"It feels like you really enjoy it."
Warhammer 40k, Pomeranian Portraiture, Herons and Sculptors
This week a friend texted me: “I think you should draw more nerdy stuff. It feels like you really enjoy it.” He is not wrong.
At a Halloween party at said friend’s house, there hung in the Game Cave two pieces I’d made from prompts he’d issued. The first prompt was, “draw me punching a zebra”, and the other, “draw a hipster dragon angry that his beer isn’t hoppy enough.”
Neither piece pushed the concept too far, but it was fun to get suggestions out of the blue and throw together some art to illustrate it. Both pieces hung side by side, leaving a conspicuous gap to the right, room for another. Inspired by several characters lying about on the gaming table (a Warhammer 40k Dreadnought and a geisha card), I combined the two to make “Dreadnought Geisha”, a purely-for-nerdy-fun piece.
What I enjoy about doing such low-stakes art is the freedom it affords, the sense of fun in just winging it with no real plan or purpose. It’s like doodling but with some conceptual direction.
As I had a 9 x 12” matted frame in the car with me, I threw it in, wired it, hung it. Voila, a new addition to the wall of the Cave, wife-approved, even.
This Tuesday I kept myself up a bit too late working on another Warhammer-inspired piece from pure imagination, a very specific character from the lore of the game,* waiting out the millennia in stasis. If you’re familiar at all with the tabletop game Warhammer 40k, and you can remember back to the 3rd Edition Rulebook, the art therein was just phenomenal, a cacophony of black and white science fiction future warfare. I used to paint the miniatures and play the game (98% painting 2% gaming) in middle and high school. The associated artwork was an inspiration: wild, chaotic, spectacularly creative, handmade. While I could have done more to give this piece a cohesive optical feel, I chose not to, in the spirit of the third edition art.
*(I have no clue if there is a substack Warhammer-savvy community - please let it be so - but if there is, comment which character this is, and receive the kudos due. There are many easter eggs in the work to point the way…)
The day after drawing this, I attended my first Wednesday evening Gage Georgetown sculpture open studio, finding a perfect subject. So my art practice advanced (evolved? Devolved?) from Future Robot Space Wolf to Wolf-Derivative Fluffy Buddy. As I studied him from about 8 feet away, he would periodically let off a single pitiful quiet whimper, “…enhm!” Trainable as I am, I’d give him pets, and he would pose a little longer. May his mortal form one day be entombed in a giant fluffy exoskeleton to serve his chapter for another 10,000 years.
I’ve been deeply enjoying the Gage Open Studios lately, tackling complicated subjects, often in motion, challenging myself by simply following my points of greatest interest in the scene, be that the model, the artists, a new furry friend, the whole room. Several models and artists I have now seen and drawn multiple times over different days.
This drawing of Indigo builds on the previous work I’ve made of her. After drawing her in profile Sunday, I was pleased to see her again Thursday. In this 3-hour drawing, I spent the first two hours and change just setting up and refining the positioning of her outlines and features. All shading (cross hatching or just hatching) was made in the last 40 minutes.
With another Gage Georgetown Sculpture Open Studio on for Friday afternoon, I didn’t plan to draw that morning, but couldn’t help myself when a huge blue heron (is it Gary the Heron?) landed and began cleaning its feathers on a neighbor’s roof, just a few feet away, lit up magnificently in the warm midmorning sunlight.
When a heron is cleaning itself, it puffs out all its feathers in turn, including the head feathers, giving itself a mohawk, looking like Godzilla. Made over thirty minutes before the bird flew away, this is the most complete drawing I’ve made yet of a heron, and I hope to see it again in the neighborhood soon. Drawing any subject over many iterations always improves the work.
For last night’s Open Sculpture Studio I focused on Kyle sculpting, who I drew last week as well, in multiple portraits on one 18 x 24”. I love watching sculptors work. Being in a sculpture studio, I cannot help but see the figure a bit more sculpturally and dimensionally than I might otherwise.
I remain astonished by your work. Thank you!