I’m really having a lot of fun using patterns and designs to hint at the interior lives of some of my figures. This picture, for example, depicts a guy I saw sitting in my doctor’s waiting room. He had a solemn look on his face and he was dressed in a plain white dress shirt and solid brown tie. The patterns in this drawing reflect the fact that even the most simply or conservatively dressed men and women and rich and complex interior lives…which is a fancy way of saying that you can never “just a book by it’s cover.”
I was browsing the facebook photo galleries posted by one of my cousins when I noticed that one of her pictures featured a guy who looked like he could be Maya Angelou’s son. I think this drawing is a pretty good representation of his features, though I did make his hair look a little more like the 1990s that it did in the picture.
I liked doing this drawing because it presented an interesting set of challenges. First of all, I wanted to capture the idea of someone daydreaming. The other day I had an early lunch at the Baja Fresh near downtown Walnut Creek. I got in just before the noontime rush. The line for ordering got pretty long pretty quickly. Most 0f the diners stared out into space while they waited, first for their turn at the register and then for the kitchen to call their number. Like everyone else who was waiting, then man in this drawing stared at nothing in particular until it was finally his turn to order. Then he sat down with his newspaper until his number came up. In this picture, I depict him as daydreaming about flowers.
The other challenge in this drawing was how to draw a subject who wears his hair a lot like the actor Billy Dee Williams. This was my best solution. Your feedback is welcome.
This drawing takes two figures inspired by a couple of men I saw at an Alameda bookstore and places them in a pose that evokes a popular religious motif of the Renaissance era. The pose recalls paintings of what was called “the descent,” in which the crucified Christ is taken down from the cross by loved ones and followers. An example of the descent is THIS painting by Pieter Paul Rubens. In the background of my drawing, I replaced the cross with a an imaged lifted and modified from a photo of a streetlamp on a rainy night.
Certain things always remind me of the 1970s. The afro, the platform shoe, the applejack hat, and the colors — goldenrod, rust, pea green, and bizarres shade of pinkish red-purple. This drawing, inspired by the man ahead of me in the express lane at Whole Foods, combines the quintessential Black 1970s hair style with two colors drawn from the 1970s color palette.
It’s turning out to be another retro kind of day here in the SF Bay Area. Then again, a trip to City Lights books is just the thing to turn one’s mind to thoughts of mid-century counterculture.
This drawing, like the previous one, incorporates a cool retro wallpaper design, and the figure deliberately recalls the late 1960s and early ’70s. The man he is based on did not have quite as bushy a beard as this drawing suggests, overall, the gentleman I saw browsing in City Lights books looked a lot like this picture. His was kind of a Black beatnik/summer of love/anti-war protester kind of look. At the same time, though, it’s also kind of a timeless, as well. After all, can you imagine a time in which a t-shirt and jeans will not be in style?
I was feeling kind of retro when I did this drawing. I came across a reprint of a book by one of my favorite childhood illustrators, M. Sasek and I decided that the table, background, and color scheme of today’s drawing should invoke his wonderfully simple and evocative designs. The bold colors and cut-out style shapes in his work bring to mind the best of think of mid-century illustration and design, an aesthetic that has been adopted (and adapted) by contemporary artists like Shag. The background in this drawing is based on a photo of an authentic 1950s wallpaper pattern, repeated and then recolored to match the brown and blue color scheme of the rest of the piece.
Just outside the entrance to the Home of Chicken and Waffles in Jack London Square, the teenager in this drawing was having an animated conversation with two of his female friends. They were talking about the young women’s outfits. Both were wearing high-heeled platform pumps that matched their outfits, and he was criticizing both women for their inability to walk gracefully in their shoes. Several of entering patrons as well as a couple passers by stopped to laugh because he was right. Neither of the women could walk easily in heels. We all laughed a little harder when he said that if they really wanted to know how to walk in those shoes, they needed to watch him. He stood on his toes and took a several strides back in forth in front of the door, walking with such confidence and grace that it was almost like watching Tyra Banks herself. The response from one his two friends was priceless. “Of course you can walk in heels,” she said. “You’re a boy!”
… another group portrait. I really enjoy the challenges of drawing a collection of figures, especially when the composition runs all the way to the edges of the page. This is much the same as drawing an urban landscape or even a rural landscape in that the space is defined by the objects that populate it as well as the space between and around those objects. Part of the fun of doing this type of sketch is the experience of each figure as two different images. There is a distinct difference between how each figure looks when I am drawing it and how it looks in the context of all the others. Add color, and each figure is transformed further still.
