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Benjamin Graindorge really wants to design a fireplace. But here’s the problem: When he tries to draw fire, it tends to end up looking like water. You can tell it’s fire because it’s yellow or orange, he thinks, but once he makes the flames brown or green or black, well, not so much. “When I find a way to represent it with another color, I think then I’ll be able to move on to the real object,” he muses. Clearly, drawing is an instrumental part of the young Parisian designer’s process. In fact, most of his objects don’t even start off as ideas, they start as swirls of color and form: “The first stage of my work is only a nebula, without humans or objects.”
Life presents us with countless problems on a daily basis, some common (how to communicate with someone who speaks a different language; how to toast drinks while maintaining eye contact) and some decidedly less so (how to pop a balloon without waking the baby). Dominic Wilcox addresses a full range of everyday conundrums on his website Variations on Normal, which he uses as a kind of instant sketchbook for expressing his ideas at the moment of inspiration.
Dan Attoe makes a drawing a day. And when I say a drawing, I mean a drawing that comprises many detailed parts, creating an explosive, Mark Lombardi–style map. “For seven years I completed a painting every weekday,” the Portland, Oregon–based artist writes in his statement. “Now I do daily drawings.”