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.

Somebody once told me that Marvin Gaye named an album the same as the title of this post, after a divorce.  The story I was told was that he recorded it so that he could pay alimony, thus the title “Here, My Dear”.  If it’s true, I think that’s pretty awesome.  I’m not going to do a search to try to verify the story.  Some things are better if left in the realm of myth.

So, this social life thing has been a bitch for my keeping up with updating.  No aplogies from me though.  It’s important to occasionally talk to women; not just paint them naked.  Both are pleasurable activities, sure.  Each have their own set of frustrations and pitfalls, but it is important to maintain balance.

I’ve been floating around the idea that in order to attract more visitors to my site, I may need to write about something other than myself.  This site sometimes get 5k spiders a day, so it’s being well indexed.  I think anyway.  So I need to type about more things of general interest to art folk.  Maybe the world at large.  Perhaps if I subtly work in keyword like “Michael Jackson autopsy results” or “Megan Fox nude” I’ll get a lot more traffic.  I’m not sure exactly why that’s a desirable thing, but it seems to be the thing to do if you have a website.

After a couple of weeks of doing shitty paintings, one finally came out decent.  There isn’t much resemblance between the model and the painting.  The model was actually really attractive and the painting is kinda puggish, but I think it has a mood.

I did a couple of drawings of my roommate’s dog.  I’m putting these up to prove to my friend Tiffanny that I do have a soul and can draw nice things.  Not everything I draw is demonically dark or has the foul stench of hetero-male sexual frustration.  Just everything but these two drawings of a dog.

So, I’m just gonna lay the rest of the stuff out here.  I’ve been doing some sci-fi sketches for a short comic book story I’m contemplating.  I also have a demonically dark photoshop painting to share.  So here it all is:

I skipped the Faster than the Speed of Light fundraiser tonight because I got myself involved in a six hour portrait.  It’s been years since I spent this long on a painting, so I thought I’d see what happened.

I experimented a bit with the process.  I first did a tonal charcoal under-drawing, then painted over that with acrylic, then finished up with oil.  It’s a pretty good process, but I should have stopped after my initial glazing with the oil.  The features were much stronger in the acrylic under-painting.  Although you wouldn’t know it from my painting the model was actually very beautiful.

I also did a quick photoshoppery to it, to see if I could improve it.

So I’ve been neglecting my online presence in favor of my social life recently.  No More!  Pixels will bring me happiness.

Here’s some stuff I did in Maya a year ago when I was stumping for a job.  I didn’t get a 3d job, I got a web job that probably pays better than any junior 3d position I would have gotten.  I’m just putting this stuff up as proof that I’m not lying when I say that I learned Maya.  The idea was that I modeled a throne room then gave it a “good” atmosphere and a “bad” atmosphere. So here it is, the project that killed my enthusiasm for doing 3d for the past year.

Here’s a few digital images that I thought I should put somewhere before my hard drive crashes again and they’re lost forever.

That’s right kids, it’s time for another epic post of naked folk. I’ve had a fever, and the only aspirin is drawing naked people.

For some reason it’s much easier to draw guy than girls. I compare it to pool. When you have wide open shot with lots of green between you and the ball you’re trying to hit, it looks really easy, but I find I almost always miss those. It’s the gritty shots where I’m trying to snake it in between other balls that I find I manage to sink it in the hole. Girls are just too smooth, there’s no detail to latch onto. That’s why I feel the drawings of guys are better than the ones of the girl.

Here’s a couple of other random things I had lying around I figured I might as well throw into this post.  The first is a photo manipulation of one of the figure drawings from above.  The other a digital painting.  I need to get a better digital camera because this one will only shoot 1600×1200 and that’s really not high enough resolution if I wanted to do one of these manipulations for print.

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.