Hey all,

I’m painting at Art Erotica tonight.  I painted there last year as well.  Here’s a video from last years event.  Evidently I’m not photogenic enough to actually appear in the video, but I swear I was there.

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:

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 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.

Sunday after the Art Erotica I was back at the AVAA for the figure drawing.  This is where I learned some consider referring to an AIDS charity benefit as a “sausage fest” to be bad manners.  I still think it’s funny.  I’ve also made a few tweaks to this website.  I installed the All In One SEO Pack plugin to optimize it for search engines as well as Statpress Reloaded to track my visitor statistics.  I check it far too many times a day.  I get all excited when I see a hit on my site from a Google Image search for “drippy paintings.”  I also put up an icon for the RSS feed.  Because, evidently, people use them.

Monday I painted at the Austin Figurative Gallery.  Every third Monday we’ve started to do 2 hour poses instead of a bunch of 15 minute ones.  It’s nice to have the extra time.  Here’s the result.  It’s an acrylic painting on a gessoed piece of plywood.

Next on the list for site tweaks, I need to figure out a way to encourage more comments and redo the galleries.

I was invited through the AFG to do live painting Saturday night on stage at the Art Erotica 2009.  I accepted.  I’d never painted in front of a crowd before.  But I was prepared.  I had made business cards so that I could participate in the most douchebag of activities: networking.

I knew that the paintings that I did would end up being auctioned.  The Art Erotica benefits AIDS Services of Austin’s Paul Kirby Fund and all proceeds from the sale of the paintings go to the charity.  Despite the philanthropic nature of the event, I participated.

The scene was pretty much what I expected; men dressed like Rob Halford, women dressed like Rob Halford, and giant penis statues.  The walls of the place were lined with erotic art that was being sold through silent auction.  The highest bids were being placed on a print of a painting by Jacques Louis David.  My guess is that due to the high quality of the print, people didn’t realize they were not bidding on an actual painting.  Either that, or they liked it and I’m a condescending asshole.

We set up on the stage, ringed around a black chair.  There were about 10 artists, some drawing in charcoal and some painting.  Because I was one of the last to arrive I set up front and center where my paintings would be the most visible to the audience.  We were doing four 15 minute poses.  This is a rather quick pace to produce a painting, especially in front of a crowd of a few hundred people, many of whom undoubtably had art hanging on the walls.  It’s easy to impress hippies, but other artists…

The first pose was the female.  I found my hands shaking while I was painting.  I didn’t realize that I was nervous until I couldn’t hold my brush steady.  Fortunately I was doing the drippy acrylic style  I’ve been doing for the last few weeks at the AFG.  It doesn’t exactly require the precise hands of a surgeon.  But it does require steady bowels. I was able to pull through and the painting turned out ok.  This gave me a boost of confidence, and my hands didn’t shake for the rest of the paintings.

The other three went well also.  I don’t think that I blew any of them.  They all sold in the auction afterward and in a clever display of douchebaggery I slipped a business card into the back of each painting.  People seemed to like the paintings.  Despite my general unapproachability I received several compliments.  The organizer of the event looked at my paintings, said they were beautiful, thanked me for participating and gave me a hug.  I could occasionally hear comments from the crowd such as, “Damn, he’s quick.”

I took a picture of the crowd from the stage, so people wouldn’t think I was lying when I said I was painting in front of a crowd of hundreds.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the costumes in the crowd, but here’s a couple of shots that I like.

Here are the paintings that I did on stage.  They were taken in a very adverse lighting condition, so the colors are all wonky, but these give a general idea.

Here are all the photos I took that night in a set on flickr.  In all, I consider the night a success.  I had a great time, people liked my art and I saw some of the finest penis sculptures south of the Mason-Dixon.

Submitted for your approval, the last of the 12 pack paintings.  These may not be the last, but I haven’t been buying beer since Thanksgiving.  Only because of the calories.  Nothing to do with the stigma of drinking alone in my apartment.  If I was a thin guy I’d have no problem with drinking alone.  It’s just the extra 700 or so calories a day catches up with me.  So, until I go on another drinking bender these are the last of the 12 pack paintings.

Not to worry though, I’m not going to start using real materials or anything.  I found that a gessoed plywood board makes a nice surface for painting.  Since I don’t mind some texture in my paintings, it’s perfectly good for cheap.  A nice big pricy canvas is for old lady hobbyists who make a painting every three months.  Not somebody who does six paintings every Monday night.

In other news, I’m painting Saturday night at the Art Erotica.  Should be interesting, I’m not sure what the setup is going to be.  I don’t know if it’s going to be one long pose or a bunch of short ones.  A long one would nice, since it’s in front of a crowd it would be nice to be pull off something decent.

Here’s the video from last year’s event:

Here’s Monday’s paintings: