Line Drawings

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Here’s some drawings where line is everything. I like drawings in which line itself is emphasized.


The forehead of this guy reminded me of Disney’s beast from “Beauty and the beast”.


Why are there so many couples in this series?


It’s simple; couples concentrate on each other, not looking around at potential sketchers who might be drawing them. In this drawing a simple jagged line becomes a fur collar.


Cops look surprisingly interesting in drawings. Gotta go find some more. But I feel uneasy drawing cops. One day I spotted a whole flock of them in front of a shop. Whoa! Cops! I instinctively reached for my Moleskine and pencil. Then I stopped. Uh… if I suddenly stop in the middle of the sidewalk and start drawing cops… wouldn’t that look a little bit suspicious?


One circle is a ring, one circle is an earring, one circle is a button.

Special moments

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How many times do you get the chance to draw a 30-something-skinhead-half-naked-nazi riding the subway with his regular-looking girlfriend?


How many times do you get the chance to draw a long-necked girl with delicate features that looks like a fairy-tale character?


How many times do you get the chance to draw… actually you might get a few chances to draw an asian girl with glasses and protruding teeth enjoying a conversation with her glass-wearing relatively-cool-looking non-asian partner.

Dreamscapes

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Sometimes I do sketches like this. I don’t know what to call them, but everybody seems to appreciate them. I called them “Joshua Sketches” for some time, because they look similar to what Joshua Davis does, only I’m doing them BY HAND. And that name is only for my own “internal” use. Now that I’m showing them outside my small circle of friends, I need a better name for them.

Dreamscapes? Infinite Gardens? Hyperflowers?

Ugly Drawings

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An apprentice artist strives to draw things beautifully. As he grows older, he realizes he can actually draw them ugly. Why not? It’s his art, after all. I am the first and most important consumer of my art. So why not make things as I enjoy doing them at a particular time? I can draw stuff beautifully next time.

Moments when you feel the beauty in ugliness must be cherished. They don’t come often. All the other times ugliness remains plain ugly.


Can you see the little devil figure? In the building I live, on the elevator door there’s a little spot where the latest coat of paint(green) has fallen off, revealing the previous coat of paint(orange). To me that spot looks like a tiny devil, and I could not resist drawing it.


With eyes without pupils, the image becomes haunting.


One of the things I’ve discovered is to draw people from quite some distance. Since you can’t really discern their features now, there’s a lot of things you need to make up, which adds chaos and distortion, and gives surprising results.


As you can probably see, I consider my drawings as expendable, and I see no problem erasing some of them and drawing on the same page over and over again.


Here the lines got bored of following the real shape of the source face, and decided to have a party all by themselves.

Landscapes

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“Urlatoarea” Waterfall (“The Howler”) in Bucegi mountains. The fine-tipped marker gives a type of line I am very fond of. Apparently, I found the big boulder on which people climb to make photos more interesting than the waterfall itself, which is less of a view than the Romanian Ministry of Tourism’s clumsily put together nation branding site would like you to think it is. Through the peculiarities of capitalism, you can buy a bottle of coke right there. The merchant camping there has brought even a branded umbrella. Now there are two things you can find anywhere. Coca-Cola. And garbage. I thought the mountains were the place to go when you want to get away from it all. Coca Cola. And garbage.


Ciolanu Monastery. Somewhere near the… Mud Volcanoes. My friends kept saying “hurry up!” and now look at those poor fir trees! Left as mere outlines, half-drawn in front of the building.

There’s some words I wrote on the page: “Cars come and go. There’s no visiting fee. Many black dogs. When we leave, two buses full of kids will come. A mob of black dogs pin down a white one. I regret not taking a picture of the scene. Makes me think of racism”

From other notes related to the image itself, you find out that the sky is gray and cloudy, the monastery roof is red and pink and gray, the tower wall is gray, and the vegetation is dark green.


I have no idea where this is (exactly) from. The same trip to the Mud Volcanoes. Enjoy the volkswagen and the utility pole. The rest is conveyed through convenient single words. Or mere letters. The sign is red. The volkswagen is a grey-green Golf model. The person near the car is dressed in black. The other person (a girl) climbed on top of some heavy (gray) concrete border on the edge of the road. Behind the concrete border there are yellow-brown bushes, and behind those, a valley dissolves into mist. Electrical wires on top. The road keeps climbing on the right side. As we look farther away, there are nondescript buildings, and a lake between some big hills. Everything is enveloped in mist this cold autumn day (in case those long coats, the brown bushes and the mist didn’t gave it away already). All that in a sketchy drawing which pushes you to reconstruct the whole image yourself. Much like a haiku. And that’s what I like about it.

Could look great if I would add some color. Or should I?


Near Mogosoaia Palace there’s a lake where on a small island this big impressive leafless tree caught my eye. It’s summer, and that means the tree is actually dead.

Misterious Figure

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Somewhere in Bucharest’s subway network there’s a pillar where water infiltration produced a spot that kind of looked like a clothed female figure. It’s recently been repainted, so now it’s too late for you to check if it really looked like a woman or I just have an over-active imagination.

Water infiltration is quite a common problem, the terrain is apparently not fit for this type of construction, but who could stand in the path of Nicolae Ceausescu‘s determination to have a subway network built in Bucharest?

I think I should just call these things “ghosts” — spots, marks, stains, anything randomly produced, that kind of looks like something. A ghost. A doodle ghost? Doodleghost! Actually, there’s scientific name for this phenomenon: Pareidolia. The habit of the human brain of making sense out of any data, including random data. Which is usually very useful. That’s how the brain of a baby learns to see, and that’s how we can recover from brain damage. The brain wires itself into making sense out of any input it receives. Which also leads to some complications. Little children may perceive scary faces into a simple window knob with two screws, and some grown-ups see the Virgin Mary everywhere. That pillar of mine would be a perfect example. It’s a clothed female, it has some kind of halo around, of course it’s her. Or is it? Unfortunately, it’s not symmetrical enough 🙂

Silhouettes

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People riding the subway.


When you stand up in a corner, there’s little chance other people standing up in other corners notice you drawing them.


Subway stations are infinite collections of silhouettes begging you to draw them.


An added benefit is those silhouettes are standing pretty still. Young, tall, thin, hipstery-hat wearing guys. Middle-aged, short, plump, bag-and-umbrella-wielding women. Standing side by side.


Some people equate military-style clothing with raw masculinity. I just equate them with the chance to make a cool drawing.


The text reads: “I told you I can draw them both with a single line while we’re walking. See?”

Silhouettes

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I swear he looked exactly like this.


This one too. Funny shaped silhouettes are a blast to draw.

These previous two drawings were made while waiting in line inside a drugstore.


Tram stations are also good places you can draw unaware people. Thank you, cell phone technology! You have turned people from sentient beings into mindless drones, blissfully ignorant of their surroundings. Perfect for sketchers. And pickpocketing.


Can’t a guy carry his water in peace? Not when there’s a manic sketcher stalking his moves.


Skinny small self-important rocker, complete with pony-tail, cigarette, black leather jacket and kewl moves.

If you looked carefully, you may have noticed a lot of these people are drawn from behind. Yup, it’s the same as that jungle thing: Approach the pray from behind, don’t let it catch your smell. Weirdo sketcher.

Portraits

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I love drawing. I work as a graphic designer, but I drew a lot in art school. Drawing is refreshing: no deadlines, no imposed style, just follow your own whims. A real joy.

Some of them are linear and clean.


Some are linear and loose.


Some are linear and compulsive.


Here actor Horatiu Malaele was delivering a stand-up comedy act at the Comedy Theatre in Bucharest. The lines are short, busy, analytical and loose; he was not standing still and the lighting was quite poor. As were more than half of his jokes. Old stale jokes. Sorry for that stab Mr. Malaele, but you’re not a newcomer, you had plenty of years to come up with new stuff.


This is a special one. The style in which I draw is influenced by my drawing “mood”. Tired, rested, excited, bored, focused, uncaring. For this one I felt like sculpting shapes out of chaos. I worked from marking overall shapes and shadows with big uncaring loose squiggles to detailing with smaller, loose and less uncaring squiggles.


This is executed in my clean-linear-elegant-expressive style.


I drew her feet separately, showing how they have trouble fitting into her shoes, overflowing their edges. Why not accept the reality and buy some bigger ones? Losing some weight would work also. But squeezing large feet into small shoes is beyond my comprehension.


Old people are cool to draw. They are basically nothing else but expressive bunches of lines themselves.


Man in his nineties. His face is heavily wrinkled, and he wears a thick shirt with busy geometric patterns underneath a furry piece of clothing whose english name I don’t care to find out now (Later edit: a fur vest, actually). His hair is angel-white, and on the wall behind him there’s a picture of him and his now-defunct wife.

Yes, I drew them in a Moleskine. Am I a snob? Maybe not. I just wanted to try this overhyped notebook to see what the fuss is all about. You might think, as I did, “a notebook is just a notebook”. Well, I can’t explain. You have to try it. It just FEELS good.

But alas, their price in my country is a BIT expensive. So I’m just thinking of manufacturing these darn things by myself.