About two weeks ago I was having major troubles uploading pictures from my trip to Switzerland to Flickr, and went through a painful cycle of deleting everything and uploading the whole batch again. Unfortunately, during that process, I lost some nice comments people made to the deleted photos, including one by Susan Rudat, who commented on this picture taken in Bern:
I visited Susan’s photostream in Flickr and I felt like a new world just was revealed to me. I had never heard about it before, but found that there are several artists, like Susan, who create wonderful art in Moleskine notebooks. Her work is copyrighted, so I can’t add samples here, but I encourage you to take a look at some of her sets, such as Places and ‘skine color. Simply awesome.
(Susan, if you ever read this entry, I would like to suggest you publish a sample of your work under a Creative Commons license, so that others can spread the word around what you do.)
I’m obviously not in the same league as any of those folks, and I have not had much success with my attempts of drawing using a tablet, so I decided to give it a try by starting small. Following a tip by Bernie Michalik, I went to a DeSerres store and bought one of their moleskine-imitation books, which cost half of the price of the real Moleskine ones, some cheap pencils and ink pens, and started fooling around with the new found hobby. Here’s my first sketch, a drawing of my son in the 10 seconds he stood still watching something on TV:
With 100 more years of practice, I can hopefully join one of the Moleskine Art groups in Flickr 🙂
I have a lot to thank Bénédicte and her Carnet de Dessins blog for being an inspiration and taking me out of my geek / Web 2.0 comfort zone and go back to the non digital world of pencil and paper. I may never become an artist, but I’m enjoying doing things that do not require a keyboard for a change.
The bamboo raft 
Hey Aaron, glad I could be of service!
I like your drawing very much, I hope you post more.
Now, you won’t make a fraction of the money Damien Hirst will make from his work, but your works have soul and his don’t.
Well, some million dollars would not hurt 🙂
I agree that DH’s work is pretty but empty, like the golden bull idol (kind of a metaphor of a metaphor). It feels like art by an engineer or a computer program.
I need a notebook with less porous paper, as I like ink better than pencil.
Hi Aaron,
no, it won’t take 100 years of practice,
you are already doing pretty well and as a true artist you see were you want to go.
For a 10 second pause you manage to get expression, attitude, and details…
and this is your first attempt in your sketch book?
It is true that there are very talented people in the world of moleskin sketch books and in bad days I wonder why bother, and in good days I remember that it is not the skills that interest me but the sincerity of the art.
So now I will be looking for pictures AND sketches of all the beautiful places you go.
Thank you very much for the link and the nice comment, I appreciate very much.
assunto por setembro: Gato, if you fell like trying.
Hi Béné, I didn’t know you knew some Portuguese 🙂
I was tempted to start with a photo as a basis, but it defeats the purpose of the sketch. I always want to try drawing people in the subway, but that may be a bit annoying for the unwilling model if she/he notices me.
No, I don’t know any Portuguese but with a little bit of Spanish, a little bit more of Italian and a lot of dictionary I can say gato instead of cat.
I have that idea too of sketching people in public places but never had the guts to do it. I stick with houses and trees, they keep the pause and are not disappointed when the final drawing have no likeness.
And when it’s raining I use photos, sketches or whatever, just to keep going.
you might be interested in this blog,
http://bonecosdebolso1.blogspot.com/
its in Portuguese, from Lisboa and the drawings are excellent, simple, elegant line and a lot of atmosphere.
[…] ask me why I blog about apparently non-work related subjects, such as vacation trips, soccer, or Moleskine Art. I wish I could blog even more about things not related to Web 2.0 or social media or conferences. […]