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.

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:

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  In between my last post and now I’ve taken a trip home and changed residences.  I’ve been busy and couldn’t find my camera for a while.  So I have a fair amount of stuff built up to post.  I’ve continued the acrylic paintings and drawing sessions.

So here it all is.  I’m just gonna lay it out here.

OK. Here’s my drawings and paintings from the last week. This is a fair amount of shit. Despite the gothy look of my latest painting, I swear that I don’t think that I’m a vampire, wear eyeliner, or carry around a vial of blood from my one true love.

I was pretty productive today.  It was one of the first Saturdays in a while that I’ve woken up without a hangover.  I went painting at the Austin Figurative Gallery from 1-4 today.  Then I went for a run.  Then I did web stuff at Café Medici.  They have a superior latté.

I may be harming the drunken artist image I’m trying to cultivate online with all this talk of running and lattés.  I’m going to have to stop before I reveal myself as the yuppie douchebag that I’ve become.  I need a 40.

So I started a new series of paintings.  They are called “Grocery Bag Paintings”.  They are called this because they are done on grocery bags.  They are very similar to the “12 Pack Paintings.”  The only difference is that the paintings are done on a grocery bag instead of cardboard from a 12 pack.  This has some advantages.  That the paintings are bigger is an advantage.  It’s a more comfortable size to work, and after I throw them into a frame, obscuring the fact that it’s a painting on a grocery bag, the bigger size affords a higher price.  That is, if I ever try to sell anything.

Another advantage is that if I go into a painting session with a bunch of grocery bags, as opposed to 12 packs, nobody feels the need to have an intervention.  Now, if anybody is considering an intervention, the answer is no, I don’t need one.  Because only losers quit.

Sunday there were one hour poses at the AVAA.  I took the acrylics and one of the paintings turned out really nice.  I think it’s the most successful painted portrait I’ve done so far.  I think the key was a fairly detailed under-drawing.  That’s something that 15 minute paintings don’t afford me.  Time for drawing.  Here’s the painting big, because I like it.

The rest are from tonight at the AFG, except one that was done the same day as the portrait.  I don’t like it as much so it goes on the slush pile with the rest of them.

This website is starting to look repetitive.  I think I need to spend some more time on something to make sure I haven’t forgotten how to draw.