Malablogia

Devilry, Me, and Sunset Suicide

2005-01-09T09:54:00.001-07:00

Before I launch into the nonsense, I just want to encourage you to go to the deviantart links for these pictures if you like them. There are two reasons. First, for the photomanipulations, I would like you to look at the credits for the sources, and second, you will bet a much better quality view of the artwork if you look at the devart links. Thanks.

Devil's Lament on a Bad Hair Day

http://www.deviantart.com/view/13656892/

This one was pure whimsy. I wanted something I could knock off fast after having a disaster losing a painting I was working on before when Corel crashed. I do kind of like this painting. I like the lips. Also I am beginning to figure out how to paint hair. The hair is not brilliant, but it is better than any I have done previously. It is purely digital painting in Corel. No references.

Self Portrait in Stardust and Rust

http://www.deviantart.com/view/13716168/

This is a photomanipulation with painting on top. I combined a couple photos of rust by a photographer that calls herself bigmammajen on deviantart. Go look at them by following the links at the devart link above. The rust photos are beautiful in and of themselves. I combined them with that photo of star creation that people call the pillars of creation. I did lots of mucking with layer masks to overlap the images in various ways. Then I painted a bit on top of it to emphasize various things. On the whole, I like it.

Infinite Sunset Suicide Regression

http://www.deviantart.com/view/13778214/

I really like this one. I built the sunset landscape in Bryce, a 3d rendering tool. That was pretty easy, since I just used its pretty basic built-in settings. Still I really like the way it looks. Then I took a 2d picture by deviouselite-stock at deviantart. I mucked around in Bryce to replicate, rotate, and lower her photo to get the image of hundreds marching into the sea at sunset. The only real hard part was finding the right settings in Bryce to render the 2-d picture properly in the environment. Maybe it should be easy, but I don't really know how to use Bryce yet. The whole thing was fairly easy though, and perhaps that makes it somewhat worthless, but I really like the way it looks.

I will likely do a variation on this theme with an actual 3-d model rather than a 2-d photo, and I will likely build a more complex Bryce environment. I may do one showing marching *out* of the sea, an infinite rebirth regression or something...

Me, Rorschach, and a Disembodied Hand Model.

2004-12-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

Me and Rorschach

This is another picture I am working on. It is still in progress. As much as I love blogger.com, thier full resolution views suck so I am linking again to the full view at deviantart.com.

You should check out the full view if only to see the fucking brilliance of Corel's capability in showing brushwork texture. It truly is amazing! I don't care to work with the watercolor level, because many of the brushes are godawful slow. They totally destroy the rythm of painting, but I put up with it, because it shows the brush work so well.

Anyway, this is not done yet. I will update it, of course, when it is. It is christmas eve. The wife is off visiting her mother, and I am painting, drinkin, and smoking. It would be cool if they logged in and left me a comment. We shall see, but, of course, it isn't very likely.

The final version of NIght Djinni.

2004-12-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

Final Version

Here is the last modification I intend to do with Night Djinni. There are still a lot of things wrong with this painting but I think I have learned what I want to with it and rather than obsess, I want to move on to learn more. I want to say that I am pretty happy with it on the whole, and I can't wait to get a good-quality 8-ink printer to print it out and see how it looks.

But today I was musing on where I want to go with digital painting. It is just too easy to produce prurient wonders. See this link: Things not to do.

Ok, don't get me wrong. I am a guy, and I like naked chicks as much as the next guy, or at least as much as the next guy whose wife might be reading his blog. And I am not trying to diss the photoshop skills of the person in the link above. This person currently has more skills than I do. But my point is, if you browse the site on the link above, you will see (presuming you do not get, err, distracted) that there are a billion people on the planet who know how to melt beautiful women to make them yew know lookallwierdandshit....

I am not going to even say it isn't art. It is art. And some of these people are very good. But the point is, what value would I add to do one more distorted breast fest? It seems to me one must strive to have some individual style (not easy--or even possible in the strictest sense). But again, check out jrulier at deviantart.com. Hey, even he is clearly somewhat derivative of H.R Giger and his army of emulators. But even saying that, jrulier seems to have an indibidual voice in the world of 3d image manipulation. Ok, so maybe he is one in 10 million rather than one in a million. Very few are truly unique and maybe nobody is, but his vision is different enough to stand out for me. There is a real beauty in his distortions, whereas Giger and his wannabes seem to me to be striving for the ugly. Hey, I am not criticising. I love Giger in most of his perversions, but jrulier's work seems at least somewhat different, and I am inspired by it in ways I am not by random melted naked chick...

Night Djinni

2004-12-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

Ok, here is a bit of discussion of a work in progress. FIrst of all, as I said, this is a work in progress, so it is not finished yet. Also, this site does not seem to show the pieces in their full resolution, so here is the link to the full view at deviantart.com: Night Djinni.

Credit where due, here is the photo that inspired the work: Inspiration.

I liked the erotic simplicity of the source photo. I am working on an ink drawing of it as well, but I wanted to paint it. At first I intended to do a charcoal study of it, but after fighting with that I remembered suddenly that I hate working with charcoal. About that time I started to become aware of the power of Corel and Photoshop, so I decided to devote my efforts to learning to paint with those tools.

I started the painting from the following sketch that I scanned in and loaded into Corel:

Sketch for Night Djinni

I am spent the last two weekends trying to paint this and getting nowhere. The problem is that while I have developed a modest comtetence in drawing the human form, I don't knwow shit about painting. I have always wanted to paint, but the mess and hassle always prevent me from spending time at it. But I am good at sitting in front of a computer. I design the bloody things for a living, first for Hewlett Packard and now for Intel. So sitting in front of a computer I can do. The problem is that just putting in the time is not good enough. You have to study right in order to learn, and I do not have models and lighting systems to do provide me with the models to paint from.

Heidi's photo is great, but I wanted color, and I just do not have the instinct to make it up. I *can* draw bodies with no model, but that is only after years of drawing from people and studying anatomy. I do not have that experienct to draw on with painting.

But then I realized: technology is fantastic! I don't need human models. I have daz3d on my computer, and I can build a 3d model and light it with the colors I want and add that to the reference photo for color and light cues. God I love computers! Here is the model I built from Victorai 3 in daz3d. I used it only for color references and to see how the light falls on forms when lit int he ways I wanted it to be:

L3d Light Model for Night Djinni

Using the source phote, my sketch and the lighting reference, I did the following:

Night Djinni

Is it cheating?

2004-12-11T18:47:00.000-07:00

Painting of Jessie 1

Before I dive into some exposition, here is a link to the woman who provided the stock photo:

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/12257168/

On with the holding forth.

This painting along with the previous one were both created with the same technique. I broke down and bought a copy of Corel Painter IX, because, well because it is effing AWESOME. I looked at their tutorial videos and picked up on this way to use cloning techniques to grab colors from the reference photo as I paint the picture. I need practice getting the results I want, but this technique will without doubt be highly valuable to me in producing works that I like. Over at deviant art *Painting or Jessie 2* got way more viewings in a couple hours than any of my harder works did in months. So I think maybe other people like this as well.

It is strange though. In many ways it is cheating. I *can* draw these pictures, but with this method I do not really need to. It is hard to explain what I mean, but even though you do not draw the picture when painting it this way, the process of having Corel pick the color your brush uses from the source photo effectively does draw the picture as you paint. The process definitely influences the outcome. There are a lot of artistic decisions made by me in these pictures, but the overall process still *feels* like cheating.

But this brings up a philosophy of art question. Is it only art if you spend years learning how to manipulate actual oil paints? Or is the art in the composition, and the decisions about how to form the image? For me the art is the idea, and focusing on the craft is to some degree bullshit. Don't get me wrong. The craft deserves immense respect, especially for those brilliant men and women who pioneered all this without all these ginchy tools to make it easier. But I find working with Corel both fun and fulfilling, so if I were to generate great images using it, will they have less merit than if I spend the next ten years struggling with natural media so that I could produce even *one* of them? I, personally, think not, but it still feels like cheating.

Jessie 2

2004-12-11T18:46:00.001-07:00

Painting of Jessie 2

This painting used a stock photo provided by Jessie. Here is a link: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/12271834/

Wacom and Corel

2004-12-03T21:43:00.000-07:00

CorelBoy

Hey, this is not a brilliant finished work of art or anything, but it is the work of about a half an hour screwing around with a Wacom graphics tablet and Corel Painter elements. I am totally smitten. This tool is fucking brilliant. I am not a color or a painting genius, but this is easily the coolest color paintint I have ever done just screwing around with these tools. Good God I love technology!

Thinking Digital

2004-11-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

Moon Djinni 2 Colored

Yeah, I am still working on the Kiera drawing. But I was hanging out over at deviantart.com and saw all the really cool stuff people were doing digitally, so I decided to experiment with paint shop pro. The results are still very amateurish, but I am intrigued by the possibilities. I never had much interest in the idea of digital art, because I do not like being tied to a computer to draw, and have never felt that sketching the human body would be very fun with a mouse. But I realized something that ought to have been obvious. I can do the sketching in real life and color it digitally.

I would, in many ways,rather do the coloring with watercolor or oils, but my real problem is that I just never get past the hassle of preparation and the many many hours it would take just to learn how to use the media. I always *intend* to, but my laziness and lack of attention span means it never happens. I suspect it never will.

But I realized looking at deviantart.com that digitally coloring really does largely get past my issues with preparation, cleaning, and duration of work span. There *is* no prep or cleaning and I can come and go as I please. With watercolor, if you mess up on a large piece that is almost finished you are pretty much fucked. It is not very forgiving. Digital is. Yes, I will never be able to get those beautiful affects one can get with watercolor, but I probably never would have done that anyway.

I still do intend to learn to paint with real media as well, but right now I am really interested in what can be done digitally. I am thinking of picking up a Wacom graphics tablet to increase the flexibility of my exploration.

This painting, as I said, is pretty inept, but I am encouraged by the possibilities.

Drawing Keira

2004-10-28T20:39:00.000-06:00

Keira Knightly

This is a photo of Kiera Knightly that I am trying to draw. I was going to upload the progress, but when I scanned it, it was all I could do to refrain from suicide. This is a real struggle. I truly suck at this. Should I ever attain something vaguely respectable, I will upload to show progress...

Keiraprogress

Ok, this blows harder than a class five hurricane, but I decided to post it anyway. It is my second attempt. The first was just horribly muddled. This one is coming along better, but I am still not sure it is going to be, well, salvageable. I am really rusty.

More progress

I will delete some of these posts at the end if I finish this. I will leave some so the transition is visible, but for now I am updating relatively frequently. I am starting to be generally happy with the shape of the mouth. I absolutely do not claim it is even close to perfect, but it is starting to show the subtleties of Keira's mouth. In fact the face in general now resembles her. The left eye is still quite wrong, and that has been giving me a lot of trouble. The very slight oblique side and upward tilt gives her pupils a skyward gaze that is really proving hard for me to understand much less capture. I think I am close, but not quite there. In a typical sketch study, I would be heavily emphasizing some lines over others. I continue to draw very lightly, because it is my intent to use technical pens to stipple this drawing, and since I want to finish it in ink, I will want to be able to erase the pencil underdrawing.

Almost ready to begin with pen

I think I am about ready to start working on this with pen. I have not finished enough detail int he blouse, but it has been so long since I worked with technical pens, that I am antsy to play with them. Of course there is a fair amount of trepidation, since it will be easy to trash all this effort. Why am I doing this?

Stippling

You can see here the beginning of the stippling process. If you have any perspicacity at all, you will say, "Holy Christ, that's gonna take a billion fucking hours!" Well, errr, yeah. That is the downside of stippling. The upside is that it is easy to control and relatively forgiving. I need to take baby steps even if it takes a billion fucking years to walk from the coffee table to mommys loving arms. A babe's gotta do what a babe's gotta do.

About one one hundreth finished

Man this is a lot of work. It is pretty hard to get good black levels with stippling. The scan and reproduction here makes the blacks look a bit blacker than they do when I work on the drawing close up. When doing art it is very important to look at your work from a distance from time to time. This work looks a lot different from about five feet away. The haze of dots coalesces into something much nicer from a little distance. As of now I think I may have made the ear a bit too dark. Well, we will see when I get closer to finished.

Looking Good I think

Dear god, is this optimism I am feeling. I am very happy with how this is going. Is it perfect? Not even close, but I am beginning to feel that I may finish this with something that makes all the effort seem worth it.

Have I ruined it?

Trying to establish the intermediate tones on the face is proving to be very dicey. They are not as white as thie highlights in the eyes and the nose and elsewhere. So these places on the face need to have dots to tone them down. The original looks much better, again from a bit of a distance. The scans are not quite capturing the sublety, but they do indicate the problem and the difficulty of getting all the tones to balance out. I am nervous now.

I think I saved it

I do believe I saved the left eye. It does not look perfect. The lack of highlights near the eye on the upper lid is going to permanently limit the sparkle so it will always seem a little flat. I could go get correction fluid, but I don't want to risk it. It looks ok. I made a lot of progress on the rest of the drawing too. I kind of got delayed watching the election and stuff. I need to get a television card for my computer in my drawing room.

The Latest

It has been awhile since I updated. I am making progress, but I am remembering why I never do this. It takes so much effort.

Stone Angels, Cheesecake, and Rorschach

2004-10-27T18:15:00.000-06:00

Rome again Rome again jiggety jig....

Bernini Angel

Another from Bernini. This one is from the bridge near the Castle St. Angelo in Rome (again). You can see the bridge in the bottom photo on the link. Bernini is a joy. The energy and passion in his sculpture is unmatched in my (admittedly limited) exposure to classical artists. I did not sketch from the actual sculpture but from a photo. I think I may have actually worked on this drawing on the flight back from Rome back in the mid 1990s. I didn't quite get the angel's expression correct unless Bernini asctually intended to give the impression of angelic dispepsia. Given Bernini it is hard to tell...

Cheesecake

This is some model I sketched from the pages of Vogue. Who is it? Does it really fucking matter? Just another pretty face. I did this drawing pretty fast though, and I like the lighting effects. But it is still pretty amateurish compared to the drawings I have linked to by photorealists. Can I ever get better than this? Maybe if I give up my day job.

My Cat, a Disembodied Hand Model, and Me

This was a bit too big for my scanner, so I had to reassemble it with a panorama assembler program. Really quite cool, but there was a scanning artifact that is clearly visible. This is me in headphones in the mid-90's again. Again we have a hand model, this time neither lucky nor unlucky, and at the very top is a quick sketch of my boy Rorschach. The old smeghead is getting on in years. He is 17 or 18 now. Pretty fucking respectable for a boy cat. We have had some adventures together for sure. I was there when he tried to jump a poodle ten times his size. Hey, he had had a few, ya' gotta cut the blogger some slack. He slept on my head the night he almost died from getting an infection from being attacked by something bigger than he the first night I ever let him go outside by himself. These days though, all he is good for is finding novel ways to deposit bodily excretion in unwanted places. Hey, I dabble in that, but for him it is a passion. I suspect it will soon be the end of him. We all have to go sooner or later. I will miss him, but eventually I will forget...and be forgotten. The cycle of life and all that....

The Ridiculous, The Sublime, and a Couple Things In Between

2004-10-26T18:45:00.000-06:00

Ah, the ridiculous:

ArtMonster

I did this at my drawing session last night. The model took a pose, the pose being leaning over while standing flat-footed to place her hands on the floor, that anyone with any sense would know she could not hold for more than a couple minutes into the 15-20 minute study. She, being only human, changed the pose to lean on a stool after a couple minutes. Even though I should have seen it coming it rather pissed me off. I had already laid down a basic sketch. Rather than switching paper, I decided to just draw over it. Then after this study she did another pose that I did not care much for, so I spent the time refining the atrocity here. To some extent it is an example of what I was talking about in the previous post about drawing over another drawing and then playing around with the shapes. I do not love the drawing, but as another example of what I am talking about, I figured I would post it. Had I drawn over it a third time and rotated the paper, this drawing might have gone from somewhat resembling a cross between a woman and a side of beef to being almost entirely abstract.

Ecstacy of St. Teresa by Bernini

If you ever get to Rome, you simply must go to the church of Santa Maria Della Vittoria. Check out the link to see a photo of the Bernini scultpure that inspired the drawing above. It is lovely, and the very very tiny chuch is a Baroque Jewel that was one of my favorite places in Rome. Every square inch of the interior is absolutely covered with decoration. I believe it was built in the Baroque and not the Rococo. Everytime somebody uses the expression, "The Devil is in the Details", I respond with, "Yes, so is it any wonder I adore the Rococo?" Nobody ever gets it, but it makes me happy.

Copy of Drawing by Alphonse Mucha

If some snivelling Talibanesque son of a bitch ever proposes to destroy all the art in the world except the art of one person, and by some odd quirk of fate chooses me to pick the lucky soul whose work will remain, I would possibly choose (absent some insane desire for irony that would lead me to pick abject pornography) Alphonse Mucha. The man is a wonder, and my copy of his piece above certainly does him no justice. His realization of Art Decco resulted in creations that are accessible to almost everyone who isn't an utter nincompoop. Ok, ok. As far as I know, bubble boy likes Alphonse Mucha. But you can't deny that he is an utter nincompoop.

Kate Blanchette

Kate. Ok, so the nose will always leave her a bit ridiculous, but the overall package is sublime. My drawing does not flatter her. Compare my efforts to this gem at deviantart.com. I look at his work and I just want to fucking cry. I am not worthy! My shading skill is roughly equivalent to that of a retarded squirrel monky after a four day bender compared to that guy. Look, I believe I am making progress, but one glance at the drawing linked above makes me want to curl into a little ball and weep. Well, whaddayagonnado?

Gestures, Pandemonium, and King Lear

2004-10-24T14:04:00.000-06:00

Gesture 1

I promised to show an example of a gesture drawing. The drawing above is likely a five minute gesture. I clearly had time to fill in some details. On the left drawing, in particular, you can see the stick elements I used to find the elements of the pose quickly and then moved on to add other shapes and volumes. Gesture drawings done well can be very beautiful.

Before I move on the discuss the next two drawings, I thought I would muse a bit on the question of being an artist. Often when people see my drawings, they will say things like, "Oh, you are an artist." Well, really, no I do not think I am. It is not false modesty. I just do not think of myself as an artist. Part of it is that I am really not that good. You think I am kidding? Here is a link to a photorealistic drawins showing somebody who is actually good at this. Here is another.

Don't get me wrong, I do not consider photorealism to be the only thing that could qualify me to call myself an artist. But if I had the commitment to develop that level of skill I might finally start to think of myself that way. I think part of my hesitance to think of myself as an artist is a reaction to my incredible laziness when it comes to pursuing it. I have always wanted to get good enough to put together a body of drawings that I might try to get exhibited. I think I will eventually make myself do that, but until then I rather steadfastly refuse to dignify my scribblings with the name Art.

Maybe I am rather too hard on myself. I went over to deviantart.com and browsed their drawings. There are a lot of people posting there who are no better at this than I am, and I bet a lot of them call themselves artists. Oh well...

The drawing below is called Pandemonium.

Pandemonium

This is inspired by a scene from Milton where the devil and his minions go to war. I did this with no visual reference whatsoever, so the figures are entirely constructed from my knowledge of anatomy and my experience from life drawing. But I never really finished it. It just isn't polished enough to be a finished work. There are a couple reasons I can never be a fantasy artist. I am just too damned lazy to polish things. Also, I don't necessarily want to produce complex detailed images of fantasy subjects. I really just like figure drawing, so I tend to want to focus on that.

King Lear

This picture is similar. I did it the same summer I did Pandemonium. I spent the summer in the Bay Area and I was trying to keep my skills honed while I could not find a life drawing session. I thought I wanted to do these kinds of drawings of scenes from literature. This one is of Lear haranguing Cordelia for something or other. I cannot recall. But I just can't keep up the motivation to do this sort of thing. I always get distracted.

Possible Explorations

2004-10-23T22:27:00.000-06:00

Future Direction

This is a watercolor painting I did a very long time ago, sometime in 1994 or 1995 I believe. I don't paint much and this is not very good, but I think this is where I want to go. I would like to take the incredible fluidity and energy of the Djinni drawings and add watercolor to the mix. I do like the painting above, but I think it stands in relation to where I would like to go as Spiderhead stands in relation to Moon Djinni 1.

I Dream of Djinni

2004-10-23T13:20:00.000-06:00

I really love these sketches. I suppose they could stand with some finishing, but I do not want to mess with them. I produced them in my life sketching session at the Temple Events Center in Denver. Let me first show you Moon Djinni 1 before I blather more:

Moon Djinni 1

I am excited by the potential direction this drawing might take my skill. How did it come about? I really did not start to improve at art until I finally took some life drawing instruction and someone told me about various techniques. One of the important ones is gesture drawing. If you want rather an extended look at drawing skills and terms, here is a really beautiful site I encountered looking for examples of gesture drawing. The essense of gesture drawing is to capture the nature of a subject as rapidly as you can. One of the incredibly useful things that life drawing sessions do for you is to teach you to draw rapidly. These sessions usually start with a whole bunch of poses that the model holds for only a couple of minutes. When you first experience this it is all you can do to draw sticks to show the general shape of the pose. But as you grow and practice you begin to add ovals and volumes and other shapes, all added very rapidly. What this does once you "get it" is to add a beautiful fluidity and energy to your drawings if you carry the method forward into longer poses. Moon Djinni was probably a 20 minute pose. I am not entirely certain, because I don't time them and time passes quickly when you are in the zone. But I am confident it was about 20 minutes.

Moon Djinni is highly influenced by gesture drawing. Look at the left hand of the model. I drew the hand by "gesturing it". The result can be quite nice, and in any case I have to gesture hands and feet if I have any hope at all of creating something that looks at least partially convincing in a very short time. But look above the left hand (her left not yours). If you do, you can see the gesture of another hand. This was a mistake. It is a key aspect of gesture drawing that mistakes are not things to be erased. You just keep going. I will post some gesture drawings soon done in 2-5 minutes to elaborate on what I mean, but if you gesture properly, most mistakes do not look bad. They, in fact can add to the visual interest of the drawing. This realization is pretty liberating. It gives you the courage to be sloppy and fast, and your drawing will almost certainly improve with that liberation. This sloppiness is what gives the djinni drawings their look of burning nebulousness. It just wouldn't look the same if I tried to do the look. So at their core, the djinni drawings require inaccuracies to work. That is the beauty of gesture drawing.

If you look at the drawings there are also repeated geometric shapes that are emphasized in a way that has little to do with human physique. I started doing this because of the little moon tatoo on the hip of the model from whom I drew Moon djinni. This repetition is kind of a stupid little affectation, but it amuses me and gives the drawings some of their character.

Mist Djinni

I want to use Mist Djinni to talk about another thing that led to the realization of this style. In the mid 90's I took a drawing class from this guy in Fort Collins. I really wish I could remember his name, bucause he added some arrows to the quiver of my skills. One of the cool things he showed me was a way to use blind contour drawing. Blind contour drawing is a technique you will learn early in your drawing endeavor if you take some classes or read books. It inovles looking very intently at the subject and moving your eyes over the contour of the subject while you move your pencil, but you never look at the paper, only at the model. The drawings tend to look pretty odd. I will post some soon so you can see what I mean, but that is a digression. This teacher would have me do (I think his name was Pete) a blind countour drawing of something, then turn the paper 90 degrees and do another blind contour drawing on top of the first one. Then I would turn the paper again and do yet another. After that I would have a mess of shapes all over each other that did not look like much of anything. But then the art begins. You look at the mess and begin to assemble the image you want out of the mess by emphasizing lines, shading in sections, perhaps erasing things. It is a bit like assembling an image by painting by numbers. The results can be nice, surreal, abstract, or even realistic depending on what you emphasize. But this method reinforced in me the idea that lines drawn over what you are trying to create as an image not only are not a problem, they can be an asset. You can see some of this in the left arm of Mist Djinni. The shape of the arm and the hand are definitely there but also hidden by the random shapes imposed on them by a very deliberatly fluid gesture method. I personally really like the result, and the ambiguity of that arm is part of why I named this Djinni "Mist".

Moon Djinni 2

Back to moon girl. There are a couple things wrong with this drawing. The left hand is a bit too unformed. The gesture is there but not quite satisfyiing. The right hand disappearing into a hook is a bit disconcerting, even creepy, but that is not necessarily bad. These days it makes me nervous. The childish extravagance of Spiderhead and Evil Empire is something I really rather want to leave behind. My goal is not to gross people out or shock them. I am very interested in the intensity of human experience, both positive and negative, but I remain suspicious of mere attempts to shock. But everything else about this drawing I like. The model for Moon Djinni is, quite honestly, drop-dead gorgeous (note to the wife if you read this: not as gorgeous as you, dear!). I managed to capture something of her beauty in the face of this drawing. Were it too accurate, I probably would not post it without her permission, which given that I never speak to her would be rather difficult to gain. The drawing looks rather "like" her but not so much that you could recognize her unless she were walking down the street naked. If the hook did not give her away, the moon on the hip surely would...

Post Card Girl, The Evil Empire, and Surrealistic Lust

2004-10-22T23:32:00.000-06:00

PostCardGirl

Ah Postcard Girl. I remember you fondly. This was one of the first drawings I ever did that convinced me that maybe I had some ability to sketch. I believe I probably did this around the same time as the other sketches in this trinity. I did not date it (I rarely do), so I cannot be entirely sure, but I do remember being very proud of it. It was a sketch of a post card copy of a painting by some minor Jedi Master (ok, so Sith aren't Jedi. Piss off, it's my blog!) or other. I do not recall whom. This drawing, too, shows a basic competence, although I am sure a decent instructor would find a billion things to criticize (I'm always a mother*******Paduan, never a Jedi). But now, on the the other end of the synthesis...

Evil Empire

So, eeennnyhoo... Look, I really can't explain the symbolism in this drawing. Oh, don't get me wrong, I do understand it, but I really don't understand its direct connection to me, even though it came from my brain. Take one look at it and I am sure you will think I am a regular contributor to moveon.org and that I want to bear Micheal (bubbleboy) Moore's love child. I assure you nothing could be further from the truth. All I can figure is that I just had all this rilly rilly intense, like yewknow eeemowshuns 'nstuff and that all my blithering youth could map them to is cheesy apocalypse symbols. I simply have to believe that even at the time I must have realized the red star on the US flag was way too obvious and crass to be evocative. You got yer gas masks, yer happy faces, yer nucyewlur explosions, and of course your poor innocent hand model in bondage. Poor poor hand model. And all the weepy skull faces in the upper left are just too precious for words, or at least for many words. Look, I get it...more elaborate than Spiderhead, but still pretty fucking childish.

BUT, I think the outline of the hand model (poor poor hand model) is actually really cool. And again, it is my opinion that this drawing shows at least a modesly competent understanding of an interesting composition. I am not an expert on such things, but I think there is a decent center of interest and a lot of elements to draw one's eye through the drawing. I am relatively sure that I must have done this at a point where I was actively reading about the principles of composition. All in all, despite being rather too obvious and juvenile, I think this picture shows some of that synthesis I aim for, intense emotion combined with technical skill.

As I get older I do not do this kind of drawing any more. It just seems too self-indulgent. I wish I felt free to do it, but I am always a little ashamed to try. These days I want to collapse all the emotion down into something a good deal more ambiguous...hence the djinni drawings of women exploding with the fire of some undefined emotion. Hmm. You know, maybe I ought to get back to hand models.

Surreal Lust

And finally for today, we have surreal lust. I did this before Evil Empire, and looking back, I see I had actually begun to develop a skill for some accuracy. This drawing was just a joke. The Dali poles thrusting into silky fabric, the disembodied hand model tweaking the disembodied nipple (lucky lucky hand model). There ain't much to this drawing other than the hormones of a young man with an obvious but twisted sense of humor and too much time on his hands, or his right hand anyway. But I still like it. Not brilliant, but a fond memory....

Oscar, Me, and The Great Empire

2004-10-21T22:09:00.000-06:00

Oscar Wilde

Oscar, dah Man!! Well, you know, sort of. I love Oscar, poor bugger. When the wife (mine not his) and I were in Paris, we went to Le Pere Lachaise so I could lay a pen on his grave. He has a cool headstone, but after we did that we felt obligated to go over and check out Jim Morrison's grave. I was pretty much all: Fuck Jim Morrison!!, but you have to go right? Jim's grave was massively vandalized. Oscar had a very tough end, but at least he doesn't have wacked-out halfwits pilgrimaging to his grave to rip something off to the point where the custodians removed anything even vaguely removeable. I bet Oscar could kick Jim Morrison's ass...or something like that.

Me.

Me. ...another poor bugger. Ok, I'm not actually poor, and certainly not a technical bugger (not that there's anything wrong with that.) I meant more in the metaphorical sense you know. Anyhow. I used to do a lot of self portraits. You will be the most conventient subject you have for portraiture, so make use of yourself...there isn't anything wrong with that either.

Buckingham Fountain

'Ere's a bituv a sketch Oi did in frunt of Bucking'am Fountain. I spent about an hour sketching this on my second foray into London, the foray that did not involve the wife (mine not Oscar's) getting in a snit that everything seemed to revolve around a recently dead princess. Women! Ok, ok, to be fair it was not all the wife. We were in London with a travelling companion on the weekend they buried Dianna. Our companion was rather interested in attending the funeral, and the wife was most certainly not. I was rather indifferent. Travel tends to exacerbate issues, and we treaded lightly around this land mine all weekend. I am not sure who stepped on it first, but we ended up in a minor fued over the affair. In the end it all worked out. We slouched over to the park and wandered the periphery like all the other ghouls and then popped off to Canterbury to visit a rather more kosher (err, maybe that is the wrong word) final resting place.

...anyhow on the day I drew this picture, I sat and consumed the lovely little strawberry tart that we obtained from the boutique, or the spa, or the pastryisserrie, or wherever the hell it is you get lovely little strawberry tarts within subterranian training distance of the palace of Buckinghams. I sat there and drew while the wife (mine not Oscar's) was off doing somthing. I think she was off contracting for an assassination with MI6 or something. You laugh, but the old girl would fly to Baghdad and rub pig grease on the pate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi if she could get 50 frequent-flier miles out of the deal. But I think I digressed. This is not a great drawing, but it is one of the few I have done from public sculpture. One of the only reasons I wish I lived in Europe is all of the cool art they seem to have left lying around. Rome, especially. In Rome they have so much of it they can't even be bothered to take care of it all.

Learning to Draw

2004-10-21T19:21:00.000-06:00

I began drawing when I was pretty young. Well, perhaps not so much drawing at first as tracing. In sixth grade, or something like that, I was envious of a felllow student who drew really awesome extreme automobiles. If you are old enough I am sure you remember the rage for bubblegum cards with extreme automobile characatures on them. There were a few car-based comics as well, and the guys at school were really into the stuff. I could not draw, but I tried tracing a picture and acting as if I had done it myself. Of course it didn't go over well, but I still envied the ability.

Then in junior high I went to school for a year with Mike Luckovich. Mike was a very nice guy. We were not best buds, but we hung out once or twice. Mike was a great comic artist even then. He used to draw these fantastic characatures of football players. I tried to emulate his drawings, but mine sucked. I just did not have his raw ability and had never worked to develop any. Mike shuffled off at the end of the school year to wherever decent guys who draw well shuffle off to at the end of school years. I doubt he remembers me, but I remember him, because he had an influence on my life.

One of the big problems with my learning to draw is that I never applied too much effort to it. In high school I would trace comic characters for what reason I do not recall. The tracing actually may have helped learn some of the mechanics of drawing and some anatomy, but it did not produce any meaningful progress in my ability to draw.

What eventually kicked me over the edge was a bad relationship I went through at an unspecified point in my life. Unspecifiec because I am too ashamed to admit how old I actually was when I drew Spiderhead. I have this tendency to try to turn negative energy into something productive, so when this relationship went bad, I drew a great number of really shitty drawings, many worse than Spiderhead. Sadly enough I thought I was rather good and would show these drawings to people without the shame I now feel. This brings up our first lesson: You have to develop the ability to tell when you suck. Improvement is difficult without this skill.

My big problem is laziness. I was undedicated and feckless about this and really still am. I will go through periods of obsessive drawing followed by months and years of nothing. So my progress has been slow. But it has been real. I am a good deal better than I used to be, and I am hoping with a bit of advice perhaps this site can help some beginners progress faster.

One thing would strongly suggest is that you read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
It has been years since I read it, so I cannot provide a detailed critique. But I am going to have to review it, because in the upcoming posts I want to spend some time talking about which exercises I find most useful. The book is filled with a bunch of right-brain/left-brain twaddle. You can buy into that if you want to. I have no real opinion. It may or may not be complete bullshit. I really don't care. The fact is that a lot of the exercises that the book suggests are spot-on and are indispensible tools if you wish to actually improve your skills. In my pseudo-humble opinion that is.

Very soon now, I will talk about specific exercises....

Musing on three drawings from the last 20 years

2004-10-19T19:06:00.000-06:00

Below are three drawings. The djinni sketch is from a recent drawing session that I go to on Monday nights in Denver Colorado. Take a look:

Djinni

The djinni sketch represents a significant step in the synthesis I have been striving for in my drawing for a long time. The synthesis of which I speak is a resonably high degree of technical correctness combined with energy and passion visible in the nature of the drawing itself. In slight contrast to that, look at my study of Michelangelo's Pieta below:

Pieta

This drawing has a very good degree of technical correctness but no passion in the drawing itself. I think I did this drawing in the early 90's, and while I was incredibly happy that thirty or forty hours of effort would allow me to make tolerably good copies of famous drawings and sculptures, I cannot claim that doing this a lot would be very satisfying, since the art is not mine and since it gives no indication of the energy and passion I would like to communicate when I draw.

Last and most certainly least is one of the drawings that I did in the early 80s. Prepare to cringe and scroll if you must:

Spiderhead

Yeah, I know, the only good thing that might have been said about Spiderhead is that it had never before been posted to the internet, so there was the hope that a catastrophic disaster to my home might relieve the world of its presense. I don't want to beat around the bush, this drawing is godawful. I post it here for two reasons:

1. I think that looking at the sequence of three is pretty convincing to any beginner that sees these that even someone with almost no natural talent can learn to draw. Yes yes, some will assert that I do have natural talent and that by working at it I brought it out. Well, let us assume that it is true. Still this sequence shows then that even someone with natural talent can suck and only improve with hundreds of hours of hard and sometimes frustrating work. I hope that this first post provides some ispiration and encouragement for any beginner who might stumble in here.

2. This drawing shows the other side of what I am trying to synthesize with technical skill. The spiderhead drawing shows emotional content that the Pieta lacks. Yes, it is the emotion of a repressed nerd-boy who doesn't get on as well as he might wish with the girls and hence decides that if only he demonstrates himself graphically to be rather unhinged girls will come running in hordes, unstoppable desperate hordes. Brilliant, eh? I would condemn myself for this a great deal more than I do if the emotion weren't so common. In Fort Collins Colorado there is a local mall that has an annual art show where they show the work of students from local schools. It is truly amazing how common certain themes are amongst artwork done by young men. You see a lot of oddly-placed and inappropriate emotion or drawings that have young men with no emotion at all but with all the paraphenalia of a righteous badass who despite showing no emotion looks really really dangerous. So I am in good company. And while that is perhaps no excuse, and certainly is not an adequate excuse for the atrocity of spiderhead, well, we all make mistakes, and I think I have moved on....

I do actually kind of like the composition of spiderhead....

Announcing a Birth

2004-10-19T09:41:00.000-06:00

Over the next few weeks I intend to post a series of commentaries and drawings documenting the process I went through learning to draw. It is my hope that this may provide encouragement to beginners in the same process.