Just so everybody out there doesn’t think I’m getting all sensitive I thought I’d post this stuff. With all my lovely drawing of naked ladies I wouldn’t want anybody to think that I’d forgotten my roots; drawing monsters and the chicks who kill them. So without further ado, here’s some art.

Ok, so this one is a bit sensitive. It’s a digital painting of a lovely young lady without a trace of a monster. But it’s been sitting around for a few days without being posted.

Here’s some watercolors that I did this weekend.  This is the first time that I’ve messed with watercolor since highschool.  So it’s been a while.  I remember hating them back then.  I couldn’t control them at all and I found it frustrating.  Evidently I like sloppy art a lot more now, because I kinda like them.  I gave up on coloring within the lines and went with it.

I did a lot of figure drawing the last two days. Here are the results. I think that I discovered rim lights last night, which really help define the form. So it was productive. Those are highlights running down the edge of the shadow side of a form, for the non art nerds out there.

Here’s a few black and white digital images from photo reference. Not sure where the photos came from anymore. They’ve been on my hard drive for years. I’m finally getting productive enough to start going through images in my reference folders.

I discovered the unsharpen mask filter with the last two of these. It really makes an image look more finished. By flipping back to the original image after applying the filter you can see the original image is much more blurry.

Ah yes, filters, the beauty of Photoshop.

So, the wacom has been fun since I finally got used to it. It was hard at first, looking at the screen and having the hand on the tablet. Actually, I’ve had it for 3 years, so I can’t say it was hard at first.

Here’s a landscape. Took about two hours in Painter and Photoshop. It was looking terrible until I brought it into Photoshop and started overlaying a bunch of crap onto it. Adjustment layers and Overlay layers are the key to this digital stuff.

In Painter it was just a bit too smooth. I had to bring it into Photoshop to add the texture and those brushstrokes. Painter can do some really nice stuff with simulating natural media, but I just don’t know it as well as Photoshop. I probably just need to find a brush I like, and use it until it makes sense.

I did this one because I rarely draw anything mechanical. If you look at my previous post you can see that the attempt at stereos were rather haggard. I didthis one so that the mechanical object was the focus of the picture. Sort of a supplement to all the figure drawing. I found that I can indeed draw straight lines with the tablet if I try. I was just being lazy and ignoring backgrounds. So next time I’m being lazy and not wanting to draw a table or something I can just look at this one and make myself do it.

This is all photoshop with a wacom tablet. Probably excessively overlaid with texture, but that how I like to do things.

So I did this digital painting as practice. Then I started playing with it some more in Photoshop and came up with something more designy and I think that ultimately stands on it’s own as a piece of art. The painting was referenced from a photograph, so I can’t take credit for the composition or the model. But I think it turned out well. I like that I’m getting to the point with the wacom that I can generate my own content for these sort of manipulations and don’t always have to use photographs, which usually involves using somebody else’s photograph.

I always try to write these posts late at night after drawing when I’m tired. They just turn into rambling messes.

I need to go through my own photos and see if there’s anything in there I can do anything with. It’s easy to make a nice image if you’re copying a picture of a naked woman. Unfortunately the supply of photographs of naked women that I’ve taken is rather slim. I may have to content myself with doing digital paintings and designs of empty booze containers.

Here’s a couple of digital master copies that I’ve done the last two nights. I worked on these probably a couple of hours each. These are all photoshop, looking at the paintings for reference. The first is a Bougoureau, the second Michelangelo. These are great practice. I feel like they’re major steps forward in my handling of the wacom. I didn’t get as far along with the second as I would have liked. For some reason it was taking longer than the other.

I did a master copy of a Vermeer in college. It was the first oil painting that I did that I thought was decent. It wasn’t, of course, just much better than what I had been doing. You learn a lot about how to depict form by doing these. You see how they handled. Looking just doesn’t do it. The only way to learn is by hand.

After a couple of weeks off I got back to the figure drawing sessions. I felt a bit rusty, but by the end of the night I’d worked out the kinks and came up with a couple that I’m not embarrassed to show. These were the last two drawings of the night.

The model had a cold. I felt sorry for her. I’d think it would be hard to go stand naked in front of a bunch of people when you’re feeling good, let alone when you feel like shit.