Sketches and Shapes

Did some sketching at Kahala mall the other night:



Also started doing some exercises suggested in Design Basics Index, by Jim Krause. The page below is an exercise involving creating small compositions using geometric shapes.


I later tried to take this exercise further and "abstract" magazine ads and layouts into shapes as well:

Shapes are your friends.

Purchase Drawing

About a week or so ago I bought Kate Bingaman-Burt's book Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today, in which she includes daily drawings of purchases. I had been meaning to both get the book and start drawing regular, if not daily, purchases since I read about her a year or two ago in ReadyMade magazine. It seemed a good way to get drawings out, especially if I was stuck in the "I don't know what to draw" doldrums. So here's the first of (hopefully) many of these drawings. Still trying to simplify lines, couldn't resist the temptation to retrace lines in the name of "line weight," though.

This month's issue of Juztapoz magazine was curated by Pushead, he of countless Metallica skull graphics, featuring, among others, Aaron Horkey (amazingly intricate ink) and Dan Seagrave (practically every classic death metal album cover). Horns, pentagram, etc. were induced by the giddy metalness of it all.

Hello again. Here are some sketches

Spent a good amount of time on the north shore over the weekend and did some sketches at the beach.


Two above done on October 15. I bought the Bill Sienkiewicz Sketchbook that night and was really impressed by the economy of linework in his ink sketches. He is able to express a lot of his forms using lots of negative space and each of his pen strokes defines a shape, nothing is wasted. Sienkiewicz has a great feel for contour and gesture. He says of sketching: "I often sketch in pen. It forces me to be exact, and if I fuck the sketch up, it screams at me. Not the pen, the sketch. The pen just laughs."


Rocks and island sketched on October 16, trying to be conscious of the use of pen strokes, and making better decisions of separating light from dark.