Falling Sky

Life Drawing: 27/02/2010

After spending the last few weeks threatening to give my life drawing comfort zone a shake-up, and not actually doing owt about it, I finally put my pencil where my mouth is (so to speak) and ended up having a really satisfying session as a result. Started off with some standard 5 minute pose charcoal sketches...

  

The second one triggered a "ah! yes! that's how they're supposed to look!" with a sense of flow but the others still have that uncertainty, that lack of weight or purpose that's been bugging me thus far. Foreseeing another patchy session like the last one, and determined not to slip into the usual safety zone of using a whole lot of tone to cover up a bad drawing, I finally did what I should've done weeks ago - GO BLIND.

You'd be forgiven for wondering what the bloody hell I'm babbling about and whether I've taken leave of my life drawing senses to produce the above scrawl and stick it online. It is, in fact, a blind contour drawings of the life model - a drawing produced without ever looking at the drawing until it's finished. There's a reason for this, honest...

Blind contour drawing is something that I first encountered in Betty Edwards' remarkably effective Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and then during life drawing sessions whilst studying animation. Basically, a key problem when trying to draw from observation (whether that be self-portrait, nude model, still life) is that your brain doesn't want to draw what's exactly being seen by the eyes but instead reaches into the memory banks and brings up a 'clip art' of what you're drawing. For example, if you're drawing a self-portrait of yourself at a 3/4 angle in the mirror, when it comes to drawing the eyes the brain will insist on using the generic 'symbol' or 'shape' of an eye, rather than drawing exactly how the eye looks in the mirror. Which sounds a bit bizarre, but consider times when you've seen drawings by non-artists or people just starting to learn how to draw, the way that eyes and mouths are always flat-on, almost cubist-style, even when they're clearly not meant to be, simply because the artist's brain wanted a drawing of an eye rather than a drawing of what was being seen. The same happens with the rest of the body - you can be drawing a hand and inadvertently find yourself drawing what you think the hand should look like, rather than what it actually does look like, and in doing so killing the picture.

This may all sound quite peculiar to non-artists but if you're the kind of person who insists "I can't draw!" a) have a go at a self-portrait and see if you do the above and b) BUY THIS BOOK. Seriously, you follow the exercises and it works like a charm. You can see examples of how people have drawn before such exercises and after here - a perfect demonstration of how people end up drawing symbols when they mean to drawing what they see. Blind contour drawing is a way of rebooting the brain, of stopping oneself from unconsciously ignoring what you're meant to be drawing - on top of that, it's also a great way of stopping yourself from getting over-precious of every single goddamn drawing. You get your page, you place your pencil/pen-nib at a point on the page where you want to start drawing, and you position yourself so you can't actually see the page, only the model/mirror/object you're drawing (an easel is a godsend for this). And you draw, essentially moving the pen as your eyes follow the lines of the face/body/object, as though there's an invisible connection between the focus of your vision and the nib of your pen, following the contours of the body/face/object. It helps to be using a black pen, with no variation in tone or thickness, and drawing on cheap newsprint paper kills off any sense of preciousness.

Look at the images above and you can see the result, the way that details and little lines that might previously be ignored are instead noticed and drawn, so that you have something that doesn't look like the subject you're drawing but, oddly, feels like the subject, a bizarre exaggerated caricature of a form. This is especially noticeable when blind drawing a hand, a foot, a cabbage. In the process, it reminds you that you should be drawing only what you see directly in front of you, that the majority of your drawing time should be spent looking at the object of your attentions, not the page, and to put more trust in making marks 'unsupervised' (ie when you're not looking at the page while drawing) and appreciating the benefits of doing so.

Pleased with the above and the palpable mental shift the process brought with it, I spent the rest of the session doing a blind drawing of each pose, then another where I'd allow myself to look at the page now and then to ensure proportions and placing on the page stayed consistent - in most of the cases, I find myself preferring the blind version to the following 'assisted' version, but the below was when it clicked properly, having the confidence to just let a single line describe an upper torso despite the urge to overwork - there's something bizarrely scary about committing to just one line, can't quite describe it, but when you override it and the result works, it's a treat.

 

That, and the longer pose that followed, would never have turned out as well as it did without the blind drawings that preceded them. It's quite fascinating feeling this shift in perception going on in your noggin, hard though it is to put into words (as the above attempt no doubt demonstrates). I had naively assumed that my days of contour drawing were behind me, that I'd learned the lessons and made the mental shift, but yesterday proved to me that's not the case. Indeed, I should think of such drawings as the equivalent of musical scales for musicians - not something you'd perform as a finished piece, but as a tool that enhances your ability to produce those finished pieces. And even though that final piece does go back to the comfort zone of tone, I'm happy with the linear drawing of the pose, the lines cleaner and more assured than previous weeks. The initial blind drawing almost acts as the problem-solving drawing, figuring out the correct angles and details, so the following piece is drawn with those problems considered, if only at a subconscious level, somehow taking the worry and uncertainty out of it.

Requiem For A Processing Unit

Whilst off sick with The Poorliness last week, holed up in bed with the laptop and bored out of my gourd, I read this review for Found Songs by Ólafur Arnalds on Pitchfork. This despite having never heard of him before, tempted in solely by the little synopsis given when you mouse over the reviewed covers on the front page, most likely with the words "chamber" "melancholic" "charming". Intrigued, I went looking online for a taster, eventually finding it (and buying it) on iTunes for a perfectly reasonable £5.53. Beautiful, haunting and, yes, melancholic instrumental music, piano-driven with keening strings and blurred electronica, it's beautiful stuff, like a subtler early A Silver Mt Zion making friends with Gonzales' Solo Piano. You can download all of the tracks from this page to get a taster for it (track 2 is embedded below) before doing the right thing and buying the bounder.

Day-II_Raein

Any other day that would've been the end of it, but with nothing to do but blow my nose, stay hydrated and bemoan my lot in life, I went a-link-following, both on the website for the record label Erased Tapes (from which you can download an entire sampler album for nothing! nowt! zilchy!) and recommendations on the iTunes and Amazon pages for Ólafur Arnalds - you know, Listeners/Customers Also Bought, the innocuous-looking quicksand sucking you into a world of music you never knew existed but, a few 30 second samples later, suddenly becomes essential to your continued existence. So it was that I also ended up getting the 3 track Wintermusik (well worth £3.99, a fine soundtrack for these frosty days) and The Bells, both by Nils Frahm, and Jóhann Jóhannsson's intriguingly titled IBM 1401 A User's Manual (not to mention adding a whole lot more to my Saved For Later list on Emusic). The two Nils Frahm releases complemented Ólafur Arnalds, again being primarily instrumental piano music, closer to classical yet still with a contemporary edge (think Rachels and Yann Tiersen) and I'm really looking forward to listening to them whilst life drawing. But what's that last one there?

Well, according to the record label 4AD (that's a good sign) Jóhann Jóhannsson is an Icelandic composer. His stately, slow-building and hauntingly melodic music has been quietly bewitching listeners for the last few years. And on the website for the album, it describes it thus:

Inspired by a recording of an IBM mainframe computer which Jóhann’s father, Jóhann Gunnarsson, made on a reel-to-reel tape machine more than 30 years ago, the piece was originally written to be performed by a string quartet as the accompaniment to a dance piece by the choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir. For the album version, Jóhann rewrote the entire score, and it was recorded by a sixty-piece string orchestra. He also added a new final section and incorporated electronics alongside those original tape recordings of the singing computer.

Jóhannsson goes into greater detail on how it began here:

In 1964, a computer - the IBM 1401 Data Processing System - arrived in Iceland, one of the very first computers to be imported into the country. The 1401 has been called the "Model T" of the computer industry - the first affordable, mass produced digital business computer . The chief maintenance engineer for this machine was Jóhann Gunnarsson, my father. A keen musician, he learned of an obscure method of making music on this computer - a purpose for which this business machine was not at all designed. The method was simple. The computer's memory emitted strong electromagnetic waves and by programming the memory in a certain way and by placing a radio receiver next to it, melodies could be coaxed out - captured by the receiver as a delicate, melancholy sine-wave tone.  When the IBM 1401 was taken out of service in 1971, it wasn't simply thrown away like an old refrigerator, but was given a little farewell ceremony, almost a funeral, when its melodies were played for one last time. This "performance" was documented on tape along with recordings of the sound of the machine in operation.

A concept album centred on an old computer? It could've turned out godawful, but stone me if it's not one of the best things I've heard in yonks. Five tracks. mostly instrumental but for samples from a training tape and an electronic voice speaking "the sun's gone dim and the sky's gone black 'cause I loved you and you didn't love back," it's an incredible piece of work that marries the sounds of an old computer with emotive classical orchestration that sidesteps cheesiness and hits you straight in the heart.

Honestly, I know this must all sound utterly pretentious but give the above a listen. Out of nowhere it's become one of my favourites, particularly Part 1 (the track in the video above). A simple little electronic melody repeats, fading in from nothingness, over and over like a beacon or an old BASIC program:

10 BEEP 2
20 BEEP 4
30 BEEP 1
40 BEEP 3
50 BEEP 0
60 GOTO 10

...that never ever stops, even after all else has gone. Musically it's cinematic, hints of Brian Eno, John Taverner, with the warm bliss of M83, losing yourself in a rich wave of sounds. Thematically it takes me back to Grandaddy's wonderful The Sophtware Slump and its songs of old technology, early Hewlett Packard, science conventions, forgotten prototypes. But ultimately it takes me back to Wall-E - to my ears at least, Part 1 is the sound of Wall-E if he never met Eve, left alone on Earth as circuits gradually corrode away over millennia to nothing, operating until there's nothing left to operate, faithful to programming to the very end, strings swooping in as the battery dies. It feels like an elegy for early days of computers, decades ago, universities and garages and labs exploding with possibilities, magnetic tape, punch cards, diodes, vacuum tubes, worlds to come. Buy it (£3.95 on Amazon MP3), play it, dig out your old BBC Micro and give it a hug.

IF: Propagate

No life drawing this week, but I did manage to get my feckless arse round to actually finishing an Illustration Friday picture, even - gasp! - producing it on paper rather than in the digital realm. Sadly, attempts to get a half-decent scan of it failed miserably, hence the above photo which is a tad wonky and unevenly lit but at least captures the colours relatively accurately. Anyhoo, the keyword this week is propagate, which somehow led to the thought of a farmer being eaten by his own crop, ending up in this not-a-bazillion-miles-from-Little-Shop-Of-Horrors image.  It was sketched in blue pencil, coloured in with watercolour pencils, then painted over with a wash. As soon as I came up with the concept for the picture it was clear it'd need to be in landscape format, so it was nice to push that further and get this letterbox shape - click on the above picture to embiggen. In retrospect it's a political cartoon just waiting to have some hapless politician's name attached to the farmer and another word - expenses? healthcare? electorate? - stretched across the stem of that hungry hungry horticulture. Surely the Comics Curmudgeon would approve.

The Littlest Mermaid

PONYO (Gake no ue no Ponyo)

A slightly belated review having been bedded up with the lurgee for much of this week, but better late than left to the end of the bleedin' year. Here in Nagl Towers we've been looking forward to seeing Ponyo ever since late 2007 when a teaser poster appeared on the internerd. Miyazaki + the ocean + cute little fishy girl was bound to be a match made in Ghibli heaven, right? Two years later, having resisted the temptation to acquire the Japanese DVD last year, it finally got released at UK cinemas, albeit in a dubbed form (though a Japanese language English subtitle version is doing the rounds of the artier cinemas). Did it live up to my giddy expectations?

HAI!

Ponyo is an utterly adorable film, very child-like indeed, more at a My Neighbour Totoro level than the Ghibli films set amongst conflict like Howl's Moving Castle or the supernatural eeriness of Sprited Away - indeed, it's somewhere between Totoro and the barmy pre-Ghibli Panda Go Panda (hear the maddeningly catchy theme and you'll never be free of it). It's almost like a picture book made motion, yet one that remains consistently inventive and magical for 100 minutes through rather than running dry after 32 pages. Awash with colour and enthusiasm, it's a film told very much from the view and mentality of a young child, one that happily accepts things that would prompt an older mindset to go "woah woah woah, WTF?". After the young boy finds himself chased by waves with eyes going "WURRRGH!" he just notes to himself "that was weird" - and just gets on with things. This might wind up some, but it's just a state of mind. Approach it like a children's picture book and you'll have an absolutely delightful time.

The story takes the essence of The Little Mermaid and views it through the eyes of a young child, as opposed to the spoilt teenage girl of Disney's 1989 version. Like Totoro, there's no evil, no real baddies - grumpiness is about as bad as behaviour gets - and even the awesome threatening power of nature stays on the right side of wonder. Adults point the way but ultimately it's a film driven by two young children, something the young 'uns in the audience must dig (think of how many children's films actually centre on a child character).

There's so much to love about Ponyo. It's unashamedly handmade, the backgrounds drawn with less realism than previous Ghibli work, photo-realism eschewed for colour, texture, energy, style. You can see the brushstrokes, the texture of pastel against paper, and this sits well with the picture book vibe of the film. The hand-drawn animation is, of course, fantastic and I was struck by how free, how unrestrained it felt in relation to CGI - there's a sense that anything can happen, anything can change, especially in the underwater scenes. Similarly, the animation of the characters, especially the faces, has a simple malleability (god, this review's heading right up Pseud's Corner) that just can't be nailed in CG. Look at this little clip (from the Japanese language version) where Ponyo first speaks to the boy and he promises to look after her (hence the sudden look of serious responsibility), and look at how so much can be done with so little:

As for the English dub - it's actually fine, as dubs go, and certainly beats the hell out of what Ghibli fans used to have to endure back in the olden days. The appearance of a Cyrus and a Jonas on the poster would give anyone with an age in the double digits pause but they do a pretty decent job, particularly Ponyo's exclamations of "HAM!" Liam Neeson is obviously Liam Neeson but to be honest his is a tough character to voice, eccentric yet necessarily authoritarian. I'm very curious to see how the original Japanese version sounds, and handily enough our local is showing it with the original soundtrack (with English subtitles, mind) for the next week. But if the only option available to you is the English dub, honestly, don't let it stop you. Just make sure you get out during the closing credits because, lovely as the artwork on show under the credits is, the English remake of the theme is ghastly as all hell (the way the word girl is sung makes my brain squirm) and made me want to jab hot screwdrivers in my ears. Not a good thing.

While I'm not sure whether it carries the emotional heft of Totoro, Spirited Away or Kiki's Delivery Service (it'll take a few more viewings to be sure) I love this film just for the joy it brings and how it brings out the best in hand drawn animation. There's one scene in particular that made my heart leap, when a human Ponyo runs across the top of tsunami waves, the happiest little thing ever drawn. It's perfect - the sight of this bizarre giant-fish/waves (just go with it...) rolling across the sea, chasing a car on a coastal road, with this little pink girl running like MAD on top, leaping from top to top, absolutely grinning. It's bloody wonderful - you can watch it online here, but honestly, nothing tops seeing it in context at the cinema. Just don't blame me if the song lodges into your head for eternity like one of those wormy bastards from the Wrath Of Khan.

Life Drawing: 13/02/2010 & IF: Muddy

It's not the snappiest of blog titles but I think I've come up with as many life-drawing-related punny titles in the last six years as humanly possible - considering it takes me long enough just to write the bally post, the last thing I need is extra pondering time for just the flippin' title. So how did yesterday go? Well, if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, at just before 2pm you would've seen the following:

ARGH I'VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DRAW ARGH ARGH ARGH1:59 PM Feb 13th from txt

Okay, which one of you bastards stole my mojo?

2:00 PM Feb 13th from txt

Yeah, not good.

After last week's long poses, it was back to blasting through 5 mins, then 10 mins, then longer - and those first few drawings were just awful, I even binned the first two, and the ones that I kept weren't that much better. Too many errors with proportions, anatomy, things that I had perhaps naively assumed would still be second nature to me - instead, I think I need to relearn a fair bit. Time was that my fast sketches would sometimes be the best of a day's drawing, the way I could do something like this in 30 seconds that still had that feeling of weight, of form. This drawing took 15 minutes and yet lacks that weight, any kind of dynamism - all the lines feel the same, unconfident and unwilling to commit. It was all the more frustrating given that the model was excellent, choosing some really good poses, and no doubt my annoyance just made it all the harder to not overthink each drawing.

To the surprise of absolutely noone I have run for the safety of tonal drawings, which look fine but still flawed.about 24 hours ago from txt

 

Yep, back to tonal stuff, my life drawing equivalent of a comfort blanket. Come March I'm committing myself to getting line drawing back up to scratch, working just with line for as long as it takes to feel confident and comfortable with it. On longer poses like last week it's probably not such an issue because there's time to get things right, but the shorter poses demand more confidence in an artist, every line and mark counts because there may not be any time to fix it later. There's no life drawing next week, after which I reckon some blind contour drawing is in order to help get the right side of my noggin in the driving seat, along with a rereading of Bridgman's Life Drawing (on Google Books here) and a going-over of some basic human anatomy, the kind of thing covered back in Bournemouth and Ballyfermot over a decade ago.

More successful was my entry into Illustration Friday for the preceding week, the subject word being 'muddy'. For most of the week I wasn't getting anywhere, struggling with a hippo-based image, then one day at work I quickly scribbled a sketch onto a Post-It note and realised that was sodding it, so much so that I didn't want to water down the sketch. Hence I scanned it in and spent an hour or so colouring it in to make the resulting image.

Very simple and terribly silly, of course, but I like it - and it has a confidence and vitality to it that's so clearly missing from the above figure drawings. It reminds me a wee bit of some of the early concept art made for animated films (though obviously nowhere near that league!), almost abstract pieces where the idea, the colour, the action is what makes the picture rather than being a technically accomplished illustration. I think this is the way I should be heading illustration-wise, since it means I can produce something effective with the minimum of time, as long as that initial sketch conveys what I want it to. Further study of various Disney and Pixar Art Of books shall surely follow.

That's More Like It

Third life drawing session this year and circumstances meant that there were to be no short poses, just one pose for the whole session (albeit with two models, which is very unusual). The first drawing is a bit frustrating in that it has good details - I think I captured her expression accurately, and although it might look like I arsed up the proportions, her breasts really were quite large - but it doesn't come together as a drawing. One of the very many wisdoms to be found in Walt Stanchfield's Drawn To Life Vol. 1 is the following from p.103:

I have seen some sketches start with details, which is like hanging a necklace in mid-air before the neck is drawn. Sounds silly but we all do it to a certain extent. Decide at the beginning what is the main course - saving the dessert for later.

The flaw of that first drawing is that I was uncertain in my initial drawings of the full figure and ended up focusing on details too soon as a form of procrastination, putting off solving the whole drawing, a cowardice of sorts that shows in the finished product. It's a shame - the torso looks good, the head looks good, but they don't seem to belong together.

The second drawing, the one above, is where it came together and I learned from my earlier mistakes. I switched to the second model, lying on her side, the perfect pose for a back study, but this time made sure I didn't get bogged down in particular areas until I was happy with the whole figure at early sketch stage. As a result the figure didn't end up getting larger as work progressed, so extremities remained on the page rather than getting edged off by revised sketching. Over-toning was a risk that I had to stay aware of - the use of tone absolutely makes the picture in terms of defining the woman's back and the shadows around the bottom and bent leg, but there's been many a time in the past when tone has been added and added and added until suddenly you're looking at a mess of grey, a figure that looks way more muscular than the model you're drawing or one part of the body is inconsistently shaded with the rest. But it's through making these mistakes that you learn to look out for them in the future, recognising when to step back and let it be - which, after 90 minutes, is just what I did, scampering home an hour early to prepare nosh for our evening guests, buzzing with that special feeling of a drawing well done.

Saturday's soundtrack: started off with the new album from These New Puritans, Hidden, which I'm having an absolute bugger of a time in describing, the best I can come up with being English classical music via Asian Dub Foundation, Burial and Thom Yorke, if such a thing can be fathomed. Remarkable stuff, though in retrospect a bit too intense for life drawing. The second drawing was drawn with The Field's Sound of Light EP, a sweeping electronica interpretation of staying at Stockholm's Nordic Light Hotel, following with Dirty Three's divine Ocean Songs, the kind of wordless music that makes the perfect soundtrack for any creative endeavour, music that swoops and soothes, bewitching without distracting.

09: Films!

As usual I had every intention of doing a best-bits-of-2009 list, and as usual I completely lost track of time and now 1/12th of 2010 is already over. Add onto that the question of whether my opinion is even worth a damn and I doubt if I'll get the music and book ones finished - the world isn't exactly short of unqualified opinion squawkers on such matters. Still, since I've already written most of the film ones I thought I'd stick them up here for what it's worth - rather than a Best Of list, I've just gone over most of the films I saw at the cinema, starting off with the following low-profile arthouse curio...

Avatar

My expectations for this were pretty bloody low, especially after watching clips online - it looked no different from a video game cut-scene - and many Internet chatterers seemed convinced that James Cameron had gone mad and blown an insane amount of money on a cinematic folly. It was only the enthusiastic advance wibblings of Roger Ebert and Simon Pegg that had me forking out nine bleedin' quid for a ticket. And thank the stars I did because Avatar, for all its faults, delivered the kind of massive cinematic spectacle that perfectly demonstates why there's still a place for the cinema in this day & age. My main misgivings concerned the prospect of watching CG animated humanoid charcters, since the last decade has seen numerous examples of CG humanoids on screen, almost all lacking in real weight, convincing movement, believabilty - only Gollum, through the strength of the human performance behind it, really worked. However, the many years of work that have gone into Avatar (I remember chatting to an animator at Digital Domain about it in Annecy 1999) have clearly paid off. From skin texture to eyes to motion to performance, these completely digital characters were more convincing than I could ever have imagined. The story, while easily derided, did the job, with a grittier edge than expected, and the sheer creativity on show in the world-building matched that of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Seen on the small screen, I'm sure the flaws will become glaring, the story trite, the visuals impressive but not astounding. But at the cinema? It's the greatest spectacle since Return of the King.

Precious

Only just released in the UK, but we caught a preview screening of it in December. One of the most emotionally devastating films I've seen in ages, yet manages to be neither corny melodrama nor emotional-torture-porn (a la Von Trier) despite the sheer horrors that take place, due to the care you feel for the central charcter and the slivers of hope that appear over the course of the film. The acting is superb across the board but Mo'Nique's terrifying performance is a true standout and especially deserving of awards. A very hard-going film, to be sure, but one that ultimately lifts rather than crushes. If ever there was a positive depiction of the difference teaching can make, this is it.

Paranormal Activity

Spookums! Very few films give me the fear, and not one has ever managed to give me the willies that BBCs Ghostwatch did back in the day - so much so that I still can't countenance the thought of watching it all over again (I tried a year ago and lasted all of 10 minutes). With that in mind, PA looked promising, albeit overhyped to an impossible extent (much like Blair Witch a decade earlier) and I went along to see it on the one night I had the flat to myself, Missus being down in That London for worky stuff. It was a fascinating film to watch, the use of the fixed-camera and fast-forwarding through to eventful moments generating a palpable and escalating sense of tension, also an excellent demonstration of the effectiveness of sound in horror films (see also Rec). The bedroom setting, the concept of things happening whilst you're asleep, unaware, vulnerable, worked a treat and left me just a little rattled later that night - it's a lot easier to imagine your bedroom door inexplicably creak open and slam shut than a chainsaw-wielding maniac bursting in. Unfortunately, the story ultimately fails to live up to the air of eerieness, though it's hard to imagine what could've lived up to all that occurs, and I found it difficult to believe that anyone with the footage already acquired midfilm wouldn't have gone to a TV channel, the police, anything beyond one person. Plus, to be honest, the male character is a bit of a cock. All that said, the first 3\4 of the film was very satisfying and genuinely spooky, and those images of nighttime shenanigans have the potential to stay with you long after the final frame.

The Hurt Locker

Bloody brilliant, easily one of the finest films this year and certainly the most tense. Bomb defusing in Iraq + Kathryn Bigelow was always going to be a match made in heaven, the result a film taut with machismo, confusion, violence and a drug-like addiction to a life hanging by a thread (or wire) in the middle of an almighty clusterfuck. Not overtly political, it feels genuine and true, conveying both the terror and the appeal, if that is the right word, of such a living. Hugely recommended.

Up

This was great, of course, but not one of Pixar's finest. Pourquoi? Well, the opening ten minutes (along with this scene from later in the film) are absolutely classic, a masterclass in storytelling and creating gut-wrenching emotion from the simplest ingredients, not to mention wonderful evocations of the gentle joy of marriage. But the film that follows, a light-hearted caper that ends up with the trademark Pixar action sequence, sits oddly against such subtle, powerful feelings. I was in tears, buckets of them, but still felt odd when the tone switched, like a mixtape going from Hurt to Move Your Feet. The story seemed wayward, creating a half-hearted baddie whose relative youth given his age is never explained. Of course, it looked divine and the whole thing is great fun to watch, but Up lacks the deep satisfction of Wall-e in combining fun and feeling seamlessly. Still, it's a bloody lovely way to spend a couple of hours, and made excellent mash-up fodder too...

District 9

Oh, what a treat this was! A debut bursting with energy, confidence and ideas, D9 echoed the mad enthusiasm and invention of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, filtered through the grimy future military of Cameron's Aliens, but ultimately stood apart from them all. An action film with brains, and even some heart, D9 starts with a fascinating concept (and how refreshing to see an alien ship hovering over somewhere other than USA) and runs with it, giving time for you to get to know & even care about the central character before everything goes all-out mental in the last half hour, a sci-fi action scene done absolutely proper, all splatter and artillery and pig-based weaponry missile. Complete with remarkably believable CGI effects courtesy of Weta, this was an extremely impressive film, delivering everything that Transformers utterly failed to do at a fraction of the cost. Between this and the Halo 3 shorts, Neill Blomkamp is definitely a man to watch. Now, how's about a full-lenght Halo feature?

Moon

Another debut, another piece of science-fiction, Moon is the polar opposite of D9 but equally good. Reminiscent of splendid 70s sci-fi, it's almost a one-man show, testament to the brilliant perfomance from that one man, Sam Rockwell. A film of words and feelings rather than aliens and weapons, I was surprised (and impressed) at the direction the film took, the story solid & confident all the way to the end. All that, and the best soundtrack of the year too.

Sunshine Cleaning

A pleasing little film, publicised like a companion piece to Little Miss Sunshine (though not half as wacky or annoying). A small-scale drama, it's a gentle, slow look at an attempt to launch a crimescene cleaning business, though naturally this is just a scaffold for human drama to unfold on. Thankfully, the humans in question are interesting and believable enough to carry the film thanks to some great acting and a storyline that never becomes ridiculous, zany or twee. Life just happens and it's a pleasure to watch it do so.

Sleep Furiously

A veritable curio this, ostensibly a documentary of life in a small Welsh village where not much happens. You'd think that this lack of eventfulness might scupper a feature length documentary, but this film seems concerned more with capturing a feeling for the place, the people, the peace. The closest comparison would be Etre Et Avoir, particularly in it's eye for the small, significant details of rural life. Minutes pass by as you watch lines of sheep move across a distant hill, yet this doesn't bore. In fact, it's oddly soothing, like going for a country walk and feeling your pace slow, adjusting to the gentler rhythms. The Aphex Twin soundtrack works nicely, as handy with a little piano melody as his more well-known electro/acid/wrongness. A lovely and subtly affectionate snapshot of a village life that seems to fade away with every year.

Drag Me to Hell

Absolutely drop dead bonkers barmy, just as I hoped it would be, it was such a treat to see Sam Raimi put Spiderman behind him and go back to the world of slapstick horror that he so gloriously conquered with Evil Dead 2. Ads proclaiming DMTH to be scary were way off the ball - this wasn't a film to scare, to disturb. Nooo, it's a film for going to the cinema and yelling "EW!" and "MANK!" and "oooh, NASTY!" with a great big smile, because this really is slapstick, albeit one with a serious oral fixation. While the performances are played straight, everything else goes flat out NUTSO, and I think I actually applauded at the scene with the goat. While ED2 still rules the roost, DMTH is a huge amount of manky fun, up to its elbows in mud & guts, and leagues better than the po-faced misery of the Saw sequels and their ilk.

Also awesome: Star Trek (FunfunfunfunfunfunWHEEEEEEE!), Coraline (brilliant, lived up to expectations, a truly remarkable piece of artwork), Låt den rätte komma in (that's Let The Right One In, certainly one of the best films of the year, a subtle blend of cold viciousness and genuine warmth), In the Loop (reviewed here), Gran Torino (Dirty Harry + Unforgiven), Anvil! The Story of Anvil (reviewed here), Slumdog Millionaire ('nuff already said) and Frost/Nixon (a real pleasure to watch the two lead performances in verbal battle, thrilling and tense no matter how inevitable the ending).

Scribblings From Last Saturday

Here's the two best bits from last week's life drawing, sad to say I've been too busy to plonk them up here until now (all the drawings are here, good and bad). There won't be any drawn today - Missus & I are off gallivanting - but hopefully normal arty service will resume next Saturday.

 

We started with a bunch of 5 minute poses, my suggestion - the results for me were pretty bland, still making basic errors in proportions and weight, but I think the above drawings that followed, from 10 minute poses, benefited. There's still a blatant uncertainty in my drawing, too many lines, and that's only going to get walloped out of me by a) very short poses that leave no time for going over & over the same bits or b) restricting myself to completely linear drawings, tone-free, possibly going for a continuous line. The output would probably be shite, but its the drawing mentality within me that needs shifting and exercises like that (as demonstrated in books like Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and The Natural Way To Draw, not to mention previous life drawing classes at college) have worked before. Anyway, the drawing on the left actually has a bit of weight to it, especially the lower half, and I like the sense of twisting in the top picture, though the lines used to draw it are still waaaaaaaay too uncertain - look at the broken lines, the short marks, rather than the confident single lines that I have been capable of and should be again.

 

After a few more drawings that didn't work I ran for the comfort of tonal drawing, particularly the old standby of white on black paper - I think I needed a little reassurance that I could at least get that right. These couple of drawings were okay, if over-worked, but I felt much happier with the above. Blatant use of negative spaces in the first one, another throwback to the aforementioned books, took the pressure off the linework, though with an inconsistent backdrop to the model it wasn't possible to extend the light shading to the whole background. It's still too scrappy for a 25 minute drawing, but it's a step in the right direction, as is the other one. The body is too ill-defined and you can see where I realised a leg had gone too far and had to dial it back, but the torso, head & shoulders work nicely enough, and I think I'm starting find the visual shorthands for facial features and hair that stop you getting bogged down in detail mid-sketch.

The soundtrack for this session? Tertia by Caspian, Silent Shout by the Knife, a varied dollop of Echo & The Bunnymen and this absolute dreamboat of electronic loveliness from Yesterday And Today by The Field, one of the finest albums of last year and perfect for slipping into that drawing-trance state where time goes a bit funny and the world vanishes to nothing.

Everybodys Got To Learn Sometime - The Field

I Read This & Thought Of You

"I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses - that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things."
- Pablo Neruda, quoted in The Gift by Lewis Hyde

Back To Life (Again)

 

Back at the start of November 2008 I went for a life drawing session and, despite producing drawings like this and having paid for another 5 weeks worth, didn't go back afterwards. Why? Knackeredness, nothing more - I just felt too damn lazy. I think I justified it to myself by saying that I would spend Saturday afternoons doing other types of art instead, working on illustration or something like that, but when it came to it I did nothing of the sort and just let Saturday afternoons fade away in the general blur of the weekend, time spent online and in the kitchen. So it passed through the whole of 2009, a veritable desert of artwork for me, barely producing more than a few sketches for the entire year. Course, for the first half of the year I was pleasantly occupied with getting married, while for the second I got into the dark & dangerous world of preserves, but I think I also used these as excuses not to sit down and do a drawing, even just a 10 minute sketch, and the more time passed the bigger a deal it became to do a drawing, any drawing. Coupled with the lack of fulfilment I've been getting from my day job over the last few months, I was getting into quite a grump with myself, frustrated that I was letting the ability to draw and paint drift away from me but too chickenshit to actually do anything about it.

(Which begs the question - what was I afraid of? It sounds so stupid when I try to describe it, or look back in retrospect, but ultimately it's failure, a fear of sitting down & doing a drawing that's bad - in which case, why bother trying? - coupled with expectations you set for yourself. Yeah, self-expectations are a fucker, at least for meself, such as the way I only did a few drawings in Orkney the second time we visited because of the expectations I had for myself following the first time's sketchbook, setting the bar for myself so high it becomes intimidating to the point of inertia. Idiotic when you try to actually describe these feelings, realising how ridiculous they are, but they're there all the same. Whether other arty types get this, I've no idea. Gosh, isn't this self-indulgent/therapeutic?)

Anyway. Towards the end of last year I realised that I needed to get my creative juices flowing again lest I became some dried-up husk of a person who does nothing but go to work and feel miserable, unfulfilled and resentful, having met quite a few people fitting such a description. Although the finger-sketching on the touchy Spod was a good start, it was clear that I needed to be pretty much forced into drawing, free of distractions (oh internet, you wanton temptress you!) and the pre-paid four hours of Leith School of Art's untutored life drawing sessions offered the perfect opportunity. Once that £120 was handed over, I wasn't getting it back regardless of whether I turned up for the sessions or not, and being so fiscally careful these days I damn well intend to get my moneys worth.

Yesterday was the first of the sessions and it went pretty well, better than I'd expected (well, feared) after over a year away from the easel & model. I stuck to using an A2 drawing pad and monochrome materials since I figured it'd be hard enough getting the hang of realistically capturing the human form on paper without chucking colour into things. It felt good from the beginning despite that initial ARGH HOW THE HELL DO I DO THIS, the 10 minute time limit for the first drawing leaving no time for neurotic retrospection (unlike Sunday mornings...) and although the drawings produced over the following few hours weren't career bests they certainly didn't see me regressing back to pre-1998 standards. There was one absolute stinker that I wrestled with (not literally mind) but just couldn't get right, yet that didn't put me into the self-critical grump I thought it might, and was immediately followed by a drawing I could feel very happy with. By using both sides of the paper, I basically ruled out the prospect of selling any artwork, thereby sidestepping the SELLSELLSELL mindset the plagued the 2007/08 sessions - I need to accept that there doesn't need to be any further purpose to these drawings beyond the very act of producing them. If they look good and people like them on the internet, ace, but that shouldn't, mustn't become the raison d'etre of life drawing. Even now it's going to take time to fully accept that, I'm still too addicted to checking Flickr stats and Facebook comments on recently-posted artwork for my own good (and then getting the hump at a lack of response, plum that I am), but I think I can do it. I'll also make sure to post on this site after each session and my thoughts on how it went, because the only thing this website can offer that no other can is my own artwork. Without that, it's increasingly hard to see what the point of keeping Falling Sky going is, so I may as well make the most of it. And if there's the slightest chance that in doing so I could inspire someone else to do the same, to get back into a skill they've loved but allowed to slip away due to that ridiculous internal fear of failure (masked by a whole bunch of almost-convincing excuses, of course) and in doing so feeling as fulfilled and relieved as I did after yesterday, hell, it's got to be worth doing.