s nose.  Since that event, the sheep give him a wide berth whenever he enters their pens.)

Next blind contour was intended to be a cat.  By the time I finished drawing the features (my eyes open, though not much better), it resembled neither a cat nor a dog, but made me think of a fox.  Meet Reggie. 

(Reggie is a ladies’ man, a smooth operator, a cunning fellow.  His sartorial style is the envy of all canids the world over.  A rakish devil, Reggie has been divorced nineteen times and is the father of 37 kits.)

Next, I tried letting watercolors flow into quasi-animal shapes, trying to keep a loose hand, as Carla suggests in her bird tutorial.  My first one was too wet and colors flowed everywhere.  In addition, I thought the first color I used was too watery, but it turned out not watery enough.  It dried much more opaque than hers did.  This is Gloria, a Vegas fan dancer.  Not happy with the results – overworked, tried to ‘think’ the results instead of just letting things happen naturally.

(Gloria is from Chile, originally.  She was brought to the US by magazine-magnate, ex-society-prison-inmate Martha Stewart to be one of the breeder hens for Stewart’s planned “Easter Egg” line of chickens, the name of which she would copyright and sue anyone who dared refer to the birds in writing, or even just say the name out loud.  Remember, “It’s a good thing”?  Gloria ran away from Stewart’s farm when Stewart went to prison.  Gloria held a variety of jobs [nanny to a nest of copperheads, her least favorite] before landing in Vegas, where the green hue of her feathers made her a natural for the chorus line – no expensive costumes needed, you see.  In the drawing above, Gloria stepped on a sequin and did an unexpected split, causing all the other girls to collide with each other, many of whom fell off the stage and into the audience...of a convention of weasels from Manhattan.)

Finally, there’s Charlie.  With this one, I followed Carla’s bird tutorial closely.  I thinned the color, wiped the brush tip to remove the excess and just let the color go where it would.  I changed colors and added the rear end of another bird, to create the illusion that Charlie was in a flock of birds.  Then, unfortunately, I gilded the lily.  Carla flicks additional color onto her backgrounds to give texture to the painting.  I picked up some lovely brown color and tapped the brush against my finger.

Oops!  Brown blobs fell across the beautiful bird shape I had just carefully created.  Drat!

I thought the painting was ruined, until I turned it around and around, as Carla teaches, to see if anything else ‘appears’.  That’s when I knew how to finish the drawing after the blobs dried.

  (Charlie was flying back east to visit his brothers and sisters, but couldn’t afford first-class accommodations.  He ended up in coach, at the end of a long line of grasshopper-eating pigeons.  Charlie vowed he’d never again fly coach, with pigeons, or eat grasshoppers!)

If any of you like to draw, or just want some silliness in your lives, I recommend Carla Sonheim’s web site and her books. (The only payment I've received for this unsolicited recommendation is the laughter and joyfulness found therein.)

(Edited because of grandson.  7-21-2-13)