Tag: drawing inspiration

Willing the pages to breathe

April 29th, 2025

I seem to have lost my ability to focus and force my way back into a novel. So today I introduced a period of martial law. Never leaving my desk, writing a set amount during a set period of time, all the familiar methods I used to fall back on. There is great satisfaction to be had from looking at the empty page, at your notes, at what you’ve already done, then will yourself, almost force yourself, to write some more, and finding that it actually works. It means I am still able to use my imagination to escape from this world into the imagined world of my novel.

– Orhan Pamuk

Sheer will. Sometimes it takes sheer will and martial law to type one page.

Pamuk, Orhan. Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022. United States, Knopf Canada, 2024. pg 162
The painter inside is alive!

March 10th, 2025

I thought I was going to be a painter. At 22, I killed the painter inside of me and began writing novels. In 2008, I walked into a stationery shop, bought two big bags of pencils, paints, and brushes, and began joyfully and timidly filling little sketchbooks with drawings and colors. The painter inside of me hadn’t died after all. But he was full of fears and terribly shy. I made all my drawings inside notebooks so that nobody would see them. I even felt a little guilty: surely this must mean I secretly deemed words insufficient. So why did I bother to write? None of these inhibitions slowed me down. I was eager to keep drawing, and drew whenever I could.

– Orhan Pamuk

More goodness from from Memories of Distant Mountains.

Wake up! The painter inside of you is alive not dead!

Keep drawing and draw whenever you can!

Pamuk, Orhan. Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022. United States, Knopf Canada, 2024. pg 16
When he looked inside…

November 21st, 2024

When the video game artist Peter Chan was young, he loved to draw, but he would crumple up his “bad” drawings in fists of frustration. His father convinced him that if he laid the “bad” drawings flat instead of crumpling them up, he could fit more of them in the wastebasket. After his father died, Chan found a folder labeled “Peter” in his father’s possessions. When he looked inside, it was full of his old, discarded drawings. His father had snuck into his room and plucked the drawings he thought were worth saving from the wastebasket.

Encouragement takes many forms. Sometimes it’s fishing out beauty from a wastebasket.

As read from Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.

Kleon, Austin. Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad. United States, Workman Publishing Company, 2019. pg 33,34
Overwhelmed with the urge to paint

November 7th, 2024

One day, the writer was overwhelmed by the urge to paint again. He recognized in himself the desire that had been gagged and throttled, but never killed; he had stumbled upon the painter whom he had left for dead. He walked into a stationary shop, bought two bags of paints and pencils, and began to fill two dozen notebooks. His hand seemed to move of its own accord. One day it drew, the next day it wrote, “like someone autographing a page without even realizing they’re doing it.”

– Orhan Pamuk

Collapse to the urge. Pull out the graphite. Pull out the pens. Pull out the paints.

Go!

from:

https://www.vqronline.org/fall-2024/art-portfolios/memories-distant-mountains

h/t – https://x.com/nabeelqu
Draw Antonio. Draw!

August 10th, 2024

“Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”

– Michelangelo

Or write. Or code. Or pitch. Or read. Or blog.

Do not waste time.

Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg 278 of the Kindle Edition
John Tenniel’s influence on Chris Riddell

February 28th, 2024

My favourite illustration in the whole book is the very first. It shows the White Rabbit looking at his pocket-watch, worrying that it’s late. I copied that White Rabbit hundreds of times in my sketchbooks, trying to capture the worried expression in his eye, the folds of his coat and the wonderful shading at his feet.
– Chris Riddell

You can still see the influence of John Tenniel‘s Alice in Wonderland’s drawings in Chris Riddell’s work today.

What’s the illustration or picture you’ve copied hundreds of times in your sketchbooks?

Carroll, Lewis., Riddell, Chris. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Puffin Classics) London: Puffin Books, 2015. (from the introduction,pp vi)
The surprising discipline of la vie de bohème

February 23rd, 2024

Characteristically, where many might see the picturesque aspects of la vie de bohème, Hockney notices the inner discipline of that way of life: an element that must have been essential since these Bohemians were driven and hugely productive people.

DH: Picasso would go to the Deux Magots and the Flore most evenings in the 1930s. His studio was a few minutes away. But he always left at ten to eleven, and he’d be in bed by eleven. He would never drink much alcohol – a bit strange for a Spaniard that. I think he must have had a routine, because he worked every day of his life, just as I do.

It’s easy to think the bohemian life style of decades past was completely unhinged, artists living free from any type of restraint. But as David Hockney and Martin Gayford describe, discipline to the craft had it’s place.

Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp57,58
How to Draw Fantasy World Maps!

September 15th, 2023
With JP Coovert

If you know how to write the alphabet you can draw this map.
JP Coovert

Two types of maps JP demonstrates.
1. The Icon Map – a starter map. An Ed Emberley-hieroglyphs type map. If you can write the alphabet, this map is for you.
2. The Tolkien Map – A Double A map. The next level up. Takes a bit more skill with the pen, but not impossible to get there. Similar in style to you guessed it – J.R.R. Tolkien
JP suggests starting with a “key” first. This will help keep all of the icons on your map consistent.

Great game for a Sunday afternoon or waiting for your food at the Olive Garden

h/t kottke.org search
Amitava Kumar on his amateur drawing habit

June 25th, 2023

And every time I attempted it I failed — There was no correspondence. So my failure as an artist, what you can’t do, I think further propelled me into the art of writing. But now, drawing interests me because having accomplished — but because writing has become easy, to a great extent, the taking up drawing is an entry into what I can’t do. Is an entry into the art of the amateur. And therefore it is discovery — it doesn’t matter if I fail. It doesn’t matter if I am a you know a — type artist. What matters really is that I’m doing it everyday and I’m trying to do it as honestly as I can. And that’s creatively, you know? Not to be complacent about it, but to challenge one’s self.
– Amitava Kumar. From minute 37:07 – 39:27

From Amit Varma’s interview on the Seen and Unseen Podcast. Listen in full below:

Be sure to listen to the Seen and Unseen podcast. I have a feeling soon, it will explode with western audiences.

It must.
Illustrator Jean Jullien’s drawing origin story, as told by his parents

April 15th, 2023

JEAN JULLIEN: Can you remember when I first started to draw?

SYLVIE JULLIEN: As far as I’m concerned, you’ve always drawn. You’ve been doing it ever since you were able to pick up a pencil. You didn’t “learn”

BRUNO JULLIEN: You drew all the time, even on tablecloths when we were out at restaurants. It was your way of expressing yourself, of describing the tiniest routine events. You did this in sketchbooks that you would carry around with you, the ones we would offer you regularly. It was a ritual.

JJ: Yes, you gave me my first sketchbook. When I was at school in Quimper (a city in northwest France), my teacher Jacques Vincent encouraged us to keep a journal. There wasn’t much in the way of rules; the idea was to get us to draw and draw and draw so that we developed a visual language. And what better way to do that than to look for inspiration in what is around you? I think that my practice of drawing every day and my interest in everyday life come from that exercise.
Jullien, Jean. Jean Jullien. New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2022. (see page 35)

Having Jean Jullien’s parents share his drawing origin story is a wonderful approach. Our origin stories must look different to our parents, who if they were around, watched them manifest in real time.

The idea of keeping a drawing journal seems beneficial for developing your own visual language. Your own style.

Keep drawing.

Tag: drawing inspiration

With JP Coovert