by Henk ter Heide on Saturday April 17, 2010
Sometimes I get reminded of all the stupid things I was taught when I was a child. Things like it’s better to quite an activity then not to finish the project you’re working on right now.
The purpose of this sketch was to find out if it’s possible to get these nice color mixes with color hatching while at the same time retaining some control over the color.
As it turns out, that is possible.
Because it’s easier to color between the lines I had helped myself by drawing some random lines.
But by doing so it felt as though this was supposed to be a real drawing.
So after I had colored a few panels and felt that I had nothing more to learn from this sketch and I wanted to put it on this site and move on.
But then I heard the very angry voice of my mother in my head. “You never finish anything!”. “You should finish what you start!”. “You are always procrastinating”. And drawing lost all of it’s fun.
That was how it used to be some 40 years ago.
At one point I took up dancing. Which was fun apart from the fact that I was the only guy present. (Which is fun when you’re 16 but not when you’re 13 and all the girls are better dancers then you are.)
You wouldn’t believe how mad my mother became when I announced that was going to quit.
After Mr. “nobody’s” comment I started thinking again and remembered that this sketch only has a limited goal.
Thinking about this some more I did realize one thing though. What is missing from my current way of working is speed. Since my best drawings where kind of accidental there is not much purpose to my thinking about what I’m doing on a drawing by drawing base.
I do realize that figurative drawings would sell much better then abstract. Drawing abstract is a way of experimenting with techniques without having the straight jacked of having to draw objects that are prospectively correct. (If nothing else I’ll always be a perfectionist).
I do want to go back to drawing more recognizable shapes. But only if I can find a way to draw the complicated world in which I’m living.
color hatching sketch
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday April 9, 2010
Very soon after starting this drawing I realized that I was doing something else then I had planned. But even so it seemed like fun to finish the drawing the way I started to find out what would happen.
This afternoon I looked back at all my drawing because I’m making a page with my best drawings. It turns out that the drawings that I like best are the result of mistakes I made.
Mistakes that led me to ideas.
And indeed while I was doing this drawing I thought of something I’m going to do tomorrow.
Colored lines
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 4, 2010
My fountain pen is gliding over the paper. Up, down, up, down.
I love to watch while the black is slowly consuming the white paper. I could do this all day.
But I won’t.
If I just paint the whole paper black there isn’t much to look at.
But I would want to…
Then comes the hard part.
Although the colors I get with this color hatching technique are beautiful. They are also completely unpredictable.
I don’t like things that are unpredictable.
The shorter the lines, the more colors I use, the more unpredictable and beautiful the result.
Or I can begin with a layer of some color and then place a few lines on top. That’s far more predictable but not as beautiful.
I’m mostly fearful of my next few drawings.
I want to try to make kind of a landscape using my new color technique. But I’m not sure how.
If I can’t predict the colors how can I get them to interact?
Get a print of this drawing
Love and fear
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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday March 16, 2010
I started this drawing 5 times before I was satisfied with the result.
The first time was when I got the idea. But I didn’t like the shapes.
The last time I realized that if I wanted to contrast between white and black I should use a pen that’s really black instead of grayish.
Pebbles
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday February 28, 2010
I just saw a video by Seth Godin about shipping.
He mentions something I never realized.
I always thought that being an artist is about making beautiful and interesting drawings. But not according to Seth.
Seth Godin says that any business is about shipping.
And of course he is right.
In the Christmas holiday I started a very complicated drawing that probably will be very beautiful if I ever get it finished.
But like with most complicated drawings that I do. It takes a lot of time to complete and the middle part isn’t very interesting to do.
I haven’t done much drawing the last few months, so I’m still only about one third the way of completing the drawing.
Thinking about this shipping idea I realized that there is a better way to drawing. It would work much better if I draw a lot of these easy, quick drawings. And when I feel like it I’ll intermix them with working on the more complex drawings.
Lines 6
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday September 21, 2009
A few weeks ago I wrote that I had reached the end of what I could creatively do with color pencils and that I had decided I would try my hand at painting.
I was planning to try to paint with acrylic paint but the guy in the art surplies shop advised me to try oil paint.
According to him with oil paint you have more time to think about your painting while you’re painting it and you have time to correct any mistakes. Both are because the drying time is much longer then with acrylic.
Oddly enough, because of the long drying time, it also has a very strange down side. You have to paint several paintings at ones.
That is you can put several layers of paint on top of each other. With which you can produce very interesting pictures. But before you can put the next layer down you have to wait until the last is dry. Which can take a few days.
You don’t want to spent iternity waiting until you can paint the next layer. So in stead you paint several paintings at one.
I’ve just started my third painting while I still waiting to finish my second painting.
The other problem, of course, is that I can’t put a painting in my scanner. From now on I have to photograph my paintings.
So I’ve bought a little tripod and tried my own digital camera to take the picture. But obvious both need replacing.
The painting is kind of an accident. I wanted to paint the battle between yellows, reds and browns. Which is what I did.
Later when I started reading about oil painting I found that the first oil painting people make usually contains a lot of brown because people mix to many colors.
So I feel kind of saved by the bell 
Color fight
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday August 31, 2009
It used to be that clocks where those big, almost statue like, objects standing in the middle of the room. Heavy weight pulling chains, moving cogs, moving time.
If you stared at them long enough you could see time flow.
Then came the electrical clock,
his minute hand jumping from minute to minute.
Time moving faster and faster.
Now we have digital clocks and time has stopped flowing.
It has become some kind of calculation.
I started this project at 12 noon and finished it at 14.33. So it took me 233 minutes….
233 minutes?
Flow of time
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday July 5, 2009
Thinking about my thinking process.
- Processing abstract information
- Finding the limit of my thoughts
So I had figured out that I talk to myself to solve abstract problems. I figured that since the behavior has a purpose there should be a natural border. Some place to stop talking.
BTW When I say I’m talking to myself that’s not completely true. In my fantasy I’m having a discussion with some one who is an interested party in the problem I’m trying to solve.
I tell him the story of the problem plus every solution I’ve found up till now.
Sometimes I get stuck and I will repeat the same few sentences over and over for hours. Sometimes even for days.
You can imagine how annoying that can get.
It took me a while but I finally found out that there is actually a very obvious answer to this question.
For me the whole world is connected. Every problem is connected to every other problem – I’m told that this has either something to do with being autistic or with having a visual thought process – So when I start analysing some problem I can’t stop because the problem goes on and on.
But I can greatly reduce the number of problems I have to solve if I simply apply the rule that every problem I solve has to improve my life.
So Dutch unemployment crisis, as interesting it might be, is not something I should be thinking about. Same holds true for the famine in Africa.
But Promen’s (my employer) embezzlement of reimbursement of travelling expenses is a problem I should try to solve. Not only because it is costing me money. But there’s the simple matter of people doing what they are supposed to do. I should follow the rules and so should upper management. (What can I say. I’m autistic. People acting the way there supposed to, is more important to me then money )
(More about this when I’ve solved it.)
So I’ve been living by this rule for a few days and it helps.
A bit.
After a few days I found that even when I limited myself to problems that actually influence my live. I still spend a lot of time talking to myself.
Turns out that I’m somewhat impatience.
When I run into a problem I tend to think about it until I’ve found the first 10 solutions. Then I implement the first solution.
But instead of waiting to find out if the solution works I continue thinking about new solutions. Which is a waste of time because the first one usually works.
But some times it doesn’t. Some problems are a little more complicated. Like the problems with my embezzling employer. And that is when I run into the real problem.
Turns out the there is no logic in the way I solve problems. Possible solutions come at random intervals.
There’s no way of knowing if I’ve found every solution or whether there are still a few more.
And as I said sometimes I get stuck and repeat the same few sentences over and over again.
Sometimes I follow a train of though to it’s bitter end. Only to find that it wouldn’t work.
And then I stop.
And I have no idea whether I stop because I’ve reached the end of a school of thought. Or the end of a series of solutions.
Or just stop because I don’t feel like thinking abstract anymore.
The thing is that if I stop because I’ve reached the end of the school of thought or the end of the series of solutions. It would imply that I do know how many solutions I might expect.
If that’s the case it stands to reason that me getting stuck has more to do with my own annoyance then with my thinking process.
To Be Continued…
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by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday June 17, 2009
Thinking about my thinking process.
- Processing abstract information
- Finding the limit of my thoughts
In my last post I wrote that I expected that post would be a little further apart in future. This one is taking even more time then I had expected.
On the up side I have figured out that my very annoying habit of talking to myself is actually a symptom of my autism.
Having a visual thinking process means that I can’t think about subjects I can’t visualize. Things like “feelings”, the word “goals”, “business deals” are to abstract to visualize.
I’m not able to think about them except by talking about them.
Accepting that this is a symptom of my autism means a few things.
- It means that I have to accept that I will never get rid of this habit.
- It means that I’ll have to accept that I can’t draw as much as I would want to. Because I can’t think visual at the same time that I’m processing abstract information.
- But it also means that I need a better understanding of this process. There must be a natural boundary. A point where I’ve solved the problem I’m working on and should go back to thinking visually. That’s what I’m working on right now.
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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 2, 2009
A few days ago I wrote that I had to get some things out of my system before I could really concentrate on drawing. I even started with an article about unemployment.
But now I’m feeling that isn’t it. Maybe it’s just that I don’t yet really know how my process works.
This morning I realized what the problem was with the drawing I was planning. It was not, as I was thinking, that the different parts of the drawing could present problems. It was the drawing it self.
I had printed a photo of some beautiful actress with blond hair that I was planning to copy.
The problem is that I don’t copy.
It’s like I’m making a kind of choice. Only it isn’t a choice.
The choice would be that I rather make a bad original drawing then a good copy. But that is not it.
It’s more like I can’t force myself to copy anything.
It doesn’t matter what good reasons there might be for making a copy (getting practice, feeling safe). I just can’t do it.
Maybe I should just accept that while I’m switching to this, relatively, new interest I’ll draw when I have something to draw. The rest of the time I will fill with thinking about it and searching for beautiful art to fill my web pages.
Anyway. About todays drawing.
I bought Jack Hamm’s book about drawing land and seascapes and found that it’s almost the opposite of his book on portrait and figure drawing.
Where the book on portraits starts with almost no theory and a lot of pictures of body parts to copy. The book on landscapes starts with 20 pages of theory on composition.
And what a theory. I’ve been drawing and reading about drawing and painting on and off for the last 30 years. But Hamm teaches me more about composition in the first 8 pages then I had learned up till now.
Since business is slow at my job at the moment I took the book to work and forgot to take it back home for the Whit weekend. So Saturday when I had a little time I couldn’t read the book but I could think about what I have read.
The theory is that you should not put your subject in the middle of your frame. Well you could if you wanted to. But you’d get an interesting picture if you don’t.
At first I started thinking about holiday snapshots.
Let’s say you want to photograph a family of five in front of a large old oak.
The most obvious choice would be to line the family up with the oak behind the person in the middle. And shoot them head to toe with the tree trunk showing above the head of the person in the middle.
But you’d get a much more interesting picture if you have the tree behind the second person in the line.
Shoot the people head to middle with a little more then a quarter of the frame showing either the sky or low hanging branches.
Or so it is written on page 5 of the book. Page 6 and 7 talks about catching the eye of the audience in a circler motion by putting interesting feature of the drawing on specific lines.
This drawing is an attempt at that.
EyeSee
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