JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

This sketch shows a sculpture in a little park a few blocks from my apartment. I rarely sketch in watercolour but I should try more of these, because this particular sketchbook is made from watercolour paper…

From a sketching trip to Golden Gate Park, late last year. This one was all done in brush pen, including a pen that had almost run out of juice (for the soft-focus background).

It has been a while since I posted anything from my sketchbook, so I will be clearing up the backlog in the near future. This one was done while sitting outside a coffee shop on Filmore Street, near the intersection with Haight.

Another drawing from my sketchbook. This one is an attempt to address my weakness in drawing vehicles. (Somehow I missed that phase of childhood where little boys draw cars).

Here is an old drawing of SEPHILINA that I recently made a new Background for, to sell it as an 11X14 print at comic conventions. I’m still fiddling with it, but here is what I have so far.

Last year, during a visit to New York, my buddy Dave gave me a beautifully leather bound sketchbook he’d bought in Italy but never used. Despite being exactly the kind of posh sketchbook that I’m normally too intimidated by to actually draw in (the watercolour paper is clearly of a higher quality than my timid scrawls are yet worthy of) I’ve been trying my best to fill it with sketches done from life, and ONLY from life, over this past year.

Once upon a time I used to draw from life, and quite often, but over the years I lost the habit and turned instead to drawing from only my imagination. I enjoy this kind of doodling very much and I believe that is where my heart will always be in regards to drawing. Consequently, I have piles of recent DOODLE books, but hardly any true SKETCH books. Though my imagination is constantly active and relatively strong, I’ve wondered recently if it has less “food” to nourish itself and truly grow (rather than merely chew on old imagery from within) if I never feed it with any new real-world observation. So I decided to use this leather-bound book to try and improve my observational drawing skills and I’ve been re-learning what l already knew; drawing what you actually see is surprisingly difficult.

This attempt at a monochrome watercolour was done sitting in the park at the Yerba Buena Center. I didn’t get as far with it as I wanted it before I had to leave (to see a movie) so I returned another day at the same time (and hence similar lighting) hoping to tighten it up a bit, but one of those downtown loons that you’ll only find the likes of in a San Francisco park was sitting in the exact spot I’d used earlier and having a conference call with Aliens. So I thought better of working any more on the picture. So it is what it is. Voila.

This ball-point, brush-pen and colour pencil scrawl was drawn while sitting on the kerb in front of St. Cecilia’s Church in the Sunset district. I am a life-long pedestrian and walk as much as I can, but lately I have been walking even more, traversing neighbourhoods I’ve never strolled through in the past. Taking a rest break is a good excuse to draw a little, but despite the pleasure it always brings, I still have to force myself to do it for some reason.

These pencil sketches of a grave-sculpture angel were done during a Halloween inspired trip to Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, a city largely comprised of cemeteries (17 in fact) meaning that dead people out number the living by a factor of thousands. The place is full of beautiful old sculptures, such as this one, and I plan to go back there again to do more drawing, perhaps even some more of this particular angel. I would like to do some more sketches in paint, as the coarse paper isn’t best suited to a detailed pencil drawing.

Thus far, I have been timid about showing my drawings from this book but lately I realised that I should post them, come what may, to record my progress (if any at all). So be warned; I will be scanning and posting more in the near future.

You are welcome to download this mini for free.

Sony Trinitron TV set: Jan 2001-Jun 2009.

This ballpoint sketch of my TV also accurately shows the level of clutter in but one tiny corner of my crummy apartment… and so it is with the clutter inside of my mind.

Not long ago, when television broadcasting here in the Bay Area switched from analog to all-digital, my old Sony Trinitron TV set, the constantly-chattering room mate that has shared my apartment since 2001, went silent. I do not plan to replace it.

I love watching TV, and that can sometimes be a problem, for I can sit in front of bad television for hours with my mouth lolling open, a caveman staring at the flickering images in the fire pit… Lately I have been feeling that I do not have the time to waste. I would prefer to do other things altogether, ideally making media of my own to numb OTHER people’s minds with; Comics, drawings, short-stories and so forth. And when it comes time to relax and be a media consumer, I would rather be looking at stuff that I am actually interested in, and nothing else.

Last year, my pal Mike introduced me to the concept of a “cleanse”; a diet where the goal is not to lose weight (although that can be a by-product) but to clean out your body of a lifetime’s-worth of preservatives and junk food. So, in that spirit, I am trying the MEDIA equivalent and hope to clean out the insides of my head and cash in an extra-time dividend as well. Quite some time ago I gave up cable TV, now I don’t have broadcast TV or even radio in my apartment. Not only that, I have no home-internet either, for I have learned (the hard way) that there is no time suck worse than spending a day on Facebook.

As I have disconnected myself one-by-one from all of the nodes of the media matrix, my Apartment has become something of a sensory-deprivation tank in terms of the audio visual media. Or more accurately, it is a sensory-selection tank, as I am not truly sensory-deprived at all; I am now exposed only to the media that I choose to take into my tiny life-pod with me, one morsel at a time.

Even though my old Sony Trinitron no longer functions as a TV-set it still serves me well as a monitor with which to watch rented DVDs. There is so much wonderful Television being made now but I find that my favourite way to view it all is to wait until each series comes out on DVD and watch several episodes in a row, free from commercials and the temptations of channel-surfing.

There have been earlier periods where I tried living without TV. Long ago, when I was living in Asia, I couldn’t understand what was being broadcast anyway, so I barely watched television. Well, apart from psychotic Japanese game shows and equally insane anime cartoons (two cases where non-comprehension was somehow enjoyable). For those several years I got out of the habit of watching TV. That trend continued when I moved to France, where I didn’t even go to the trouble of buying a TV set, and the first few years living here in the USA were also television-free.

I remember well how many conversations I was unable to participate in back then, simply because I had not seen the previous night’s episode of SEINFELD or the SIMPSONS. I got tired of hearing about those shows (though I found out years later that all the fuss was justified). I continued to live in my media-free bubble until someone gave me their TV to look after while they traveled abroad. While baby-sitting that lonely telly, I turned it on one day and was suddenly back where I had begun; a man without the strength of mind to shut off the flow even when all that pours out from the box is crap.

Even now, I was unable to get rid of the TV myself. I had to wait until my TV set died before I could finally shut it off. But I hope to make the most of this change. When not watching the cherry-picked best of the TV-show crop on DVDs, I hope to read more books (I have a pile of gifts that I have yet to read) and do more drawing, free of the distractions of telly-oggling. I know myself well enough by now to realise that it is only a matter of time before I am back chewing through media crud, but until then I hope to make the most of this quiet time.

Although, now that the handy dandy white-noise machine has fallen silent, I am much more able to hear the squabbling couples, flushing toilets and crying babies in the apartments around me, not to mention OTHER people’s TVs. Not exactly what I had in mind when I began this sensory deprivation idea, but there you go….