Where do you want to go?
Number one.
You, Tommy Kane, and your son are making the coolest videos.
How did this start?
How many have you made?
More in the works?
We started making these movies earlier in the year.
You know, I've made a few little sort of time-lapse demonstrations of what it's like to do a drawing before.
But I was never really that happy with the quality of them.
I filmed them mainly with the same camera I'm using to film this, which is a Flip Cam,
which is a pretty good camera for what it is.
But early in the year I got this, which is a Canon 7D, which is an incredible camera.
You can shoot things that could go on the air as a TV commercial or as a TV show.
And you can rent all kinds of lenses to put on it or buy them.
And you can do almost anything that you would do with a professional-level movie camera.
So that completely transformed the quality of what we were making
and then made it worth putting a lot more effort into making really good films with stories
and trying to capture the whole sort of artistic process.
So, so far we've made about a half a dozen of these little films.
We've made two about me and we've made one about Tommy Kane,
who's an old friend of mine, who's been a collaborator on most of the films ever since.
And then we've made a couple of other films about people who honestly neither of us knew before
but got to know through the process of documenting how they work.
One of whom was an animator, another was a tattoo artist,
and we have a bunch of ideas of future people that we would like to make films of.
It feels like these little films have achieved one of the goals that we had in making them,
which was to create films that would stand alone and that would just get people excited about drawing
and about the drawing process and show them what goes on behind the scenes.
And ultimately it would be cool perhaps to do a feature-length film about drawing
and document all the different kinds of people who keep illustrated sketchbooks
and all the different ways that they do that.
So that's my gigantic ambition for one day.
We'll see if we get around to doing that.
In the meantime, we're having fun making little films like this
and try to explore how exactly do you take a process that could take somebody
half an hour or several hours and turn it into a film that sustains interest
that lasts for about four minutes or so.
I also had an idea for a film about pens.
It seems like an odd topic for a film,
but it seems like people have such specific things about pens,
about the ones that they like to use, and so forth.
So it might be interesting to do kind of a longer film about that,
about different people, the pens they use, why they like them, what they do with them.
And so that's something that we might do in the future.
It's a fun project and we make one every month, month and a half.
Jack, my son, has been involved as the sort of cinematographer on a lot of these.
Unfortunately, he's going off to college,
so we're going to have to figure out how to get along without his contributions.
But it's just been a really fun experience to work together to explore this kind of thing
and to make films that people seem to like.
I mean, I'll be honest with you, there are days that pass that I don't draw.
There have been weeks that pass, there have been months that pass.
And, you know, what seems to happen is if you miss a day,
missing the next day becomes easier and eventually you just fall out of the habit.
It feels rusty and it feels like a chore.
And it's silly really because it shouldn't, it's not like flossing.
It's something that gives you returns, right?
It's like, you know, something that you should do because you want to do it.
And so I find that if I stop drawing for a period and then I get back into it,
I ask myself, why did I ever stop?
You know, why did I lose that habit?
And, you know, it makes me happy to keep doing it.
So it's not an everyday thing, but it's certainly an every year thing.
I mean, a year hasn't gone by that I haven't drawn.
And, you know, I find like right now I'm in a period where I'm drawing at least every day,
often more than that, and it's fantastic.
I can't wait to do the next drawing.
That being said, you know, I don't think drawing should be like going to the dentist.
And, you know, it should be more like eating a hot fried sundae, which is something that I try to do regularly.
And it's difficult for me to keep up with it.
I wish I did it more.
And when I do eat a hot fried sundae, I think, man, this is really good.
I should eat more of these.
What am I doing?
But, you know, I'm only human.
And, you know, I should really go and eat a hot fried sundae sometime soon.
What was the question?
Number three, writing a book?
When will it be out?
Tell us about it.
Yeah, I have a couple of new books that I'm working on.
One of them is this one, which is called A Kiss Before You Go, an illustrated memoir of love and loss.
And it is an illustrated book called Paintings.
And it is the story of how I met my wife, Patty, and the time that we spent together, and her death,
and the time since that, you know, my son and I have sort of adjusted and dealt with missing her
and not having her as part of our lives.
It is published by Chronicle Books, and it will be available probably in mid-November.
And, you know, I'm really excited about it.
I think it's a very heartfelt book, obviously, and it's, you know, in a lot of ways,
I think the best thing that I've done so far.
And it was very important to me to do it, and to do it as well as I possibly could.
And I hope everybody else gets something out of it as well.
My other book is a sequel to this book, An Illustrated Life, which was my last book.
I did this two or three years ago.
And this is an illustrated life was about a broad range of people who kept sketchbooks,
illustrated sketchbooks, as you know, Jane, because you're in it.
And An Illustrated Journey is a book about just illustrated travel journals.
And I have an incredible group of people on new people who have created fantastic paintings
and drawings and writing and stuff, you know, capturing their journeys and travels around the world.
And it's full of really interesting interviews, and I learned a huge amount doing it.
And I think it's going to be a really exciting book.
It's at the publisher now, and I think that will probably be available by next February.
So it's just in the process of being edited and designed and put together.
So I haven't actually come close yet to having an actual copy of it.
Hopefully that'll happen in a few months.
But I'm very excited about that.
So two books, A Kiss Before You Go, and An Illustrated Journey, both coming out at the end of the year and beginning of next year.
Number four, I wish you'd teach, like, create an art retreat with you as the teacher for a week in some glorious place.
Any plans for that?
Well, that sounds like a lot of fun.
And, you know, so often when I have taught, which has been only really a few times,
the classes are held in sort of convention centers and conference centers and classrooms and things like that.
And there's not a lot of beautiful stuff to draw.
And it's not even interesting stuff to draw.
So it has made it less fun than perhaps it could be.
But I think the idea of a group of people going somewhere beautiful and drawing sounds great.
When do we go?
Number five, what is your favorite part of your day?
I think my favorite part of the day is probably the morning.
You know, that's the time when, you know, you can get stuff done and you can be productive.
And then suddenly the pressure is off.
You can spend the rest of the day doing whatever you want.
It's all extra.
I think that by nature, I am, I think of myself as a night person.
But the reality is that as I get older, I tend to wake up earlier and earlier.
And suddenly, you know, hopping out of bed at 6.30 doesn't seem like it's too painful to chore.
And, you know, if you can get a lot of stuff done before the day really begins, then it's all gravy after that.
Number six, give us some titles of your favorite books, any kind, fiction, nonfiction, or art related.
Well, I love books, obviously.
And while I read mainly these days on my Kindle, I read a lot of novels.
I read nonfiction books.
But I'm not going to talk about those.
I'm going to talk about real books that I also love to read in real paper and on real ink and so forth.
Art books, mainly.
So this is a book that I just bought.
It's called Painting People.
And it's sort of a review of different forms of figurative painters and the work that they do these days.
It's edited by this woman, Charlotte Mullins.
And what I like about this book is it shows all the variety in different ways in which people, you know, interpret the human form.
Some of it's abstract.
A lot of it's pretty figurative.
But there's just such a range to it and such a variety.
It's kind of really inspiring.
And I, you know, I flip through it on a regular basis to just think about how I draw people and to think about different ways in which you can interpret the same form.
This is another book that I borrowed from my friend Tommy Kane.
It's called Pyongyang A Journey in North Korea by Guy DeLille, who's a Canadian animator who has traveled to a lot of sort of interesting, sort of, I would say, politically challenged places
and done this sort of graphic novel describing his experiences there.
I really like the way that he tells a story.
I like his sort of persona.
I like the quality of his line and the black and white drawings that he does.
And, you know, his depiction of people, his architecture.
It all has a lot of personality and it gives me a lot of ideas on how to do sort of little tiny drawings that have a lot of story value to them.
I mentioned this book, Artist Journal Workshop, Creating Your Life in Words and Pictures.
It's a book that was written and edited by Kathy Johnson.
And it has a lot of fantastic stuff in it.
I mean, first of all, it has some of my stuff in it, too.
But that's not the reason that I bring it up.
Because I just really like Kathy's approach.
I like the quality of her drawings and paintings.
And she has a lot of people, some of whom I know, some of whom I don't, in this book.
It's full of examples, of prompts, suggestions, just demonstrations, all kinds of things.
And it's just, every page has dozens of ideas and inspirations.
This is a book that I keep in my kitchen by my place where I eat breakfast every day.
And I flip through it several times a week.
Just for a few pages to get some ideas before I go and draw myself.
It's a fantastic resource and I really recommend it.
Here's some of the books that I've owned for many years but continue to inspire me time and again.
This is Paris Sketchbook by Ronald Searle.
Anything that Ronald Searle does is fantastic to me.
But I particularly love the stuff that he did in the late 40s, early 50s to the early 60s.
The quality of his line, the scratchiness, the splatter that he has, the way that he captures people,
the way that he just draws buildings, he draws sometimes very, very intense detail.
Other times he leaves areas empty to emphasize that detail.
He's also a great visual journalist and there's just endless inspiration in this book for me.
He has so many books but Paris Sketchbook and I own two different copies of it.
And it's a book that's been out of print for ages but you can find it on the internet.
And I've also posted pages from it on my website many times but that's really a great book as are many of his others.
This is Creative Ink Drawing by Paul Hogarth.
He's written two books about drawing, Creative Ink Drawing and Creative Pencil Drawing.
Hogarth is primarily an illustrated journalist I would call him.
He does illustrations but he also goes to places and does stories about them.
He has done all the covers for all the Graham Greene novels as they came out in the 50s and 60s.
Again, I really like the quality of his drawings.
He draws with crow quills sometimes, with dip pens, with fountain pens, with brush.
He travels to interesting locations and tries to find stories behind them.
And in this book, Creative Ink Drawing, he also explains the stories behind his techniques.
He tells stories about drawing.
He talks about, you know, even things like how to cut a feather into a pen.
It's just a great book and I go back to time again.
I think there have been several editions of it. You can find it around.
It's a fantastic book.
David Gentleman is well known in England.
I think Americans know him that well.
He's done a whole series of books. This one is called Coastline.
He's done books all about traveling through England.
And he does watercolors.
He tends to draw an ink, draw in a brush, draw with watercolors and a brush.
And I love the way that he uses color.
Sometimes it's bright and intense.
Sometimes it's muted. He puts in detail where it's needed.
Sometimes it's kind of a cartoony vibrancy to his work.
At other times it is, you know, more architectural.
But there's a huge variety to it.
And again, lots of different things you can learn from looking at it.
And his books are all dense with lots and lots of drawings.
The text tends not to be as interesting to me.
It just talks less about the method of drawing.
And they're more sort of like books that are almost like travel or coffee table books.
But, you know, there's many, many books that he's put out.
And I strongly recommend him, David Gentleman.
So, you know, those are my favorite books right now.
As for novels, I don't know.
Maybe I'll post a few and send you a few links to things that I'm reading right now.
I don't feel like I have anything particular to say that's that interesting about.
About my general reading, but, you know, when it comes to art books, you know, they're my passion.
Number seven, future plans and dreams.
You know, ever since I first started to draw, my life has changed in so many different ways.
And I think I've found that in the course of sharing that enthusiasm
and explaining to people that it's possible to overcome your anxiety about drawing, about creativity,
to overcome all those lousy art teachers you might have had in the fifth grade.
And, you know, to make drawing into this regular part of your life doesn't have to be a profession.
It's just something fun to do.
And I think about my dreams and fantasies and, you know, plans for the future.
They're all kind of around that notion and doing more with that.
Because I find that, you know, I keep experimenting.
And as I experiment, I find, you know, new energy and new things that I want to do.
So, you know, first it was just drawing and making that a habit and then it was doing books
and then it was doing little films and then it was doing stuff on the internet.
And it just keeps going on and on.
And now, you know, my life has changed so dramatically the last couple of years since Patty died
and Jack's going off to college and, you know, I just don't know where I'm going to be going.
But I do know that drawing and being part of this whole Everyday Matters group
has just been incredible for me and I want to do more with it.
And I seem to be inclined that way.
I seem to have more energy for it, more ideas, like getting more feedback.
So it keeps going.
And I think that that's really, I'm incredibly lucky that way that, you know, in spite of the stuff
that may have happened in my life, this feedback and love and encouragement and inspiration
and the whole cycle of it, the whole kind of community of it is just really fantastic.
You know, I want to meet more people in person.
I want to go to places.
I want to draw with people.
I want to think of new kinds of books to make.
I want to, you know, figure out how we can bring more people in there and share more stuff with people.
You know, it's limitless.
And, you know, so I just get very excited about it, as you can tell.
And, you know, Jane, I know that you share my enthusiasm for this.
I know that you're doing all kinds of things to get people to express their creativity.
And there are a lot of other kindred spirits out there, people who, you know, want to either participate
or want to show the way of how this can be done and to figure it out.
And that's what we're doing.
So that's kind of my grand, you know, hope for the future is that we do more of it more intensely.
Do it together.
Use technology to share it, to bring people in and yet not forget that it's really in the end
just about a piece of paper and a pen and recording your life and making that a habit that you do
as often as you possibly can.
Number eight, feel free to add any other questions and answers you'd like to include.
I don't know. I guess my only question would be where has the time gone?
I've had a fantastically fun time answering your questions, Jane.
Thanks very much for asking them and thanks for giving me this opportunity to answer them.
I hope that it has clarified some things for you as it has for me
and that you will take this as an opportunity to go and draw something
which is what I plan to do now that I've done with this barrage of interrogation.
Have a lovely day. Bye-bye.
