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Sketching Quotes

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Sketching Quotes

“Save for the accident of her low birth, Peg might have been a person of fashion; a vibrant beauty, painted by an academician in oils. Intending to make a quick end to it, I started mixing the lily green I had made especially from crushed flowers, hoping exactly to tint her eyes, rattling my tiny brush in the jar. Then I subjected her to my closest gaze. "Your eyes," I said, musingly. "They are a very unusual green; in different lights they reflect brown and blue. Do they perhaps reflect whatever light falls on them?" Peg replied that she couldn't say. "Do, please, sit very still." I looked very hard, then used my green with a wash of yellow ochre to tint the iris, and a ring of burnt umber. A pinprick of white titanium gave them startling life. I was happy with them; surely even Peg would admire her lively cat-like eyes.”

PaintingSketchingEye Colors
Book:A Taste for Nightshade
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“Another day, sheltering beneath trees in a rain-shower, I uncovered a doorway long obliterated by undergrowth. After pulling shrubbery aside, I stepped inside a long deserted summerhouse, fronted by cracked marble columns and ironwork, the rear extending deep into the hillside. Though still filthy, even after I cleared away the tenacious vines, the windowpanes gave sufficient greenish light for me to sketch indoors. In a cobwebbed corner stood a gardener's burner that must once have coaxed oranges or other delicate shrubs to life. With that alight, I found a chair and sat with my shawl muffled around me as I sketched. The marble statues that lined the walls were fine copies of the Greek masters, with muscular limbs and serene faces, though sadly disfigured with a blueish-green patina. As an exercise, I copied a figure of a handsome boy, admiring the sculptor's rendering of tensed muscle, the body frozen just an instant before extending in action. My mind drifted to Michael, the uncertainty hanging over us, my urges to please him, my need to move beyond this stupid impasse. As I sketched the statue's blind eyes I half-heartedly followed his line of sight. I stood and looked more closely at the statue. "What are you looking at?" I said out loud. A green stain blotted the boy's cheek, ugly but also strangely beautiful, for the color was a peacock's viridian. For the first time I noticed the description, "HARPOCRATES- SILENCE", engraved on the pediment, and had a vague recollection of a Roman boy-god who personified that virtue. He held one index finger raised coyly to his lips, while his other hand pointed towards a low arch in the wall. I paced over to the spot at which he pointed. The niche was filled with gardener's trellis that I removed with rising excitement. Behind stood an oak doorway set low in the wall. As I lifted the latch, it opened onto a blast of chilly darkness. Lighting the stub of a candle at the stove, I propped the door open and ventured inside. At once I knew this was no gardeners' store, but another tunnel burrowing into the hillside. Setting forth with the excitement of new discovery, my footsteps rang out and my breath fogged before me in clouds. The place had a mossy, mineral smell, and save for the dripping of water, was silent. Though at first the tunnel ran straight, it soon descended an incline, and my feet splashed into muddy puddles. Who, I wondered, had last passed through that door?”

SilenceGreenSketchingMarble StatuesSecret DoorSecret Pathway
Book:A Taste for Nightshade
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“She took out a charcoal stick and began to sketch-- on the workbench itself. Of course the moon wouldn't come to her in songs or poems or crystals or whatever... she felt the most centered, the most tranquil, when she was painting or drawing. Lost in her own world or in new ones she imagined. She shouldn't have made a chart; she should have drawn a circle, with the moons going from waxing to waning all the way around... She hummed to herself a little, the way she always did when she painted. Her hair began to glow. A little shading here, a few light strokes in the middle of the full moon for the face that Rapunzel saw there... Circles and shadows and crosshatching... She worked extra hard on the profile of the fatter waxing crescent, where the moon would be now. She knew what it looked like as she felt her hand shape it. Her power surged; her hair began to sparkle. She looked around frantically for something to release her magic on. The first thing she saw was her tea, so she grabbed the red clay cup and wrapped the end of a braid around it. Just like with Pascal, sparks sprayed off her hair and over the object. When they faded they revealed... ... a heavy, crude clay cup. Rapunzel started to slump in disappointment-- and then noticed something. Where the hair had touched the sides, the cup was now shiny black, like onyx or obsidian.”

TalentPaintingSketchingRapunzelMagic PowerMoon PhasesMandala
Book:What Once Was Mine
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“I come around the curve of a hardwood hammock to witness two herons, a great white and a great blue, having what looks like a territorial dispute. I slow the canoe. Another white heron stands in the shallows a short way off, either fishing or waiting to see who'll win. The white and the blue keep flying up, each trying to warn the other off, angling their wings so the light catches them first one way and then another. I sketch them fast, trying to record the unintended grace of their motion as well as the force of their intention. While they're concerned with power and territory and fishing rights, they have no idea how stunning the exchange makes them look. The blue heron, in particular, shows me the richness of her color from every angle.”

Natures BeautySketchingHeronsTerritory FightsWhite And Blue
Book:The Marsh Queen
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“His torso was a perfect "V" of golden skin and muscle; his slim hips, whiter than the rest of him, tapered to thighs and calves that could have been turned on a lathe, and these were dusted all over with fair hair that glinted in the low sunlight. The hair on his head was cropped short and beacon-bright, but the features of his face were nearly indistinct from where she watched. Given the glory of the rest of him, they scarcely seemed to matter. The man's beauty was, in fact, an assault, and a peculiar tangle of shock and delight and yearning began to beat inside her like a secret, second heart. And then the man stretched his arms upward, arching his back indolently; exposing the dark fluffs under his arms, and this, somehow, seemed more erotic and intimate than the rest of his naked body combined. Susannah had seen paintings and statues of naked men, for heaven's sake, but none of them had ever sported fluffy hair beneath their arms. In fact, the sheer easiness with which this man wore all his raw beauty frightened her a little. He was like someone too casually wielding a weapon. She fumbled her sketchbook open. Quickly, roughly, she sketched him: the upraised arms, the curves of his biceps and legs and the planes of his chest, and when he turned, the darker hair that curled between his legs and narrowed up to a frayed silvery-blond line over his flat stomach. Nestled right between his legs were, of course, his... male parts...which looked entirely benign at the moment, really, at least from this distance. She sketched those, too, as she intended to be thorough, hardly thinking of them as anything other than part of her drawing.”

SketchingMasculine BeautyNaked Man
Book:Beauty and the Spy
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“Your armpit is very handsome." This made him laugh. "Only an artist would think an armpit is handsome." "But it is... the line of it is, anyhow. The muscles and shadows and hair..." She traced the muscles and shadows and hair with her finger as she said the words, and her voice drifted. She sat up suddenly and reached for her sketchbook and quickly rendered him, that arm stretched over his head, his bare chest, and long legs, his lolling, spent manhood resting in curling hair, his wonderful face reflecting smug satisfaction, easy intimacy. "You're a very good model," she told him approvingly. "You hold cooperatively still." "I don't think I could move if you pointed a gun at me," he murmured. She kissed the birthmark in the shape of a gull on his outstretched wrist, then leaned down and kissed his nipple, tracing it with her tongue, tasting it the way he'd tasted hers. His hand trailed down her back, she saw unmistakable signs of stirring below. "You're moving now," she teased. He gave a short, very distracted laugh. "Siren," he said absently. Clearly enjoying the run of her tongue over his chest.”

SketchingModelIntimate Act
Book:Beauty and the Spy
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“As her dreams intensified, the red-haired girl became so real to Olivia that she found herself absentmindedly sketching her image during the day, bringing her to life on the page. She drew her surrounded by the flowers she held in her hands- white harebell, pink campion, and yellow cinquefoil- entwining them into the curls in her hair, until the flowers and plants were not around her, but part of her. A true child of the woodland.”

SketchingWildflowersLittle GirlOlivia Kavanagh
Book:The Cottingley Secret
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“After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century.”

GivingMindFirstsHumansMayStillsEndsHandsSpiritPrayerCenturyRevolutionPrayingProgramMercyAccountsTwentiesSteadfastSketchingHuman FamilyScientific RevolutionGood Prayer
Author:Freeman Dyson
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“The Sketchnote Handbook is neither about sketching nor is it about note taking. It's about receiving and processing the world in a more complete and insightful way. It's a software upgrade for your brain. For those who've been shamed into thinking that drawing is either beyond them or beneath them, this book offers a whole new way of mastering the daily onslaught of information and turning it into raw material for discovery. (For those of us who've done this all our lives, the book provides a beautifully conceived and lovingly illustrated treat, and a great gift for our left-brained friends.)”

ThinkingWorldWayBookDoneWholeLeftBrainOur LivesInformationMaterialsOffersDiscoveryTreatsNotesDrawingInsightfulSoftwareReceivingNew WaysRaw MaterialsProcessingGreat GiftsSketchingNote Taking
Author:Stefan G. Bucher
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“I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.”

WayYearsChildrenDoeBookPlayHoursExistenceWrittenFieldsWindowDrawingNeighborhoodNotebookFertileSketching
Author:Maurice Sendak
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“[While designing] I'm mixing two lines of thought really: me as a designer for women and then me as a man. At the start of the design process it's the designer for women that comes to the forefront - sketching and revising the silhouette. Then the man comes into the picture - and I look at the shoe from a very masculine point of view. Then there is a conflict between the two sides of me. Sometimes the man wins, and sometimes the designer wins.”

MenLooksTwoSometimesWinningProcessSidesLinesViewsDesignHe ManConflictShoesPoint Of ViewDesignerMasculineTwo SidesMixingSketchingSilhouettesRevisingDesign Process
Author:Christian Louboutin
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