Kat Johnston

Tag: Sketches

  • Sketch: See? Sketching -is- good for you!

    Kat Johnston: Random sketching -is- good for you. I told you so. You didn’t believe me, but its true!

    Aha! Many seem to look at me dubiously when I proclaim that I am better focused in classes due to my sketching, seeing it instead as a certain sign of my unattentiveness. However, as I have surely mentioned before (though I won’t dig out the post now, seeing as it is after midnight), I think that sketching actually helps me focus better. Its a zen-like thing – you sketch, letting your mind wander a little in one place, while the rest of it works at absorbing whatever it is you are meant to be absorbing on that particular day.

    My hubby called shennanigans. He thought that it was just a lot of hokey, and that I was pulling his leg. Well, this morning he sent me a link to this little article which proclaims the same. Yay! Now I apparently have science to back up my wonderful theories. I’m glad someone got around to trying to prove it. I wonder if I inspired them?

    So, in honor of this particular article, I dredged up one of the pages of one of my writing books, which I’ve dragged along to a lecture or two. This is a class… though I am entirely unable to recall which one. It was a while ago, after all. It features my gorgeous hung bunny, which I think hasn’t been properly introduced here in its original form until now. Yes, there’s the bunny in the moon (featuring the same bunny), but this was the way he was originally imagined, though not the first sketch of him, I assure you. My hung bunny rocks.

    Alrighty ya’ll, I think I’d best get to bed before I stay up all night! Throw some congrats my way… I got an interview! Yayyyy!

  • Three wishes were granted, may you be happy.

    Kat Johnston Sketch – it is just really really nice to be able to stumble across a picture you’ve drawn… and just smile.

    Title of today’s post is a line from a song I like, just to explain that one up front. Ok, and now onto something about the actual sketch!

    I must have actually done this little bit of sketching last week, but I stumbled onto it again last night while flicking pages back and forth trying to decide exactly which wonderful page was the one I was going to write on for the night. As if you can’t tell (if you’ve been reading for a while), I have about a trillion books and note-pads and so forth that I write and draw in; there really is no rhyme or reason as to which I might pick up one day over the next, save perhaps for the fact that some are ‘put aside’ for certain purposes.

    Well, last night I stumbled onto this little patch of random sketching in this little particular notepad and you know what? It made me smile. I love when I can do that to myself: draw something, come back to it, and just smile. It may just be that it is a fun little selection of faces all beaming and smiley and just as pleased as punch, but it does happen with other images too. The unwise owl is a good example of that. It is just an illustration I could not be more pleased to have drawn. Owls, or even mimes doing spirit fingers: easy way to make me smile. I mean, who can resist spirit fingers?

    I’m really not sure where this post is going… perhaps its just trying to shine a light on the fact that I think that it is brilliant that my own little sketches can affect me, even if they never once affect a single other person. I’d love for everyone in the world to crack a grin at one of my sketches, but even if it reaches no-one else, I have me. And if a picture can make me smile… the day’s just that little bit brighter then, now, isn’t it?

  • A Useful Lecture.

    Kat Johnston Sketchbook – The first page of yet another book… I decided to go to town on this one.

    I decided yesterday, as I went into my media writing subject, to dedicate the first page of this new little notepad to a bit of drawing… then post it with no cropping, no centering in on a good spot and cutting out the rest, or any of that sort of stuff. Thus, I present to you the first page of yet another notebook. You can click on the image to zoom in and get a bit of a better closer look… might be helpful to read some of the writing close-up.

    If I am drawing during a lecture or a class, this is the sort of stuff that does actually generally come out… it isn’t something to distract me from what is being said, it is… hmmm… lets say an almost meditative technique? It is something to do with my hands as my mind is focusing on something else (what is being said by the lecturer, teacher, etc). My mind is fairly unfocused on what I am drawing – its more a stream of consciousness than anything else, flitting here and there and everywhere as I listen to and absorb other information.

    Yes… sounds like a complete cop-out as to why I am wasting my time sketching when I should be ‘concentrating’ on something else… but I actually find it helps. I don’t entirely know how… perhaps some pseudo-meditative thing whereby the action of doing something without thought focuses the mind on that which actually requires attention.

    Or perhaps it is just that things flitter through my brain almost constantly and getting them on paper gives them somewhere to go… empties out the random things to let the important stuff have some space up there. Eh, those are a couple of theories, in any case.

    One of the best things to come out of the lecture, oddly enough, was a showing of an old film regarded by some to be the ‘worst film ever’. Plan 9 from Outer Space was shown, just the first half dozen scenes, and I was laughing the entire time… I love films that are just so bad that they’re good. Just to give you a little taste of just how brilliant this film is… watch a clip from the opening of the movie. Its well worth checking out!

  • Announcement and Update: one month has passed me by, and I’m drawing in a real sketchbook.

    Kat Johnston art - looking at a blank page is hard. Its so full of potential, and -you- have the potential to screw it up. But as the saying goes: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

    A quick note on the picture above, before it goes into the hugely long post of today. I’ve entitled it ‘Dandelion Dreaming’ and it currently occupies a place in one of my ‘real’ sketchbooks. Please read on – the site has been live for a month today, so it is a bit of a long post to kinda reflect on this fact.

    Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper. A word first coined in this post. It may not be a ‘true’ phobia, but it is certainly something a lot of us must face at one point or another. Ever sat down to write a hand-written letter and been scared to start because you just know that you are going to misspell something? Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia.

    Whilst the above example is certainly pertinent, the more common one for me has to do with sketching in a nicely bound, beautifully presented sketchbook – not the spiral-bound cheapies, or the lecture notepads… with those, you can always just turn another page, or even tear it out. There is something special, something exquisite about a sketchbook that is just waiting to be a showcase of the things that flitter around on the edge of your consciousness, works in their own right waiting to be committed to a journal, which, while rough and underdeveloped at times, you would be proud to hand to someone else and go ‘this is mine’.

    Having a ‘digital sketchbook’ such as this blog may go a way towards battling this, but I am able to, as with the ‘cheapie’ sketchbooks, pick and choose what I display here. I can toss away the incredibly bad bits and pieces and just throw up the ‘this is passable’ stuff. It just isn’t the same.

    Thus, I’ve started trying to draw in ‘actual’ sketchbooks now and then. It is something that I have seemingly avoided for quite a while – it does actually scare me. I see pictures of people’s sketchbooks and I am in awe of the things they produce, page after page of perfection – or at least, that is how I see it. How can I live up to that? Sketchbooks such as these are creative works in their own rights, no matter how much people may argue to the contrary. Whilst they may not have the centre-stage such as a well-worked painting under spotlights may have, I find them to be just as interesting, just as relevant, just as fascinating – perhaps even moreso at times because it is so raw and often unfiltered.

    Anyhow, this roundabout post is kinda just trying to point out that I am trying to do something about this silly fear I have of ruining a perfectly good sketchbook. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ is the old saying, and I’m coming to realize that it is a saying I should pay more heed to.

    On May the 16th, 2008 I started a little blog on the spur of the moment, thinking ‘if not now, then when?’. It was updated only semi-regularly, though the goal was for a once-a-day sketch as it is now. It was frequented only once in a while by a few friends, some family and so on. I never did anything to promote it, beyond telling a person or two.

    Then I had a chance to do my major assignment for my coursework on a subject of my choice. This website became that project. The saying ‘It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt’ did occur to me, but I had been doing that forever – if no-one ever sees your work, then they can’t point out that its not great, right? But nor are you going to get anywhere or move forward. Whilst I don’t generally go in for the whole ‘self help’ mantras, this one has always rung true for me: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ (Tony Robbins, in case you were curious… I had to look it up). So I did it anyway. I could have gone with a safe project, and written an essay, but instead I decided it was time to promote me.

    On the 29th of August, after weeks of learning css on the fly, modifying wordpress themes and making a place to call my virtual own, KatJohnston.com went live. As of the moment I write this, I have had 1,293 visits to this site, ranging from people I know, to people that I certainly hadn’t met before this project went underway. I’ve been putting myself out there on social networking applications: facebook, twitter, delicious and more, actually trying to get people to see what I do, who I am, even if it is just the rough sketches and flittery thoughts rather than the refined works. I’ve been consistently throwing up at least one sketch a day, even when that sketch is barely more than a few flicks of a pen to say ‘there, I’ve done a sketch, now I need some sleep’.

    Before I started out on doing this, I wasn’t drawing consistently. I wasn’t doing something day by day, every day and I certainly didn’t feel as if I wanted to be in my studio every waking moment. Right now, I cannot wait until my time at university is over. I am still working strong on assignments with another month ahead of me, but I’m almost counting down the days until I am done and will have time to paint and draw for more than a minute here, or an hour there. Believe it or not, doing this has actually made me enthusiastic about something that has fallen to the wayside for far too long: creating.

    Perhaps it is the fact that people are actually seeing my work, or the fact that I have people now who I know check this site day by day to see what I have drawn. Perhaps it is just that I can scroll through these pages myself and go ‘you know, I actually like what I do’ in a way that can’t really be done with scraps of paper scattered from one end of the house to the other in a dozen different books and places. It isn’t life-changing stuff, its just random thoughts, random sketches and things that make me smile – but it has made a real difference. I’m showing my work to people, risking ‘failure’, rejection and more by throwing the good up with the not-so-perfect, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m also starting to sketch in sketchbooks now. Yup, I am a little scared – I think I always will be when it comes to this. But I’m doing it anyway.

    Something has been ventured: everything has been gained.

  • Jenny makes another appearance.

    Kat Johnston sketch - Another Jenny, and I've even done the whole body... not sure if it is the final body she's going to get, but it looks good for now.

    I’ve had this one in the sketchbook for over a week now, just never got around to actually scanning it in – and since I am working on a larger sketch at the moment, I thought I’d throw up this one to fill in the gap for today. For those who are seeing Jenny for the first time today, try checking out the ‘Jenny’ category to get an idea of her progression.

    Anyhow, stay tuned for something more substantial either later tonight or tomorrow. I’ve been busy working on a slightly more detailed sketch and cursing the fact that I need a better desk, so I’ll post the results of that little experiment when I’m done.

    So far, I’ve been having fun with it save for one, rather annoying thing. The pen I have started drawing it with is faltering. Now for me, this is not a good thing… because not all pens are created equal and the pen I am using is not a generic bic or something. If it were, I could just pick up another generic bic, and continue with a nice, fresh pen. Since I don’t have a refil for this pen, nor another pen exactly the same, I have to continue with using this one. Argh!

    Ah well… it is my own fault. I have been using that pen to death recently, and it is about time it falters. I think it is actually a combination of the pen and the type of paper I’m using. Well, I’d better get back to it!