"Drawing with My Phone" by Richard F. Yates

Howdy folks, it's Saturday morning, and I'm not feeling particulary creative or capable of spinning any interesting lies today---so I'm going for a "how-to" or, more accurately, a "how-I-do" post.

Yesterday, for fun, while I was sitting around killing a few minutes, I drew this little, semi-abstract monster on my phone:

I draw fast---the whole thing done in less than fifteen minutes. (I know what you're saying, "It's OBVIOUS that you draw fast... Nobody would spend a lot of time on something THAT dumb!" Ha!) But, like the artist and filmmaker, Mike Mills, said in the documentary, BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, he doesn't TRUST things that take too long to create---and I don't either.

I'm capturing moments, little moods, evil little bites of movement and emotion.

I have a smaller Galaxy phone---I don't know which one, exactly, because I didn't buy it, my wife did...I thought my OLD phone was fine still---and I use a free app called "Sketch" for most of my digital drawing (unless I'm on my laptop, in which case I use "Paint.") The program lets you draw over a photo or other image OR start from scratch. In this case, I started with a blank "canvas," and I usually pick the square to draw in, when starting from nothing. (For a LOT of my artwork, I start by drawing with a ballpoint pen or a Sharpie on paper or a hunk of cardboard, then I photograph the drawing and use "Sketch" just to color and tweak the image. Not this time. Yesterday, I started with nothing---a blank playground.)

With this drawing, I used a big brush "cursor" (I'm completely untrained in art junk, so I don't know the technical terms) with the "rainbow" color assignment on it, starting with a bright green. With the rainbow color thing on, the brushstroke changes colors the longer you keep a single stroke going, but by using small strokes, I kept the color mostly green, moving slightly towards yellow, and "painted" the whole square with a greenish background.

Next, I switched the color to a deep pinkish hue (pink and green are contrasting colors, and I like that effect), and I left the rainbow thing on, so my strokes moved from pink towards red and orange, and I painted the vaguely blocky "head and neck" formation in the center of the image in those colors. Then I changed to the thin "pen" cursor and black "ink," and I drew the facial features. I like asymmetrical faces for some reason (partially because I, and a few members of my Dad's family line, have a "squinky" eye, which is where one of our eyes usually doesn't open as much as the other one---like Popeye---and my "squinky" eye doesn't work as well as my "good" eye does, although I don't remember if I damaged it when I was young or if it's a congenital thing. I was also deeply influenced by A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which I watched when I was seven... We had Showtime when I was little, and I would often sneak out of bed at night and watch shows I wasn't supposed to while the rest of the world slept...)

Where was I??? Oh yeah, faces...

I love Charles Schulz's PEANUTS comics, and artists like Jack Kirby, who could draw just a few lines and STILL manage to create these really interesting, really expressive faces. I'm nowhere near mastering the sublime art of cartooning, but I like their lines, so I try to emulate those simple, stylized features.

After I was reasonably happy with the sketched face, head, and neck, I added the black lines around the main image. Switching to the "fill" feature, I next added some more colors, the blue, yellow, and fuschia, as well as the signature and the black dots in the green area. (The thin green strip is all that remained of the original background color!)

And that's how I draw on my phone--quick and sketchy and influenced by a variety of things, from movies to comics to personal deformities! (Ha!) I like high contrast colors and simple lines and messiness, which to me is usually more interesting than a cleaner, more commercial looking image---but that might just be my kink! Ha!!!

---Richard F. Yates (Holy Fool)

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