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.

Watercolors?  We got em.  I was late this time because of terrible traffic coming down Lamar on my way home.  It was restricted to one lane for about twenty feet and this caused my trip to take about 45 minutes to drive four miles.  So I only have four paintings.  And here they are.

Tonight I brought out the oil paints again at the AFG.  It had been  a while since I’d actually done a figure painting.  I wasn’t sure I’d remember how.  It had been so long that when I got there my Gamsol was dry so I had not thinner.  This forced me to paint thicker than I normally, which I think was good.  It’s always good to do things a bit differently if you’re in a rut.  We had a single pose the entire time, so I had a couple of hours to work on this painting.

Figure Painting at the AFG

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.

Hey all, thought I’d drop in and make a quick post.  I’ve built up a backlog of paintings, so I’m gonna clear out some inventory.  Thanks for your patience, as I’m sure there are many of you who’ve been patiently hitting refresh since my last update.

First up, here’s a couple of painting that I did a while ago, but never made it to the site.  Since they’re good examples of what I can do when I take more than 15 minutes to do a painting, I thought I should put them up.

I’ve done a couple more of those record paintings as well.  As with all of my projects, it has slowed down.  Somehow, staying home and working on stuff has become very difficult.

I did a poster for Animalesque, a burlesque show that is happening this Friday.  I also have a couple of paintings that I donated to their silent auction.  The money is going to a charity, Love-A-Bull.  I seem to be opposed to doing art for money considering the lethargy with which I approach any sort of monetization.

And here’s some recent AFG stuff.  I have several sessions worth of drawings that I haven’t scanned as well.  I need a better workspace.

And lastly, here’s a flier for a show that never happened.

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.

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.

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.

Hey all,

This is the stuff that I’ve done over the past few weeks.  The figure stuff anyway.  I tend to keep the drawings of monsters and decapitations to myself in the confines of my sketchbook.  So today I went to the AVAA for the first time in a long while.  I guess I’ve had stuff to do on Sundays recently.  Or been hungover.  Maybe I’ve been praying.  Whatever the reason, it was nice to have an hour for the paintings, rather than the usual fifteen minutes. I did the sharpie underdrawing again because I was curious to see what it would look like with more time to develop the painting on top. I rather like how these two came out. Jamie, who is always excellent, was the model.

Unfortunately my iPod shuffle died ten minutes into the painting session.  For the first part of the painting session I was subjected to some kinda Native American flute music.  For the second half I listened to half a dozen sixty year old women sing and hum along to the Forrest Gump soundtrack.  One of them would recount a memory of a song after each one.  They didn’t seem to grasp that’s why they were chosen for the soundtrack.  Maybe that’s why I haven’t been to the Sunday session there in a while.  It’s full of people who have unironic memories of the music from their youth.

I have a few weeks worth of stuff to post.  So I’m gonna just dump it all here.

I almost forgot about another bit of art I’m kinda proud of, my Halloween zombie makeup.  Wendy Sanders, a professional make up artist was kind enough to show me around a costume shop and make sure I got the good stuff.  So I put my paintings skills to the test and tried to make a realistic zombie costume this year.  I think it turned out well.  Nobody wanted to talk to me that night, so I guess it was effective.  Definitely gets the award for costume least likely to get laid in.