Coffee Table Drawing Book

a Priority by Jason Kobs — Posted on Feb 14, 2016

Large format artist's portfolios, a lifetime of work right at your finger tips.



1

Drawing Portfolio

1000s

drawings & gestures

13

Years of Figure Drawing




Why a drawing book?

Truth of the matter is that I have an obsession with books. My bookshelves are filled with so many genres and sizes. Books are where drawing and design mix well together. As visual mediums, they translate perfectly to paper. Paper stacks well, travels well, and keeps pretty well over time. Is my work worthy of a book? Well, I am paying for it to be printed…

I've been obsessed with drawing as a child. Most of my artwork has been thrown out from my younger years. There was never a great way to archive all of the different pieces other than laminating them.

Now, as I grow older and the sketchbooks are really starting to pile up, I have to consider how to safely store my work for future generations of fans, friends and family. Individual pieces can be damaged or separated, but if compiled together as a collection these drawings have a chance to stay together over time.



I am paying for it to be printed…


Well, that Figures!

Our human form has always had my attention. Early on it was hands, feet, and portraits. Later it was nudes and quick portraits with equal excitement.

Seeing the needs from the agency, I knew there was an additional opportunity to help level-up some of the soft skills that would be a contributing factor to their next step.


Working Title:

"Figure Drawing: The First 10 Years"

Figure Drawings from my flickr account.






A Book of 3 Parts



1) Figure Drawings

The nature of a figure draw is momentary. A pose ends and the drawing is over. There's the rush of being in front of a model and drawing against the clock.

At first it was difficult to keep up. As an artist you're following the highschool rules to drawing figures, 7 or 8 heads tall and mapping out the figure with a pencil at arms length with your thumb.

College drawing taught me to move faster, to establish the figure in seconds. Gestures are the express lane to getting the drawing down. These days I try to plan the drawings based on the length of the pose. I'm not totally there yet, but I do feel better about drawing.




2) Sketch Cards

Hard to explain the use of these drawings. They are a fun utility. A way to draw during my downtime. A short/small drawing that helps polish the details of hands and feet.

It's also nice to get some celebrity portraits every once and awhile. I'm not a huge fan chasing the next movie release, but it is fun to draw familiar faces. Faces that we all know pretty well from the public conscious. It's quite a thing to capture the essence of a person. Some people are defined by the bridge of their nose or a dimple in their chin.




3) Composed Drawings

Consider these long format drawings. Not minutes or hours, but days. These drawings are rare for me. The time investment is hard to swallow. What's more difficult than time? Finding the right subject!

The subjects of past drawings have been very important people to me, my father, my boss, my design instructor. Usually from a photograph that has something special, a particular quality.




A small sample of the over 500 portraits.



Next Steps…

DRAW, SCAN, REPEAT! I would like to get in a few hundred more drawings before making a compiled book, especially, the sketch cards and composed drawings. If your looking to join in on this journey, contact me.

Explore a few different collections