Hey all, long time, no post.  I finally got back to figure drawing tonight.  It had been a couple of months due to a Linux command line class I’ve been taking on Monday nights.  Yeah, Linux command line instead of figure drawing.  Where the hell are my priorities?  Well, a couple of months off seemed to treat me well.  I liked my drawings tonight.  Good lighting and a great model helped as well.  But I was looking forward to going tonight whereas it had been a slog for a while to attend the drawing session.  I guess some time off occasionally is helpful.  Here’s to more art in 2012.  I think it’s about time I start doing something with it.

I have this pack of Chartpak markers that had been sitting around gathering dust for a few years, so I decided to take them to figure drawing tonight.  It took me a few drawings to start to get the hang of them.  I only like two drawing from tonight.  The rest are crap that I’m not going to put on the internet.

Our model tonight was the indefatigable Kelli Bland.  I always end up with good drawings when Kelli models. Here’s a couple of past drawings, for example:

Good lord, I just realized that the first drawing is almost exactly three years old.  Have I really been in Austin that long?  Have I really been doing weekly figure drawings that long? No wonder the portfolio I filled with paintings on paper weighs about 40 pounds.

Here’s a couple from tonight, after I’d gotten used to the markers:

I finished up a freelance website a couple of weeks ago.  I made a custom WordPress template for the lovely ladies at Sky Candy.  Some of the good stuff with this template is the use of the Widget Logic plugin to allow them to target sidebar widgets to individual pages.  This lets them do things like add class info to their instructor pages.  Surprisingly, this just isn’t something that WordPress does out of the box.  Seems like a bit of no-brainer.

I tried to use the fancy new HTML5 tags as well.  <footer>, <header>, <section>, and all that.  It worked great in all the browsers on my Mac, of course.  But once I started checking in IE, nothing below IE9 knew what to do with them.  This is despite starting with the HTML5 Boilerplate.  I had to go through and replace all that stuff with <div>s before launching the site.

So, here it is.  Check out the live site.

Sky Candy Website

Tonight we had a great model at the AFG. Very dynamic and challenging poses. They’re the pencil drawings below. I realized that it had been quite a while since I’d scanned anything. So I scanned a bunch of stuff in the sketchbook tonight.

I’ve been doing a lot of freelance recently also.  I just finished the Sky Candy website and I’m working on another one for Native Nom Nom, a new restaurant that’s just opened in south Austin.  So these projects take up art time and so does going out and drinking.  But as Jack Nicholson said, “All and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Here’s a bunch of recent figure drawings.  I have charcoals to photograph also.  Maybe next post.

Howdy there true believers. Tonight I went to Gibson and did a couple of watercolors while sitting at the bar. I wanted to spend some time doing arty stuff tonight, but I seem to have the opposite affliction to agoraphobia. Claustrphobia? I have an irrational fear of being home. So I took my sketchbook and watercolors to Gibson, my friendly neighborhood bar and did couple of paintings. It was enjoyable. I got there around 7 and had a couple of hours to talk with my friend who worked there while it was slow. Afterward I was heads down into the painting and was surrounded by people ordering drinks. While making this post, I have one question. Is The Crow soundtrack really the best CD of all time? Or is it just because I was 15 in 1994 that I respond so fervently to this music? Is it a Pavlovian response to the feeling of accomplishment of having grown pubic hair? Maybe the hormonal high of having a new batch of zits to pop every morning felt much more pertinent than the air conditioned nightmare of the cubicle life?

Meh, now that I look at these I see that the photoshopping of the painting of Liz is bullshit. The straight-up watercolor is much better. Oh well, it’s late. If I return to it at some point, it can be improved.

I thought I’d give this process another shot because I like the results from the last one.  I’m still digging it.  I got some feedback from a friend of mine, JR Fleming, a fellow geek artist, that the last one lacked darks.  Which I agreed with.  So I tried to make more of a value range with this one.  I also layered in text to see what it looked like.

This was a test to see what happened when I scan a watercolor drawing and mess with it in Photoshop.  Basically I wanted to see what happened when I tried to draw a more science fictiony scene instead of the usual naked people.  I rather like watercolors.  The key for me seems to be not to try to control them at all.  Stay outside of the lines.  Make it sloppy and call it expressive.  This is a hell of a lot faster and feels more natural than trying to go all digital.  And the watercolor already has a nice texture to it.  I like the way my pencil lines look, not so much inks.  So what do you think, would you read something drawn like this?

Not much to say here.  More watercolor figure paintings.  Dig it.

I took the new iPad to figure drawing tonight. It ended up pretty well. I’m getting the hang of it. I’m definitely slower with the iPad than I would be with Photoshop and a Wacom, but it would be damn inconvenient to drag a laptop and a tablet around with me. The lack of pressure sensitivity sucks, but it’s just a limitation to work around. Hopefully there’s some shortcuts I have yet to discover that will allow me to more easily resize the brush and adjust opacity. Color picking works well. I’d say with some time, I should be able to bust out some good work with Sketchbook Pro.

Also, the dark sketchy drawing was done using a program called Harmony. It’s a program that runs in-browser in Safari using HTML5 canvas and Javascript. I absolutely love it. I’m gonna take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

Thursday night I went to the Vargas house and painted a pair of boots.  An interesting thing about this painting is that I didn’t use any white until I did the background.  Interesting to me anyway.  Normally white is the color I use the most.  It wasn’t something I intended to do, it just happened.  Could have something to do with painting black boots.

These Boots Are Made For Stomping

Edit: Here’s Tiffanny’s rendition of the boots from the same painting session, a few feet to my left.