I’m in England(!) for a few weeks, so my presence online has been intermittent. I’m finally settled in Dartmoor for a little while, and hope to post a bit more regularly.
If you are also in England and I have not told you I’m here — surprise! The trip was organised a little hastily. I’m in Dartmoor without a car for the next two weeks, then heading to Glasgow for a week, for the University of Glasgow Once & Future Fantasies conference.
Well, the floods got worse (and far worse in NSW), and now the cleanup is on. (I wasn’t flooded, but the street was cut off and there was no power for a few days.)
I haven’t done much sketching, because it was so many people’s immediate, personal loss, and there was a lot of harder, more important work to do.
But on Saturday the Mud Army 2.0 arrived, numerous and cheerful, and by then I was driving instead of carrying things, so I snuck in a few sketches when I was pulled over.
If you’d like to help:
I keep buying illustrated books thinking, hmm, what an interesting compendium of mark making, technically this is a reference text…
Continue readingUsually when I share process pictures of silhouettes, they’re for specific commissions, and the final transferred line is very tidy — it’s a function of the approval process, the need to fit specific formats. But when I work on my own pieces, for gifts or for patrons or as samples to test treatments for a larger project, the drawing isn’t neat at all.
A stationery-design-in-progress for Patreon, doubling as a test patch for another project
It’s a graphite scribble directly onto the back of the paper, working out the curves and patterns, the tension and shapes, gesture and narrative. Dozens of searching lines until the promise of something is there on the page (this example is unusually tidy). When I cut, it’s a matter of choosing the right line from those there, improvising along structures established in the fray, or trusting to an average of equally appealing choices.
In a conversation today I realised that people think I’m being wildly productive and well-adjusted, and I’m really not. This isn’t to seek pity or sympathy (beyond the current blanket baseline!) — it’s just that I don’t usually talk too much about life outside art/writing on here, and wanted to keep it like that! Everything’s not great (although I’m much better off than many people and recklessly optimistic in company) and it’s been difficult to do anything at all except flail at urgent changes to courses I tutor, or else sit and stare at the sunlight (the weather’s been wonderful, which just makes it more surreal — usually disasters come with weather, and scents of mud or smoke heavy on the air).
But when I can, I potter and chip away at things, and it all comes back to art in the end, as usual — or at least, to stories. Making little lines, and flailing, and feeling my way back to a shape on the paper. Just one. And then another.
And the weather is marvellous.
I’ve mentioned that I like sketching people (and sketching helps me like people): The Madding Crowd.
Since many of my preferred methods of relaxing (cinemas, cafes, people) are somewhat curtailed at the moment, I’m working out alternative approaches.
But for now — taking the opportunities where I find them.
My notebooks are full of little questions I rarely go back to — and if I do, it always seems such an effort to worm my way back into the original excitement of the idea in order to answer them. I could just be drawing something new.
I’m learning, gradually, to phrase the questions as answers, even if only tentative ones. To catch ideas as a sketch or the most fragile of outlines. To just paint the thing and see if, as usual, that solves the conundrum.
It’s a small way of staying in motion.
Me and my enormous feet at school, supervised by my dad, with those all-important School of the Air adjuncts: a Royal Flying Doctor radio and a fearsome stack of butchers’s paper.
If you find you’re having more group meetings remotely, here are some etiquette tips from those days:
(When I went to boarding school, I got laughed at for shouting “Katie with a question” with my hands neatly on my desktop, and for finishing my answers with the teacher’s name, as in, “The chimera was made in 400BC, Mrs Lamerton”.)
More useful substitutions:
(These are all real examples and scale well to current technology. For example, we were participating in a group online watch-and-shout-along of The Lady and the Highwayman last night until a possum knocked a fuse off the electrical pole.)
Some days, of course, are just about creating shapes to be filled with things another time.
Borders that set a mood for later making. Folders to fill with text one day.
Outlines that aren’t a promise of anything, only a potential. Prepared pages just the size for something to be drawn (tomorrow).
Just playing with lines, that’s all we’re doing.
Just roughing out where edges might be, oh fickle muse. A purely mechanical activity. Nothing to see here. Nothing that counts. Move along.
We wouldn’t be so rash as to slip and accidentally put something in those spaces.
Not today.
Grand plans have their place. But sometimes it is good to make little things.
Clockwork beetles (eventually became part of an illustration for Trudi Canavan)
They are beautiful. Their tininess is fascinating and they look incredibly complicated by virtue of being small, and all the natural textures come out to play in ways that are lost in a big piece. People will compliment you on your remarkable detail work which is a nice ego boost, although you know that the trick is this: the smaller a piece is, the more detail you can leave out.
Trying to get the textures of matchbox art (for Mermay)
They are completed so soon. You have made a thing! It is out in the world now, being. On busy days or hard days or stagnant days or days all stacked up on giant projects, they remind you that you can make a whole thing, that you can hold in your hand.
Out of desperation to have drawn a thing, any thing, that day.
Like a prettyish sort of little wilderness, you can lose yourself in a small project without fear of wandering too far. There are, after all, times when you can’t get away for long, and times when you need to stay close to home.
Learning control
They can be test-patches for larger ideas. There’s no pressure there. No commitment. You are just trying things out in the service of some larger beauty. A few verses to try out the style of a grander epic. A short story to feel out the edges of a world. A tiny print in the manner of a picture book you’d like to make. And maybe it will lead to grander things, or maybe you will decide this was enough. You have made a thing, after all, and it was not here before.
High waists are back in
Many little things, all set side by side, can add up to a collection, an exhibition, but that is not the point.
And why are we standing behind the watch? What does it mean?
You can pretend you are a clockmaker, or a spy hiding secret messages.
And then, when you are done (so quickly!), you can put the rest away and sit back for a little, or go for a walk, shining with having made a thing, one thing, today.
My family has often drawn maps. Next time I visit them (next time I’m allowed to — what a strange year this became) I need to dig out a pirate map — complete with ominous bullet hole — my father made when I was little. I think it’s in a big Nürnberger gingerbread chest with other childhood treasures.
One of my mother’s sisters was a draughtsperson, and took us on a memorable tour of the Yale plan department when we visited her there (and printed us plans of various buildings, as souvenirs!). My father’s brother got onto a few real actual maps, including in the Northern Territory (below — if you look at neighbouring names you’ll get an idea of the relevant decade) and Antarctica.
When I was pulling together all our map books and atlases to take to some some map illustration workshops, we found a few more:
Here is a treasure map of our house out west, leading to a present for my mother. Whatever it was, we hid it in the bathroom. (The “giant’s causeway” was the stepping stones that led to the outdoor (unplumbed) toilet, so this was before we installed a septic tank and put a new toilet building at the site of the “thorny strait”).
All good maps have a mermaid and a sea-monster.
This one was for a very early (and somewhat culturally unexamined) Peter Pan birthday party for a (now 20-year old!) nephew, held around Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra.
And here are the clues!
Ideas, exercises, lessons:
Kathleen Jennings 