28 October 2012

what baseball has done for me lately




It has been quite some time since someone offered me money for services in a bar.
While at a conference earlier this week, I wandered into the Mucky Duck with a colleague to watch game seven of the Giants/Cardinals series. I'm not a baseball fan, really, so I was doing what I always do in these situations. I pulled out my sketch book to draw. I was trying (and mostly failing) to draw the batter in his batter's helmet while he shifted, adjusted and the cameras kept switching to other angles. My sketches were a little pathetic, but I suppose when one is confident enough to draw in a bar, some skill is assumed by observers.
One of the waitresses came up on my blind side and said, "oh my god, you draw? Do you want to draw my daughter? I'll pay you."
Within moments of my half-mumbled, "sure" she was back with a stack of really nice photos of an adorable blonde ~2yo. I sifted through them as my companion alternated between yelling encouragement to the Giant at bat and gushing about the child's extreme cuteness.
I selected the photo that showed the child's happy personality and set the others off to the side. I started in pencil to be certain that I had proportions correct. Errors in drawing people are noticeable in a way that an error in drawing a spiny lobster is not. We as people look at other people all of the time. Whether we realize it or not, simply by interacting with other humans we have internalized the basic measurements between facial features and have an inatate sense of "rightness". We judge a portrait by how well the artist placed the nose, mouth, eyes in relation to each other.
Once I got the basics down, I came back in with ink, shading, tweaking. The light in the bar was not ideal, but I was able to shift along the bar toward the kitchen and borrow some illumination. 
Additional challenges: happy baseball fans pounding the bar. The waitress bringing people over to look at the drawing in progress.
I took several bad photos with my Blackberry before signing the bottom. I carefully ripped the portrait out of my sketch book and handed  it & my card over. The waitress was thrilled.
At the end of the night, Giants world series bound, we fled the odd live music. Our tab for 4 drinks and food came to less than $20. All for a sketch. Works for me.

2 comments:

  1. Love the story, love the sketch. (And yeah, those spiny lobsters at the bar are really a lot less prone to saying "you got my nose wrong!", aren't they? Hee hee.)

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  2. Ha! It is true. Lobsters usually don't say much about art.

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