Thing-a-day.com

Too quick; the challenge of drawing on the subway is how frequently the poses (or sightlines) shift…

More in the “awkward sitting poses’ vein…

Like it says…

I am now officially obsessed with drawing the subway…

The base of a column in the subway.

Gotten interested in staircases again. Here’s a cameraphone photo of a subway staircase, as raw material for a drawing, and with edges and planes highlighted.

Steam table. Ink on napkin.

Steam table. Photoshop filter (Filter->Stylize->Find Edges) on ink on napkin.

20 years ago, my studio was at the bottom of a stairwell, and I spent a lot of time looking up at those stairs. A stairwell is a great challenge, because there are so many planes interacting, and because the eyes tendency to flatten angles can really lead you astray. In this sketch, I started drawing the banister at about a 60 degree angle, and then realized its was actually closer to 85 degrees.



And, since I too sucjk at Photoshop, I’ve also been looking at filters, and this patchwork texturizer seemed interesting, not so much because it makes the drawing better to look at, as because it makes it clear where either the contrast or angles are off — here, I made the angles to flat and the contrast to strong on the left-hand side, relative to the middle of the drawing, where all the depth is.

For those as RSS-obsessed as I am, you can subscribe to the posts for any user or any tag, using that user or tag’s URL + ‘feed/’

So my feed is  http://www.thing-a-day.com/author/cshirky/feed/, and the general form is http://www.thing-a-day.com/author/{username}/feed/

Similarly, to subscribe to everything tagged ‘drawing’, the feed is http://www.thing-a-day.com/tag/drawing/feed/, and the general form is http://www.thing-a-day.com/tag/{tagname}/feed/

I’ve got a page in Netvibes where I’m watching favorite users and tags (which also reminds me to get it in gear about posting my own stuff, when I see what everyone else is up to…)

At my daughter’s ballet class, all the grown-ups sit downstairs on folding chairs, waiting for our kids to be done, and there was this woman trying to talk on the phone over the strains of Tchaikovsky coming down the stairs, and I tried to capture a couple of contortions.

One thing I miss from being a painter is just grabbing a piece of paper and sketching something, as much to see what looking feels like as to capture an image. Here’s my two feet on a desk, and my coffee mug. Just as I suspected, I’m terribly rusty, but as I hoped, it felt good to do this again. Hope I get better from the practice.