Sketch 365 – by Scott Hulme

So this drawing barely got started before I was literally falling asleep at the page.  I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to do anything other than the initial lay-in shown here.  If you can identify it, I’ll be most impressed.

[Comments and critique always welcome]

We’re babysitting my niece and nephew this weekend, so today I took them to the park down the street.  A nice, relaxing morning.  I sat and sketched this while they were looking in the bushes for treasure.  As I finished, I discovered that my 4-year-old nephew had been working on a cocktail of sorts.  His found ingredients, combined in a discarded pudding cup: water, leaves, dirt, a small rock, some dried up olives, and a metal screw.  I resolved to be more attentive.

[Comments and critique always welcome]

Saw a great collection of photos today from the 2010 World Fencing Championships.  I thought the energy in the poses was really cool, so I started doing really basic versions of them for practice.  As I drew more and more of them, I decided to arrange them into a basic narrative.  (Sketches are based on Reuters and AFP photos by Jacky Naegelen, Franck Fife, Bertrand Langlois and Francois Mori — all available here.)

[Comments and critique always welcome]

Every once in a while, I get the compulsion to geek out and draw tools of the trade (“the trade” pretty much expanding to include all variety of visual arts).  Today’s installment: the Frezzi Mini-Fill Camera-Top Lighthead!  I’m sure you loyal readers have been clamoring to see my representation of this fine video accessory.  At long last, that day is here!

[Comments and critique always welcome]

Had absolutely no idea what to draw this evening.  I don’t even really know where this came from.  I think I just started drawing and that’s what I ended up with.  An earlier incarnation had a one weird robot eye, but that just seemed weird for the sake of being weird (and I covered that already).

[Comments and critique always welcome]

This evening I dropped by one of Art Center’s figure drawing workshops for the first time in several weeks.  Amazing how rusty you can get so quickly.  Anyway, this session was with a larger model, and on this particular pose I had an weird, unflattering viewing angle, so I tried composing the sketch in a different way.

[Comments and critique always welcome]

My wife’s big into smoothies at the moment, so I’m big into making them.  They’re not usually this blood red, but hey, that’s the only colored marker I have, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Oh, and thanks, Tom Dickson, for letting me borrow your slogan.  Actually, that raises an interesting question.  Could a Blendtec machine blend one of its own competitors?  Think of it: a super-sized blender-eating blender.  Like the Robosaurus of kitchen appliances.  Sir, I think I can speak for the entire internet when I say, “Please get to work on that.”

[Comments and critique always welcome]

In the autumn a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of bouncing around like a giddy 6-year-old.  And so was spent a portion of my afternoon.  (With summer gone, today my cousin set up the trampoline in his backyard, in the spot where the inflatable pool had sat all summer.  And there was much rejoicing.  Including some by his kids.)

[Comments and critique always welcome]

I didn’t know what to draw tonight, but with iTunes running in the background, I struck on an idea.  I arranged all my songs by duration, and started playing all the one-minute tracks back to back.  Then I drew something associated with each track while it played.  An interesting exercise for several reasons:

• I was required to not only draw in 60 seconds, but also to listen to the song, pick an aspect of it, conceptualize an image for it, execute the drawing, and finally caption it.  Lots to think about.  Some drawings didn’t get finished (“the merry peasant,” for example).
• There was no time to go back and start again once the drawing had begun.  Even if it was going really badly (e.g. “serpent”) I just had to keep pressing forward.
• It forced me to pull stuff from my brain, rather than look up a reference image (which I probably would have done for several things like the lute and violin).

Trying to keep that pace was actually a lot of fun.  Before I knew it, I had spent the better part of an hour at it.  Click through to see all 45 mini-sketches representing songs ranging from 1:00 to 1:07.  Images are based on things like artist, song title, featured instrument, associated lyric, etc.

[Comments and critique always welcome]

I was out this evening for happy hour with my teacher wife and one of her teacher friends.  Conversation, as it so often does, turned toward teacher-y things.  Like a particular student’s difficulty grasping the three branches of the American government.  That got me sketching in order to kill time.

[Comments and critique always welcome]