I’m not even going to attempt to generate enough text to balance these images. This is what happens if I don’t post stuff immediately after making it. It builds up on me quickly. This is stuff from the past week or so.

I was messing around with Photoshop tonight, playing around with some brushes, and this is what I came up with. Why paint in Photoshop? Well, it’s very convenient for print work. If I had an illustration gig of some type I would almost certainly do it digitally. Production and delivery in one tidy package. The only thing lacking from doing work digitally is a physical end product. So to me if feels kinda cold.

There is a speed advantage as well. Where real paintings that I’ve done on this site take many hours, multiple sessions over days, this took about an hour.

The brushes I was playing with came from a downloaded brush set from Bittbox.  Grab them here.

Obama won the election and I finished a painting. It’s been a pretty good day for America. The painting doesn’t have anything to do with the election. I started it before Halloween with the intention of painting something creepy. I think I succeeded. It was also an experiment with glazing. I started with a charcoal drawing and sprayed it with a matte fixative. The stuff really holds charcoal to canvas. It didn’t mix with paint at all. The photos are actually really bad. The gray on the right had side is much more subtle and blends with the sienna much more nicely. I guess what are you gonna do with a hand-held 5-year old digital camera.

It’s dark and colorful. Bother were traits I was going for. I took some photos at various stages. I actually missed one between the first painted step and the finished. All that’s left to do now is to brush a layer of galkyd over the surface when it dries to make it all shiny. That’s the key to a good painting. Shininess.

The first image is a quick charcoal drawing on the canvas. Took about an hour maybe. Establishes the values and the proportion. The second is a quick glazing of some color over the charcoal after it had been sprayed. Now we’re missing a step where I went in with more opaque paint and covered the drawing. And the last image is the finished painting. Basically, it’s another glaze to obscure the figure a bit and try to combine it with the background.

The model didn’t show up to the figure drawing session tonight, but it turned out pretty cool anyway. Artists posed and I did some portraits of people I’ve been drawing with for a while. I think they turned out pretty well.

I found that guys are much easier to draw than girls. I was thinking that I was terrible at portraits until tonight because I’d only been doing portraits of girls for the last six months. Guys have way more bumps on their faces and parts of their skull stick out more. It’s easier to relate all that detail to each other. With girls their faces are much smoother, with much more subtle transitions. Not to make broad generalizations. Or generalizations about broads.

I am impossible to draw. My face is round and smooth and I have no visible upper eyelids due to my thick cro-magnun brow. But it helps me take a punch, so it’s a trade off I’m willing to make.

That’s it for tonight. I haven’t had any adventures since last night’s post. Hopefully this is enough text to balance the images.

I found a toned sketchbook like I was talking about in my last post. I found it at Bookpeople, a big bookstore in Austin. Strange that I couldn’t find anything like this in an art store, but it was at a bookstore. It’s a bit too nice. It’s bound and has a nice cover. It’s a lot of pressure when I have a nice sketchbook not to put any shitty drawings in it. I should probably just do everything on a pad of legal paper. These are the first drawings in it.

I hadn’t really intended to write so much on this website, but the images look so unbalanced without text. Please forgive my self-indulgence.

I voted on Thursday. Straight Democratic ticket, except for one where there was just a Republican and a Libertarian running. I went for the Libertarian. I think it was for a judge and I definitely want Libertarian judges. Anything goes! Hell, you could smoke in the courtroom of a Libertarian judge.

It was not without event. For some reason, I had to do a paper ballot. This was evidently very rare because they had no idea what to do. The poor woman who had to help me spend fifteen minutes dialing a phone number repeatedly to get directions. There was no call waiting and no redial button. Quite a line developed behind me.

I finally went to a booth to fill out the ballots while the woman stayed on the phone to sort out the paperwork and whatnot. The election judge was a bit of a dick. While she was on the phone still trying to sort out the mess I’d caused by arriving to vote, he told her to help the line that had formed behind me. She informed him that she still had to take care of the “paper ballot.” This is how I was now known. “NO” he actually yelled at the woman, “I’ll take care of the paper ballot.” I don’t know if this guy was a real judge or just some retiree volunteer when it’s not election time. I’m guessing he was a real judge. A normal person would know it’s just not right to yell at somebody when they volunteer their time to do some odious job like work an election. I guess he could’ve been a cop.

I filled out the ballot, put it in a orange bag and was assured that it would be counted. As long as any votes are actually counted, I believe that mine will be. I assume that I had to do the paper ballot because I’ve moved around so much recently. Obviously, drifters are up to no good.

I also saw a big snake while I was running this weekend on the trail behind my apartment. I don’t know what type it was. It was the color of dirt. I wouldn’t have seen it if it hadn’t started slithering away from me. Even though I’d been running for 25 minutes already, I still managed to jump three feet in the air. Why’s it always have to be snakes?

I’m working on a painting that should be done this week. I’ll post it when I get it done.