So I went to the AVAA for the first time in quite a while today.  It’s a consistently good drawing session.  Good models.  However there is one caveat; bring an iPod and headphones.  Noise canceling headphones if at all possible.  They play the most horrible music during the drawing sessions at the AVAA.  The Full Monty excluded, of course, because Leslie Pierce knows what’s up.

You never know what horrors will assail your ears when you settle in to draw.  Will it be world music?  Will it be classical B-sides?  Will it be some local reggae band?  If you’re really lucky it’ll be an electro/traditional Native American fusion band.

So with my iPhone and headphones in hand I braved the AVAA once more.  I found it enjoyable in again now that my sonic fate rested in my own hands.  I could listen to Clutch, David Bowie, and Blackalicious as I drew.  At a moments notice I could start playing Tom Waits.  The power was mine.  All was well in the basement that blistering Sunday afternoon.  They must have gotten a new A/C as well, because it was a very comfortable temperature in the room, despite the milieu of artists and their instruments.

Monday I did pencil drawings at the AFG as well.  This was because I got in my car and completely forgot to bring a surface to paint on.  But I did have the sketchbook.  It was the 2-hour pose, so I did a couple of drawing of the same pose from different angles.  The second one is much better.

Last Friday was Carnivalesque.  It was a burlesque performance put on by Smoke and Mirrors Cabaret.  The show was quite a bit different from most burlesque performances that I’ve seen.  We tried a few experimental ideas with the performance that are not normally seen in burlesque performances.  There was a narrative to the show instead of a disconnected series of performances.  We incorporated some live digital painting into the event.  I made some images that were projected as backgrounds in the performances.

I also did the event flier.  For some reason, when it came time to do the flier my main source of inspiration was the Drew Struzan Blade Runner movie poster.  Because nothing says burlesque like 80’s sci-fi and Rutger Hauer.  It was digitally painted in Photoshop and sized for print at 11×17.  I didn’t know if my computer could handle that many pixels, but it managed.  I based it on photos of the cast from prior events.

Originally the idea was to digitally paint the backgrounds as the show was happening.  But after playing with the computer and the projector a bit during a rehearsal we decided that having the painting happening during all of the routines would be too much of a distraction from the focal point of the performance.  That and the fact that most of the performances were only a few minutes long wouldn’t give me time for much more than scribbles on the screen.  So I ended up doing a lot of that art for the show before hand.  Since we waited until the weekend before the show to actually hookthe laptop up to a projector, I did the images in two very late nights.  I did have the chance to do a live painting before the show started as people were filtering in to the show.

These are the images that were projected behind the performers.  I had thought that since I wouldn’t be able to do paintings during the performances that I would instead do illustrations for each of the backgrounds.  After I spent and evening on a horrible attempt at painting a carnival ground I decided on photo-manipulations instead.  These I could finish quickly enough to have ready in time for the show.

The show went well.  People seemed to really enjoy it.  There’s a review of the show on launch787.com.  There’s a set of photos from the show on Flickr by photographer Menelaos Prokos.  They all look great.  I’m really impressed with all of the photos I’ve seen from the event.  There’s also a video of Miriam’s aerial dance routine.

It was a great event to be a part of.

Hey all,

I’m painting at Art Erotica tonight.  I painted there last year as well.  Here’s a video from last years event.  Evidently I’m not photogenic enough to actually appear in the video, but I swear I was there.

So I got an iPhone last week.  I know, douchebag move.  What’s next?  Buying a SUV?  Maybe a 300 square foot downtown condo for $300K?  Wearing polo shirts and trousers?  But it turns out the damn thing is handy.  One thing that really pushed me over the edge and made me break down and buy it was the Brushes app.  I saw some examples and it looked like people who knew what they were doing could get some good results.  That of course meant I had to spend $300 on a phone and $5 on a program.

I went to my usual Monday night figure drawing session at the AFG tonight.  But I was in a rush in the morning and forgot to pack my art gear.  But this provided the opportunity to finally spend a couple of hours with the new app.  I figured I should be able to turn something decent out with it.  I’ve been doing regular figure drawing and painting session for almost couple of years now.  I’ve done a fair amount of digital painting with Photoshop and Painter.  I thought I was fairly well qualified to take the software for a spin.

So it was pretty good overall.  There are limitations compared to the multi-hundred dollar software, of course.  But as they saw about cameras, what’s the best digital painting software?  The one you have with you.  The biggest issue would be the lack of pressure sensitivity.  Now, that’s a hardware restriction.  Not Brushes fault.  Nothing to be done there.  It’s stripped pretty much to the bare bones that could provide a decent painting experience.  Trimming the fat, I say.  I read a couple of reviews before starting to write this one.  They both mention that the lack of a smudge tool was frustrating.  Now, nobody who knows what they’re doing uses a smudge tool in digital painting, except maybe for novelty.  You blend using opacity and this one of the main variables in the brushes in Brushes.  We’re limited to four layers and they lack blending modes.  Honestly, if there’s no blending modes what do we need layers for anyway?  It would be very useful to have Multiply and Overlay layers.  We don’t have the preponderance of brush option that Photoshop and Painter has, but there was a nice simulated natural-looking bristle brush that I made use of.  All of the brush options in the other two programs just tend to confuse anyway.

Painting with my finger was a bit unusual as well.  This was my first night messing with it though.  With practice I’ll get more used to it.  My fingers feel a bit large for detail work also.  There’s a stylus that can be used with the iPhone that might be handy for drawing with, but I’ll see how the finger comes along first.  I don’t want to start carry around accessories.  Defeats the purpose of portability.  Plus, what kinda dork uses a stylus with their iPhone?  I think I was able to get some decent results.  I found that by zooming far in and taking the brush down to 3 pixels I was able to do some detail work in the faces.

Exporting the images is a bit of a hassle.  There’s an exporting program for the Mac that can grab the images at a decent resolution, 1920 x 2880.  That’s enough pixels for a standard printed page.  But any other method of getting them off the iPhone results in an image that is the screen resolution of the iPhone, 320 x 480.  Tiny.

My work computer is a Mac, so I’ll have to wait until I have some downtime there to export the large images.  What would be nice would be if I could add the full resolution image to the camera roll of the iPhone and the use Dropbox to get it onto another computer.  You can also export videos of the painting, which is pretty cool.  It would be nice to see the working process of somebody who knows what they’re doing.  I’ll post mine up at some point, not that I know what I’m doing.

Another question I have, is why raster images?  We’re already recording the strokes for the video, why not export a vector image?  We have a stroke, it’s attributes are path, length, opacity, color, pattern, etc…  It would seem that these are all things that could be recorded in a svg file.  Now, that would be a game changer if this thing could do vector images.  This would allow us to do prints of any size.  This would be something that Photoshop and Painter cannot do.  This would move this beyond the realm of a neat little app and into something that would be considered for professional use.

In all, I’d say it’s a neat little program that you can get nice result with.  I’ve posted the images I came up with tonight.  These were all 15 minute poses.  I’d say that they’re not bad images considering I was working with an unfamiliar interface and input device.  Definitely worth $5 if you have an iPhone and any interest in drawing.

When I was in college a lot of students omitted the cock from their figure drawings.  Some even didn’t draw nipples on the female models, which is silly since it’s such a good indicator of the position of the ribcage.  I don’t know exactly why they wouldn’t draw the cock.  Insecurity of some sort perhaps?  Perhaps they thought people would think they were gay if they saw charcoal drawings of cock in their newsprint pads.  Or perceived as straight in the case of the females.

A cock is far more obvious in it’s absence.  Therefore kids, in your drawings from now on be sure to include a cock if it is appropriate.  Now, it doesn’t have to be fully rendered.  It’s not terribly important to the overall gesture of the figure.  It’s position is determined mostly by gravity, and occasionally bloodflow.  No need to make it the focal point.  Unless it is.

So don’t be afraid to draw those cocks.  Stick a thumb in the eye of your puritan parents and give them a framed drawing of a naked dude for Christmas.

This post is dedicated to one of the great cock drawers of our time, Leslie Pierce.

I did a few paintings this Christmas as presents.  I did one for each of my roommates, and one for my parents.  I naturally waited until the week before leaving for my trip back to Indiana before starting these paintings.  I did three paintings in three days the week before Christmas.  The one for my parents was done on a 16×24 hardboard.  I stole a few idea from looking around the East Side Studio Tour and the 12×12 Box Art Show and started masking a border around my paintings.  It makes them look a lot more complete without a frame.

The paintings that I did for the roommates were both 24×24 with a 4 inch border done on 3/4 inch plywood.  I lifted that directly from something I saw on the studio tour.

I also participated in the Austin Figurative Gallery Winter Opening Show.  I have several paintings hanging up at the USAA.  During the show we did a live painting demo.  It’s always fun to paint in front of a crowd.  Usually it’s done alone.  We did four fifteen minute poses of models in costumes.  We got my favorite models, Drea and Waverly for the special event.  I asked them for space outfits, and they delivered with some great outfits.

It seemed to go well.  Spiderhouse opened the bar in the USAA so we had drinks available.  The music was excellent and we had a good amount of art up in the place, including some incredible photographs by a guy named George.  Unfortunately hte rest of his name eludes me.

I just finished a painting of a street scene of Austin.  This is East 6th Street, somewhere around Rio Rita.

I set myself up with a painting desk at home a couple of weekends ago.  Up until now I’ve been doing all my paintings on the go.  The main places I would do the paintings were the AFG, AVAA, various hobo camps, and The Varga’s House.  So I’m going to be branching out in subject matter now that I have a desk where I can set things down, like reference photos and paint brushes.  I should have done it months ago.

So what I have here is a painting from a photo I took in Montreal.  I was there in 2006 I believe for a conceptart.org workshop.  I was woefully unprepared as all I had to show off was an embarrassing assemblage of stuff on a dvd from a semester in animation school.  I had a sketchbook that was full of awful crap and showing that stuff to pros was fairly humiliating.

This was an attempt to get used to painting architectural stuff.  I’ve found the sharpie underdrawing technique works well for this sort of stuff as well as the figure paintings.  What I do is make a drawing on the board and thinly paint some general colors over the top.  The drawing still shows through so I still have the a guide for the rest of the painting.  I then paint more opaquely and cover the drawing.  I’m not too concerned with covering the drawing entirely.  If you look, you can see it showing through in places.  I’ve got to start experimenting with oil again and see if I can get this working.  I figure if I paint the first layer thinned with mineral spirits, I can do the same sort of thing.  Acrylic is just currently much easier to handle.  Once it dries, you can just paint over the top.

Here’s my entry to the 12 x 12 art box show that opens on the 5th.  It’s acrylic and oil.  I used acrylic modeling paste to make the texture that’s on the surface.  It was my hope that it would look like really painterly impastoed brushstrokes.  Instead it looks like ceiling plaster in a Quality Inn.  But, it’s covered in galkyd and shiny.  People like shiny.

It could be yours for just $100.  A little bit of Tom Britton to hang on your wall.  It’s preferable to a little bit of Tom Britton that won’t come out of your upholstery.

I’ve been doing some portraits lately and I think I’m getting a much better resemblance nowadays than what I used to.  I’m still using acrylic because most of my painting is done on the go.  But I recently set myself up with a desk and a table-top easel at home and plan to get reacquainted with oil.  I have a couple of tutorials, one by Shawn Barber and another by Coro Kaufman that have given me some pointers, so I plan to put them to use.

Yeah, so I spend a lot of time looking around conceptart.org.

Here’s some of my recent paintings.  I’m a little behind.  I have some more to photograph, but my 8 year old digital camera just broke.  I need to get a new one, but I haven’t gotten around to researching it yet.

And Here’s a couple of drawings from the AFG.

Hey all,

This is the stuff that I’ve done over the past few weeks.  The figure stuff anyway.  I tend to keep the drawings of monsters and decapitations to myself in the confines of my sketchbook.  So today I went to the AVAA for the first time in a long while.  I guess I’ve had stuff to do on Sundays recently.  Or been hungover.  Maybe I’ve been praying.  Whatever the reason, it was nice to have an hour for the paintings, rather than the usual fifteen minutes. I did the sharpie underdrawing again because I was curious to see what it would look like with more time to develop the painting on top. I rather like how these two came out. Jamie, who is always excellent, was the model.

Unfortunately my iPod shuffle died ten minutes into the painting session.  For the first part of the painting session I was subjected to some kinda Native American flute music.  For the second half I listened to half a dozen sixty year old women sing and hum along to the Forrest Gump soundtrack.  One of them would recount a memory of a song after each one.  They didn’t seem to grasp that’s why they were chosen for the soundtrack.  Maybe that’s why I haven’t been to the Sunday session there in a while.  It’s full of people who have unironic memories of the music from their youth.

I have a few weeks worth of stuff to post.  So I’m gonna just dump it all here.

I almost forgot about another bit of art I’m kinda proud of, my Halloween zombie makeup.  Wendy Sanders, a professional make up artist was kind enough to show me around a costume shop and make sure I got the good stuff.  So I put my paintings skills to the test and tried to make a realistic zombie costume this year.  I think it turned out well.  Nobody wanted to talk to me that night, so I guess it was effective.  Definitely gets the award for costume least likely to get laid in.

Here’s my display from Art Outside 2009.  It put on by the Artseen Alliance in Texas farmland outside of Austin.  Evidently it used to take place in Austin, but they had to move because the city built a parking lot or something where it used to be.  OK, I made the parking lot thing up.  I have no idea why it had to move to the countryside.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the event, but there was a lot going on.  For the few hours I was there last night, there were multiple band playing the entire time, a carnival, a fashion show, a film screening, and many contraptions that spit fire.  In all, it was a pretty awesome event.

I was glad that I had to chance to set up my own display.  Since I didn’t have frames for any of my paintings, I had the idea to paint frames around them.  I also threw water into the frames to match the drippy aesthetic of the paintings.  I think it came out well.  I took a couple of pictures with my cell phone.