Sketches From A Moving Train Part4

These sketches come from the first half of my current sketchbook (17 March 08). I was sick for a few weeks and worked from home, so I haven't been sketching much. I haven't been drawing at all much, come to think of it. I don't consider storyboarding for work as drawing, it's just work to me. I colourized these sketches because plain gray looked boring.

I'm growing very dissatisfied with how I draw, I wrote a list of things to focus on in the first page of this sketchbook. The list included: No more shitty poses, Learn to draw hair and cloth, Draw more dudes, Observe people around me and Use different expressions. I haven't been doing much or any of these things. I guess I'm just adverse to learning, or maybe just plain lazy. It's easy to just hunch over a sketchbook and draw the same old crap I always draw.

I think a pro AND con of the internet is that there is so much stuff. My bookmarked links to Artists websites is huge and when I find time to look at them, my inner pack-rat takes over and I just right click the images without really studying them. There's a lot of art on my computer that I haven't really looked at. I don't really get inspired anymore, not by artists, films, novels or music. I think I'm getting old and calloused. I don't feel the passions I used to feel in my early 20's. I think I'm kind of a passion parasite; I feed on the enthusiasm of those around me. When I live in Australia, I hang out with friends who aren't artists, so I don't really get inspired. When I'm in New Zealand, pretty much everyone I know are artists (there are a few particularly inspiring people there).

I've been watching some pretty good movies recently, 3 Days of the Condor by Sydney Pollack, A Streetcar Named Desire by Elia Kazan, Half Nelson by Ryan Fleck, The Lookout by Scott Frank. Four years ago I would have been jumping up and down, looking to find out what lenses and lights the cinematographer used, studying the thematic spines of the stories, memorizing compositions. Nowadays, when I finally make time to watch movies (I have a stack of dvds that I have to watch) I only really watch them as a passive viewer, which was something that I hoped I would never become (one of the reasons I hate and don't watch T.V).