Hey all, Sundays and Mondays I go to figure drawing sessions. Today between work and the session I went to the art supply store. This time I got a demonstration of how incredibly unobservant I am. I stopped at an intersection for the length of a red stoplight. Behind me I saw a fire truck coming with sirens on. It pulled up and stopped right in front of me, blocking the lane. Across the street from me, on the corner, was a guy collapsed on the sidewalk. I sat there in my car for about a minute and didn’t notice him. This wasn’t a case where somebody sees a person who needs help and doesn’t do anything, it was simply beneath my notice. So, if you’re ever collapsed on the street somewhere and you see me driving by, it’s not because I’m an asshole. I just didn’t see you.

Here are a couple of more drawings on toned paper. I think this work well for me. I basically do the same drawing I would do on white paper and then the white chalk is an extra step that really sets it off. I gotta find a toned sketchbook somewhere. You’d think they’d be more prevalent. I can’t be the only person who wants one.

On an incredibly nerdy note, I saw a sketchbook there that advertised itself to be the same “Golden Ratio” as the Mona Lisa. Meaning the same height and width dimensions. What they must not realize, or care, is that the Mona Lisa was chopped down from it’s original size at some point in it’s history.

That’s right, that’s the kinda crap you have to look forward to from me. I can hear the browsers clicking closed as I post.

Howdy there. Here’s a couple of drawings that I did this afternoon at the life drawing session at the AVAA. I had some toned paper lying around that I hadn’t done anything with for a long time, so I used that. It’s always fun to work on toned paper because the paper becomes the mid-tone and you work in both direction from the middle value. This is different from regular white paper where the paper is the lightest tone in the drawing.

They came out alright. I like the portrait better, although for some reason it looks religious. I guess that’s the dramatic effect of covering most of the paper with charcoal.

This site, tmbritton.com, is finally ready to launch! It took quite a while of picking at it and a long concerted effort this weekend, but it’s finally in a working state. I’ve been a professional web-guy without a website for too long. There’s still things here and there that bother me. I still need to get a sidebar that is consistent in the Art Gallery section. I need to figure out what I want all the pages to be and say, apart from the blog portion.

I should probably give some props to all the sources and references I found that helped when building this site. I build it based on the Starkers naked theme by Elliot Jay Stocks. Basically this is a theme that is stripped down to the database calls. You put in your HTML around the calls and it makes it quite quick to build a theme if you’ve already done a HTML/CSS layout. This post on Smashing Magazine is a good compendium of resources for WordPress development. I probably used several of the tutorials linked from this page.

Probably the greatest help for this site was the Flickr Photo Album plugin. I was originally just looking for a way to do some random images in the sidebar. Then I saw that it could do galleries based on sets of images in Flickr. Then I saw the tagging. It is so cool that I can tag all my drawings and paintings and bring them up based on materials I used and subject matter, for example.

I’ll update this site frequently with new drawings and paintings as well as more computer-centric stuff. So, if anybody who is not my mother happens to see this site, thanks for looking. And Mom, thanks for looking as well.