The Artist’s Diary
Artistic Inspiration for a Life in Bloom
The Drawing Studio
In 1824 Hokusai published a book with no pictures in it.No wave, no Fuji, no people.
The corner Malevich chose mattered as much as the square. 10 secrets of abstract drawing for beginners, each one traced to the artist who found it.
The Drawing Studio
He put the pen down, walked it once, lifted it, and started the next one.
Drawing Tips & Tricks
In 1007 somebody broke into the stone church at Kells at night and stole the gospel book.
In 1904 somebody counted the knots in the Book of Kells and found 8. The angels had been using a grid of dots the whole time.
Drawing Ideas
Everything that makes one worth framing happens inside those shapes, which is good news, because the shape takes 90 seconds and the inside is the part you will enjoy.You draw one half.
A novelist spent decades at a microscope looking at butterfly wings and was proved right about two continents. The wing is never the hard part.
Drawing Tips & Tricks
That is the part that stops people, and it is the part meditative drawing quietly removes: you need one mark and the willingness to make it again.A dash.
Louise Bourgeois kept paper beside the bed and filled 220 sheets on the nights she was awake. Not studies for anything - just the hand, repeating.
Drawing Ideas
A nature journal is not a sketchbook you have to be good at.
Every guide tells you to note the date, the time, the place and the weather. None of them tells you what to actually put on the page.
Drawing Tips & Tricks
The bird will still read as a bird, and faster than the one you have been labouring over since Tuesday.What goes down instead is a shape.
A man painted birds for fifty years and never once counted a feather in a wing. He counted the wings. Twenty-two birds, three shapes each.
Drawing Ideas
Master ‘How to Draw Patterns’ in One Evening: 18 Fills Artists Rarely Explain (+ Free Pattern Chart)
Copying it, tile by tile, for days, with his wife helping.
Escher crossed Spain twice to copy tiles off a palace wall by hand. Zen doodle patterns get you the vocabulary from the kitchen table.
Drawing Ideas
A card is the only drawing you are allowed to make out of one thing.
Nobody keeps a card because the drawing was good. They keep it because you sat down. 50 occasions, and the confident half is already inked.
How To Guides
You are not going to draw it.You are going to draw around a saucer.
The oldest wreath on record was drawn around a name, not a door. Egypt called the loop shen — to encircle, to protect.
