Lindon Days

Saturday brought a close to this year's annual Lindon Days festival. If you didn't go, you don't know. You don't even know.

I was invited to take my Human Drawing Dispenser and join the festivities by drawing free pictures for festival-goers. And, sandwiched between the mechanical bull and the beautiful Japense Caligrapher, I drew my pictures inside a cardboard box.

The minute I set up the box there was a line of kids waiting for their free drawing. Some of my favorite requests were:

-a platypus

-a sea otter

-a disco owl

-a computer geek

-"will you draw my wife gardening?"

-a pioneer beating up Thor

-a sunset

-the Rocky Mountains

-a pirate ship in the ocean and a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder and a dragon flying overhead

-a fat old man

The Human Drawing Dispenser has been invited to Lindon Days 2010, so mark your calendars for next August!

$20 Portraits

I'm saving up to get a new printer/scanner/copier, so that I can make prints and better pictures. So...

From July 27-August 10, I'll be offering digital portraits for only $20. Here's how it works: 1) Send 1 or 2 pictures of yourself to jess.smiley@gmail.com 2) Tell me your favorite animal and/or colors (really!) 3) I'll start your portrait once you've put $20 into my paypal account (I'll email directions). What you get: an 8.5 x 11", CMYK, 300 dpi printable portrait, and a profile pic-sized version. Check out the Facebook group here.

***If you just want a small portrait for your profile pic, I'll do it for free, but paying orders will take priority.

Portraits

Here are some digital portraits I've made. I can't help but think of early cameras and the way projectors were used in early paintings, casting moving images on the dark walls of a room. I like using a solid color in the background, with line drawings of mountains, clouds, trees, etc. Do you need a portrait? Let me know.

Coloring Book

This is an 8-page music coloring book that I made all by myself.

You can buy your very own music coloring book for $2 by emailing me at jess.smiley@gmail.com and sending your address. I'll be selling these at Pablo's secret show on July 20 and at the Arts in the Park on August 17.

***BONUS***
Send in your best colored page to jess.smiley@gmail.com The winner gets a prize!







Jessica Goldfond (from the Shiny Squirrel) was kind enough to mention the coloring book on her blog. Thanks, Jess!

Old Drawings, Part II

Here are some typical sketchbook drawings from 2003.

Old Drawings

So I was cleaning my room for the first time in about 7 months and I found this box full of my old stories and poems and drawings. I felt ridiculous looking at it---the pictures and poems brought back a lot of memories, and reminded me that I've always been a nerd.

The picture on top is a drawing I made when I was 15, of the superhero Spawn and the Violator, for a schoolwide contest. I don't think I ever turned it in. I forgot how into superheroes I used to be.

The bottom pictures are my sorry attempts to imitate Jeff Smith's Bone characters, Superboy, and then a few things I made up. They were all drawn with a pen (I didn't believe in using pencils!) and on a loose sheet of printer paper. I have stacks and stacks and boxes and boxes of old drawings. Seeing them all is making me really think about whether or not I'm making drawings that matter right now.

Anyway, I wonder what my pictures will look like in another 10 years.

Sidewalk Chums

Sidewalks get lonely too, so I made some sidewalk chums.

If you would like your very own sidewalk chums, send me an email and I'll come by and make some just for you (---so long as you don't live too far away!). 

Q. Where do I send my email?

A. To jess.smiley@gmail.com

Learning to Ink, Part III

Ugh. I think I'm getting worse at drawing with ink. I drew people and parts of people at Alex Bigney's reading from his Talking to Tesla (more on that later), then went home and drew some more, but the magic never seemed to happen. 

Well, that's not entirely true---I loved the process, loved figuring out how to interpret hair and soft edges, etc., but I was pretty bummed by not being able to make anything that was even okay. 

It was just one night, and who knows what'll happen with tonight's drawings. It's nice trying to draw things I've drawn my whole life, but in a new way. It's a good challenge and a different kind of fun.

E-Stamps

Lea Redmond runs a beautiful little shop called Leafcutter Designs. It's a great place to find pencil scrolls, recipe dice, puzzle cards, the World's Smallest Postal Service (my favorite!), and electronic stamps. 

"Isn't it sad that emails don't have postage stamps? Well here's something to brighten up an email with a bit of color and whimsy. Lick and stick one of these e-stamps onto an email by saving it to your computer and attaching it to the email."

Head on over to Leafcutter Designs to get some fresh stamps for your e-mails! You can even send Lea some of your own stamps for her to add to the site! Hooray!

Ink Drawings, A Dream, Photography

Here are a few new pages from my sketchbook. What's different about the drawings? There are heads! Entire heads! Oh man---I took a deep breath and tried some faces.

I was still nervous enough that I worked out a pencil drawing first, then picked up my favorite lines in ink and corrected the drawing as I moved the brush. 

Pulling a brush across a page and slowly turning it is such a great action to be a part of! I closely watched the tiniest hairs on my brush tap the page and then stiffen up again. I absolutely love repeating the fragile creases around eyelids, and around corners of mouths, and in subtle folds of skin. Last night I even dreamed I was drawing these same pictures, and I was still paying close attention to those little creases and folds in skin.

A lot of these eyes look very photographic to me. Do you see it? I'm pretty sure that, even if I were making these drawings from life (which is also on my TO DO list), they would look pretty similar to these (which have been drawn from photos), because most of the images I've ever seen have either been photos or heavily influenced by photography. 

There is so much to be had from cave drawings and I'm always picking up a new book or looking for new pictures of them. For one thing, cave drawings have such a different visual language. Even the syle (for lack of a better word...I'll have to figure out what that word is, though, sometime) used by cave painters has such a life to it. 

These eyes I've drawn look photographic---like they're snapshots of someone who knows they're being photographed. It's funny how, in some ways, the camera doesn't really capture life after all. Think of a photo of a pitcher throwing a baseball and a blurred crowd in the background, standing anxiously. There is no time where we'd see a baseball frozen in the air like in the photograph, yet most people talk about realism as an integral part of photography.

That's not supposed to be a knock against photography---just a thought. A nice hike up the canyon Saturday led me to attempt drawing the rocks and water in the Provo River. I hope to do it again soon, even if it means coming back with sorry attempts.

Learning to Ink, Part I

On my list of goals to accomplish for 2009 is "Learn how to ink with a brush". Well, really, it's just to start toying around with a brush and learning how I draw with one. I'm really timid about the whole thing (which is partly why it's one of my goals), but I finally started spending some time making careful lines with my brush, and falling in love with the wet depths of black ink. 

These photos show a few pages in my sketchbook. I've been focusing on eyes, which is kind of strange, now that I think of it. I've been making well thought-out dots for eyes at best in my other drawings, but using a brush pulls out a different focus for me---allows me to see things differently, and see different things differently. 

I like drawing eyes, because of how recognizable they are---if I mess up drawing an eye, everybody knows it. The delicate lashes and masses of eyebrow hairs are a lot of fun to draw, and I'm figuring out new ways to portray the effects of light and shadow. Leaving breaks in dark areas for light to peek in, and noodling with narrow creases around the eye and lids are so much fun to draw. Now I'm scared about drawing full faces and figures, but its the next step.

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Did I mention you can buy some of my paper cut-outs here?

Cats

Here are some playful cats I made with charcoal pencils, graphite, crayon, colored pencils, and pens.

I think I've always liked the idea of cats more than the animals themselves, but I've been liking 'em more and more over the last year and a half. I've also started eating spinach.

If anyone wants to talk about "cute" in pictures, this post might be a good place for it. We'll get a good forum on Rob James' "Cute Face Theory" and my thoughts on the "Cute Factor". It'd be nice to get some comments from Andrew Christensen and Kelly Larsen, too. 

Huh.

TimeSheetMag

The good people at TimeSheetMag have included some of my primitive drawings in their second issue of TimeSheetMag. You can download the issue for free, or just browse through it online. It's a really well put together magazine with high-quality photos and reproductions of images. 

From the Sketchbook

Here are some more doodles from my sketchbook. I've been getting excited about continuous contour line drawings again and I've been trying a few new things. Once I have something worth sharing I'll post it. Oh! And have you listened to M Ward's newest album? I mean, dang!

Ballers

Here are a few continuous contour line drawings from my sketchbook. 

It's simple: you put your pen down and draw one line without retracing or picking up your pen until it's finished!

The drawings are from this book of basketball history from the library and Noah just loved the book! Ever since we checked it out he is always drawing "basketballs", no matter what marks his crayons and markers make.