Hey all, long time, no post.  I finally got back to figure drawing tonight.  It had been a couple of months due to a Linux command line class I’ve been taking on Monday nights.  Yeah, Linux command line instead of figure drawing.  Where the hell are my priorities?  Well, a couple of months off seemed to treat me well.  I liked my drawings tonight.  Good lighting and a great model helped as well.  But I was looking forward to going tonight whereas it had been a slog for a while to attend the drawing session.  I guess some time off occasionally is helpful.  Here’s to more art in 2012.  I think it’s about time I start doing something with it.

I have this pack of Chartpak markers that had been sitting around gathering dust for a few years, so I decided to take them to figure drawing tonight.  It took me a few drawings to start to get the hang of them.  I only like two drawing from tonight.  The rest are crap that I’m not going to put on the internet.

Our model tonight was the indefatigable Kelli Bland.  I always end up with good drawings when Kelli models. Here’s a couple of past drawings, for example:

Good lord, I just realized that the first drawing is almost exactly three years old.  Have I really been in Austin that long?  Have I really been doing weekly figure drawings that long? No wonder the portfolio I filled with paintings on paper weighs about 40 pounds.

Here’s a couple from tonight, after I’d gotten used to the markers:

I thought I’d give this process another shot because I like the results from the last one.  I’m still digging it.  I got some feedback from a friend of mine, JR Fleming, a fellow geek artist, that the last one lacked darks.  Which I agreed with.  So I tried to make more of a value range with this one.  I also layered in text to see what it looked like.

This was a test to see what happened when I scan a watercolor drawing and mess with it in Photoshop.  Basically I wanted to see what happened when I tried to draw a more science fictiony scene instead of the usual naked people.  I rather like watercolors.  The key for me seems to be not to try to control them at all.  Stay outside of the lines.  Make it sloppy and call it expressive.  This is a hell of a lot faster and feels more natural than trying to go all digital.  And the watercolor already has a nice texture to it.  I like the way my pencil lines look, not so much inks.  So what do you think, would you read something drawn like this?

I took the new iPad to figure drawing tonight. It ended up pretty well. I’m getting the hang of it. I’m definitely slower with the iPad than I would be with Photoshop and a Wacom, but it would be damn inconvenient to drag a laptop and a tablet around with me. The lack of pressure sensitivity sucks, but it’s just a limitation to work around. Hopefully there’s some shortcuts I have yet to discover that will allow me to more easily resize the brush and adjust opacity. Color picking works well. I’d say with some time, I should be able to bust out some good work with Sketchbook Pro.

Also, the dark sketchy drawing was done using a program called Harmony. It’s a program that runs in-browser in Safari using HTML5 canvas and Javascript. I absolutely love it. I’m gonna take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

I went to the Dr Sketchy again.  It has returned to Elysium and I think this is the perfect place for it.  The most unfriendly of molemen works behind the bar.  The restroom smells of hepatitis.  The normal patrons who show up and aren’t part of the Dr Sketchy are in more elaborate costume than the people who are posing.

The members of Apophenia Belly Dance posed for the event.  What’s not to like about Dr Sketchy?  Drinking, drawing, lovely ladies.  Here’s the drawings:

I’ve been doing drawings at the model sessions as well.  I thought I’d show so that you all don’t think I’m a one trick pony who just produces quickly done paintings of nude women.  I also do quick drawings of nude women.  There’s couple of guys in here too.  And a woman wearing clothes.

And what the what, 47 unique visitors today?  I logged in to post and I have no idea where you’re coming from.  Statpress seems to be intentionally obfuscating it’s information.  Maybe it’s time to break down and put in Google Analytics.  No, who am I kidding, I’ve been posting every two months on average.  We’ll wait for my site overhaul before doing any analytics work.

This isn’t a drawing or a painting, but I kinda like this photo.  I might go to the mall and have it put on a t-shirt.

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.

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’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.