“Righnbeck” was written on the door in gold, gothic, scripty looking letters. As if some 12th century monk had taken an hour away from the scriptorium copying copies of copies of copies of holy books to come down to this dusty little god forsaken town in Iowa and do an old pal a solid.
It looked nice. I was jealous.
I made a show of knocking for the two uniforms that were behind me, but as softly as possible. I like to make an entrance and I find that knocking, more often than not, spoils the surprise. I barged in without being asked.
The office fit the door. On the floor was a luxuriant burgundy rug stitched up like a tapestry of curling flowers and figures doing what figures on rugs do in the way that they do them, which is to say expensively. Lining the walls were big hulking gothic bookcases 8 or 9 feet tall and brimming with little gargoyles and goblins and god-knows what-else, and stuffed to bursting with books. There were statues too. Little stone things like the bookcase carvings sitting on just about every horizontal surface in the room. Righnbeck liked to be watched.
I cupped a hand to my mouth. “Righnbeck, It’s Kay, speak up if your in here.”
There was nothing. Not that I expected it. The place was so cramped with the medieval decor there wasn’t a place to hide a goldfish.
“It looks like he’s not here Kay.”
It was one of the uniforms. The younger one with the Norman Rockwell looks, freckles and everything.
“Brilliant d….”, I ran my hand through my hair. I was about to butter his bread but stopped myself short. I don’t know why. Who cares. Right then I just wanted Righnbeck and this joint was fresh out.
“Look around boys. See if you can find anything useful.” I caught the younger one’s eye, “but for Christ’s sake, don’t touch anything.”
I turned towards the doorway and took a long look through it to the dingy hallway behind us – drab, institutional, looking at the threshold between it and the lavish office it was as if the seam in the carpet was glowing, as if the door jam were the frame of some truly uninspired painting.
That’s when I saw the owl.
It was perched just above the door, its talons gripping some sort of lizard headed thing carved in the freeze that capped the doorframe.
It was so still that at first I thought it was stuffed. Given the rest of the office a bit of taxidermy would hardly seem out of place. I stared at it for a long second, then two and three and four and then it twitched. So quick I wasn’t sure I’d even seen it. Twitch, twitch, blink.
“Freeze!” I shouted under my breath. The two uniforms gave me a look but they were smart enough to do as told. Soon enough they followed by gaze to the spot just above the door.
“Is it dangerous?” one of them whispered.
“I can hit it from here, no problem,” said the other. It was the older one this time, a plump man with scraggled grey hair and 3 days of a beard. He started to reach fro his sidearm and as he did the owl snapped its gaze to stare him down.
“No you fool!” I shouted.
I dove at the man, sliding across a mammoth wooden desk sending nicknacks and papers scattering across the floor. My outstretched hands struck the old fool square in the stomach, 2 buttons above some ridiculous silver belt buckle, and his weapon went off.
He’d only managed to get the gun about waist high, unfortunate for me, as the round went into my left shoulder, caromed off a few bones inside and went whizzing out the other side with a wet THWACK. The low angle was a no go, but that little dance inside my anatomy was just the ticket to redirect the round. I landed in a pile on the other side of the desk, and looked back just in time to see a burst of feathers falling in little twirling spirals onto that lush imported rug.
It’s a while after that where my memory picks up again …
One of the courses I took this last fall was Anatomy for Artists, taught as a companion course to figure drawing. I’ve been dyeing to learn more about anatomy, I’ve got quite a few books, but in the past it always seemed like an insurmountable task. So many bones and muscles, so many crags and knots and little doodads, and all that Greek and Latin!
Well this is where great teachers come in. The reason you take a class instead of learning something on your own is that (hopefully) the instructor’s experience tells him or her what’s important to learn and what’s pedantic detail.
We spent most of the class on the skeleton and the first thing we learned was SIMPLIFY. All those little boney protuberances and ossuary processes and subtle sloping curves of form basically disappear once you wrap everything in guts and skin and whatnot. Instead, visualize the bones as simple geometric shapes and focus on understanding their positions and relations in space (which is quite hard enough on it’s own, thank you).
I’m proud to say that we did study the medical names however, which is kind of fun.
Here is a set from early on in the semester to give you an idea of what I mean. At this point we’d covered the head, torso, and legs but not the arms. These are all drawn from reference photos (I left the clothed ones in, but I cropped out the nude ones, sorry ^_^).
So you can see how all that boney detail turns into boxy shapes, but the drawings still capture the figure pretty well. Even the complex joints can be turned into things like spools and cylinders. The joints on the knees are called condyles by the way, which is my new favorite anatomy word. Also, don’t look at that ankle just above, I put the spool in backwards and it’s wrong wrong wrong x_x.
Some things are easier to simplify than others. The pelvis for example is very complex in real life, but because it’s mostly buried in fleshy bits you really don’t need much more than a wedge shape to get the idea. Scapulae (that’s shoulder blades to you non-doctor types) on the other hand rest right under the skin of the back so they take a bit more work. Heres me trying to sort them out:
Going through the process I learned some things that surprised me. For example, did you know that the two bones in your forearm ( the ulna and the radius ) actually cross and uncross as you rotate your wrist! It kind of gives me the chills if I think about it too hard.
Near the end of the semester we just started talking about the muscles, but unfortunately we ran out of time to get very far with them. For the final project I did these two complete skeletons:
The fellow on the left is Fred Astaire, the one on the right was a female model. I drew her once before in one of the drawings above. Comparing the two you can see how much more fluid and weighty this one looks.
Last week Apple updated their e-reading software to include a new (well really just extended) format for multimedia e-books aimed at the textbook market. As part of that push, they also introduced a new tool called iBooks Author which lets you . . . you know, author iBooks. Apple is promoting the program chiefly as a tool for making textbook like rich media books, but after watching their presentation I immediately thought that it would be a great way to make all sorts of illustrated book content like comics, story books, illustrated noves, and especially a convenient portfolio tool.
Apparently I’m not the only one. The fabulously talented Dani Jones has a post up about her experiences trying iBooks Author making a comic.
The Best part is that Apple is giving iBooks Author away FOR FREE, which puts a few other $500 products I can think of *cough* InDesign *cough* to shame. After watching the apple speech I was all giddy and excited and whatnot, so I immediately downloaded Author and decided to give it a try. Here’s how things went.
The Project – Flywheel:
A few years ago I made an illustrated short story for a class project called Flywheel. It’s written in the style of a series of journal entries accompanied by simple watercolor illustrations. It’s about 20 or so pages depending on how it’s paginated and since I already had the text and illustrations in my computer for the print I made for class I thought it would make the perfect candidate for my first e-book.
You can download a copy of my finished book here:
Getting Started with iBooks Author:
If you’ve used one of Apple’s iWork programs like Keynote or Pages then I suspect that Author will look pretty familiar to you. It’s been quite a while since I’ve used either, but I found things to be pretty intuitive, and thankfully the help file in the program is well written and handy.
When you start you’re presented with a few templates you can work from. I played around in each of them but I ended up using the “Basic” because it had the least formatting for me to remove.
The first thing that gave me some pause was the structure that Author imposes on your book. At the top of your list of pages are 4 sections that are part of every book. The first is a cover which you can populate with your title and whatever images you’re interested in.
The next is an “Intro Movie” which plays the first time you open the book. For an example of this see the E. O. Wilson Biology textbook that Apple uses in all it’s demos; think “flashy to look at once in a demo, but ultimately really annoying”. You can’t delete this heading in Author, but if you leave it blank then it just doesn’t appear in your export, so no biggie.
Next is a Table of Contents. This is generated for you automatically as you build your book. There are some settings to adjust what appears here but as far as I can tell there is no removing it and at the very least it will contain each of your chapter or section pages (more on that later). The formatting is also a bit fixed. You can add images and text to decorate it but basically you get a static for each chapter or section with a series of thumbnails of that chapter’s internal pages along the bottom, each of which is a link to that page in the book. For a visual book it’s much prettier than a list of chapter titles. I think perhaps very handy for a portfolio book too.
The last fixed item is a glossary that lets you add terms and link them to pages in your text. This is more for the textbook side of things so I didn’t play with it much but now that I think about it I wonder if it could be used for something handy like a keyword index. If you don’t fill it out it’s omitted from the final export just like the intro movie.
Under the fixed items is the list of your pages. So on to the guts!
Making Pages:
There were a few things about this that were very confusing to me at first, so let me explain and maybe save you from the same headache. The problem came down to the way Apple wants you to structure your book so that it works nicely with things like the table of contents and scalable text and all the other e-book features. Once you get the idea it makes sense, but if you’re like me and don’t read the instructions it can be confusing.
An iBook is made up of either a series of “Section” or a series of “Chapters” (or a nested mixture of each) so that each section or chapter’s heading can show up in the table of contents and link you to each part of the book. This means that you can’t just add pages to your book, you have to add a section or a chapter first, and then add pages to that section or chapter. That took me about an hour to figure out.
In turn, each section or chapter has a single block of text that snakes through linked text boxes on however many pages are necessary to show all of it. This is so that when a reader adjusts the font or text size the text of the book can redistribute itself properly. When you add an image or a floating text box Author also makes a little anchor indicator that lets you associate that item with a location in the text so they stay in sync.
When you make a new page you choose one of several templates, basically a blank page or one with 1, 2, or 3 columns of connected text boxes. It took me a while to realize that the connected text boxes and the floating ones were not interchangeable. If you want things to work correctly you have to keep your body text in the big linked boxes.
My story is laid out as journal entries, each about a page long, and each headed by a date (so 25th of January for example), so at first I decided to work with chapters. I think this would be fine if my story were longer, but because each chapter is only about a page long this arrangement turned out to be a problem when I previewed things on my iPad for the first time. Instead, I made a single chapter and designed it’s intro page to look like a title page for my book. The I filled the chapter with all 20 or so pages of my book. This worked really well.
Once you get going things are pretty smooth. I cut my text from the original textfile I had handy and pasted it into text boxes, and then dragged and dropped the illustrations into place. The formatting and styling tools are all very intuitive and adjusting the images and flowing text around them is very easy.
Preview, Where Dreams are Crushed by the Realities of eBooks:
Ok, that’s a little harsh. Things weren’t that bad, but there were a few things I discovered when I made my frist preview that were a bit disappointing.
First, and most upsetting, were the fonts. As I said I had laid out my book previously for a printed assignment, and at the time I spent considerable effort finding nice script fonts for the date headings and a legible but interesting body font. On my computer everything looked fine, but apparently fonts are not exported with your book. The iPad only supports about 2 dozen common fonts so all my stylized text was replaced with a crummy substitute font. Rather than take what the system gave me I went back to my computer and restyled the text with something more appropriate.
Another harsh reality on the iPad is the issue of portrait vs landscape views. When you work on your project in Author the view defaults to a landscape format, which feels about like a 2 page spread on a paperback. You can also click a button and edit the way things will be laid out in portrait orientation, but for some reason Apple decided that in portrait view all images should appear as small thumbnails in the margins. Again, very textbook like.
I played around with the portrait orientation for a while trying to find something I liked, but usually when I made something work in portrait it looked ugly in landscape or vice versa, and there is just enough connection between the two versions that I couldn’t get something that worked well in both. I almost wish you could make two completely different versions of the book and just swap them out when someone rotates their iPad. You do have the option of disabling portrait orientation all together and that’s what I finally ended up doing.
Another annoyance I came across has to do with those linked text boxes. I formatted my book as two facing pages, sometimes with an image on one side or the other, but occasionally with a large picture spanning across both. I used the 2 column page template which gives you two equal text boxes and a grey dividing line down the middle of the page. You can see it poking out on this screenshot at the top and bottom.
Well I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get rid of that blasted grey dividing line. At first I thought maybe it was just for visual reference and it would disappear when I exported the book, but not so. You can select the line but there doesn’t seem to be any way to delete it or even edit it’s appearance. You can also edit the template files directly but the same story there. SO FRUSTRATING! I finally had to make thin white boxes on every page just to cover it up.
After the first preview I had some adjustments to make, but for the most part things went fine.
Export, ISBN’s, and the iBookstore:
Exporting your book is very easy and when you’re done you are left with a .ibooks file that you can then distribute yourself for others to install on their iPads through iTunes.
If, however, you want to sell you books (or give them away for free) in the iBookstore, then you have to go through a process of applying to Apple to become a seller which requires some contract signing, and then submit your book for review and approval. I applied for a seller account on the day iBooks Author was released but I haven’t heard back from them yet. I suspect they are a bit inundated with applications at the moment.
Reading about the process however I discovered that one of the submission requirements for a book, even one you intend to sell for free on the store, is a registered ISBN number. If you are lucky enough to live in a country where the government runs the national ISBN database you can likely get an ISBN for your book for free. I however live in the USA where our government thought it would be wise to grant a monopoly on ISBN numbers to a private corporation that charges around $125 each. Large companies can buy ISBN’s in blocks at substantial discounts, so there are a number of small self publishing websites that offer numbers for less or even free, but with varying caveats. ISBN numbers not only identify your book but the publishing house to which that number block was assigned, which can mean that if you publish under a free or low cost ISBN associated with a publisher it can present legal hurdles if you ever decide to sell your book under another publisher later. My over all impression at the moment is that getting and ISBN is more trouble than it’s worth.
Anyway, you can always distribute your exported book yourself as a download. Well, sort of, you see . . .
License Controversy:
Since iBook Author was launched there has been some controversy on the internet about some of the provisions in the EULA pertaining to what you can do with the books you make with the software. The offending section is this one:
2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.
…
B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:
(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution
The gist of this is that you are not allowed to sell the books you make with iBooks Author anywhere but in the iBookstore. Some people jumped to the conclusion that this ment that you would not be able to sell your book anywhere but with Apple, but the important distinction is this: You can still sell the content of your book anywhere, you simply can’t make a formatted version of your book with the iBooks Author software and then sell that formatted version anywhere other than the iBookstore.
I think this provision is pretty scummy, both as a potential author and as a consumer, but it doesn’t mean my work is locked up, just that I have to do a lot more to reformat with a different tool it if I want to use it somewhere else. Because of this provision I would think twice before using iBooks Author to make something I intend to sell.
Conclusions:
I didn’t get a chance to play with many of the fancy eye-candy type features of Author but for the simple sort of layout I was after I was pretty happy with the experience. I’m also excited to try it at a few other sorts of projects. For a few years now I’ve been compiling my portfolio in InDesign and exporting it as a PDF to be printed (at considerable expense) or sent to clients and and studios as an e-mail attachment along with a resume.
I think this would be a great way to make a portfolio I could take with me to a meeting or a job interview. You can also export your books as static PDF’s so I can imagine filling out the portfolio in Author and then using the same files to send out as I take with me.
This is another cross post from our little collaborative project at Pixeldiggers. If you get a chance hop over there and see what everyone else is up to.
Pareidolia (that something like pear-e-DOLL-i-ya) is one of those big fancy doctor words that every artist should know. It refers to the phenomenon of seeing something meaningful in what is in reality completely random. Think: seeing a bunny in the clouds, or a man’s face in the moon, or the disapproving face of the Viking God Woden in the scorch marks of your morning toast.
For most people pareidolia is little more than an interesting trick of the eye, but for an artist it’s a fantastic way to generate ideas. If you’ve ever had the experience of sitting down to your instruments and thinking “I just don’t know what to draw”, pay close attention.
Pareidolia works because your brain is a pattern matching machine, especially for shapes that resemble faces. (If you’re interested in how this works, I highly recommend Jeff Hawkins book On Intelligence)
It’s so good in fact that when you give it something vague and formless to look at it can’t help but interpret what you see as something it’s not. This can happen by accident as in the examples above, but you can also provide your eyes with something random to look at on purpose and then coax an image out of the chaos.
As part of a digital painting assignment this last semester we tried this method out as an exercise. It was so much fun that I’ve used it a few times sense and I thought I would share a little about what I’ve learned so far.
Your first task is to make some kind of visual noise to work with. One approach, and the one we talked about in class, comes from Scott Robertson on his Gnomon Workshop DVD, Creating Unique Environments. Scott uses large greyscale markers to make interesting organic shapes on a dozen or so sheets of paper, then scans them into photoshop layers where he overlays and blends them with different blending modes until he sees something interesting.
Another approach, this one from Chris Oatley, is to take a random photo from the web and then zoom WAAAAAAY into small sections of it looking for something interesting.
For my first attempt I dug through my art drawer and pulled out every used up charcoal stump and mislaid tube of paint and spent about an hour randomly smearing things on different scraps of paper. Then I scanned them all into layers of a single photoshop file at very high resolution (600 dpi). Then I spent about an hour zooming in to different portions looking for interesting shapes. Here’s one of about 6 sets I came up with:
The first thing I realized after doing this is that not all random stimulus is created equal. I had a lot of trouble finding interesting shapes, but on Scott’s DVD he picks them out one after the other. The reason is that even though the shapes he was making were random they all had organic structural shapes, so when he went looking for landscapes and buildings the building blocks were there.
Still, I did find some fun things. I especially liked that one on the bottom left so I opened it in a new documents and started laying things over it, painting into it, running filters against it, and after about an hour came up with this:
And then this:
It’s nowhere near finished, but it’s certainly a good start on something.
That first session was so much fun I thought I I would give Chris’s technique a try, so I zoomed way in on a section of that painting, then started layering, cropping, and painting again. Here’s the result of that:
So you can see how things can change quite drastically.
One thing that was bugging me about this process was that the results were so random. I wanted to see if I could control things a little more. This next time before I started working I thought about the kind of image I wanted to create. I’ve been looking at a lot of ink work lately, people like Mike Mignola, Ale Carloni, Alex Toth, and Francis Vallejo so I thought this might be an interesting target to aim for. I also had just finished watching China Town, a really fantastic Film Noir, and I had the idea of those 1920′s cars with the giant headlights in my mind.
I got out my bottle of ink, some bristol board scraps, and some masking tape. I put strips of tape down at random on the paper and then made a mess with the ink. Heres a scan of some of the results:
So just like before I scanned these into the computer at high rez, but this time instead of zooming and layering, I used the lasso tool to cut out random shapes which I pasted into a new file. Then I started moving the shapes around like puzzle pieces until something started to emerge.
After a few hours of moving and only a little bit of painting, here’s what I got:
Other than some of the fine details like the face, the car’s grill, and the skull emblem on the door, everything here was pieced together like a collage with only a minimum of straight painting. Here’s the final version:
I’m still not confident that I have a good handle on steering this process where I want it to go, but I think that’s probably part of how it works. It does seem that you can at least point things in a general direction by the sort of raw materials you put in at the beginning.
If nothing else, it’s an interesting exercise in composition and visual metaphor and a good way to hone your skills in identifying both.
A thank you note.
Ink, watercolor, and gouache, about 9 x 3
These were a couple of quick portraits I did in digital to try out some brush ideas.
This first is Dorathea Mort, the mug shot subject I mentioned in a previous post about glazing.
This one I painted from a still from the movie True Grit. It was one of my very favorite movies this last year. This is actress Hailee Steinfeld done up as Mattie Ross.
Working on hands this time. In this case I did master copies.
This first set is from Alphonse Mucha. Mucha’s work is what we all think of when we think Art Nouveau. It’s all about the play between flat graphic shapes and subtle rounded forms and lots of organic curly cues. These were done in photoshop:
And these were pencil on paper:
This third set are based on J. C. Leyendecker. Leyendecker was a rough contemporary of Mucha’s, but he worked in a very different style as one of the golden age American illustrators along with people like Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker did a lot of magazine covers and so had to work quickly. His style is all about getting the point across with a few strokes. He’s one of my favorite artists. These were done in photoshop:
This set is based on sketches by James Jean, a contemporary illustrator. His does these sketches with single lines in pen, so they’re basically impossible to copy. It was fun to try though. Mine also pen on paper:
I’m not sure who this last set are from, the file wasn’t properly labeled. I believe it’s someone contemporary. If anyone recognizes them (as if my copies were good enough) let me know. Mine are pencil on paper.
UPDATE: turn out these were from Jerome Witkin. He’s a contemporary figurative artist.
Some foot studies from life drawing class, mostly from photos. There’s a few Bridgeman’s in there if you look carefully.
As a rule I am generally opposed to self portraits. When I have to do them they generally end up pretty weird. A case in point:
Yes I do own a shirt like that. And the tie. And the silly giant jacket. But I usually don’t look this moody and wistful, (usually). Just think of it as the 3 story tall mural in the lobby of my evil corporate headquarters. Somewhere there’s a little plaque with a title like “Faciamus Mala Fecit Apparatus” (he made us make evil machines), and under that orange thing on the left theres a little expresso bar.
The portrait is all done in digital but I layered it in with some goodies scanned from my old engineering texts. I have this old book of machine parts that is full of wicked diagram drawings like these. For you chemistry nuts out there that’s a zinc oxide molecule on the left. Believe it or not I have an entire book about zinc oxide.
Part of the assignment was to make a few custom brushes so here are the brushes I used in the painting. The ones on the right are things I made.
Our big project in perspective class this semester was to design an ideal art studio for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million. That will buy a lot of chocolates and enormous chairs, but I wanted to make something pretty cool to put them in as well.
I’ve always had a thing for houses made out of converted buildings. I heard once about this decommissioned nuclear missile silo that someone converted into a house, the star feature being the 20 ton silo cover door which could be opened in less than 10 seconds with the aid of several rockets.
Missile silos are pretty cool, but an art studio needs light and silos a more of a subterranean affair. When you need windows there’s only one way to go. Gothic churches.
I’ve seen a few churches converted into houses as well, but most are smaller country churches and I wanted something big and stony like churches are meant to be. Here’s the basic layout I came up with:
The section to the far left, what the cathedral folks would call the narthex, is 2 stories with an entrance hall and some small rooms on the bottom, and then a large open office on top with 20 foot celling. The middle section, the nave, is large and open with a split level staircase to the 1st and 2nd floors. On the far end where the apse and alter would have been is closed off to form a library and reading room. Pretty swanky huh?
Here’s a measured floorplan I drew up in sketchup. You’ll see by the measurements that this is pretty small for a gothic church. We call that Bijou in the real estate biz.
Drawing this thing in perspective was a bit of a challenge. I did quite a few studies. Here was a first attempt based on the sketches above:
And here is a study of the staircase:
One of the techniques we studied in class is called a plan projection. It’s a process where by you can plot out your perspective drawing from a measured floorplan and elevation so that you know everything is precisely the correct size and location in perspective. It’s a time consuming process but it works like a charm. In order to do the projection I needed an elevation to go with my floor plan above, so I made this rough model in sketchup:
Once you get these two as guides, you line everything up on a drawing table along with your drawing paper. My setup looked like this:
And here’s my first attempt at the drawing:
Not too shabby, but I decided I wasn’t completely happy with the angle on things, so I started over. Here was the final result:
I decided to try coloring it a bit in photoshop as well. If you look carefully, there are 3 cats hidden in the picture. You can see 2 of them in the detail above.
Along with the overall view I also did a shot from the interior. This time I decided to forego the plan projection and just do the drawing on my own measurement. I settled on a shot looking at my work desk up there on the second floor in the extreme left of the drawing above.
This drawing had a lot of overlapping elements so I actually used 4 sheets of paper overlaid on one another to keep all the parts separated. Here’s what that mess looked like:
You can see all the construction lines I used to plot everything out. A good example is that circle floating in the middle of the page. That’s how I mapped out where each of the 5 legs of the chair base should go.
Here’s how it looks all cleaned up:
I got a little carried away in this one and added some subtle shadows.
Just a quick note. This post originally appeared on a collaborative blog some of my TAD buddies and I are trying to get going. Things are still in the early stages but hopefully we’ll have a lot of interesting stuff to share. The title of the thing is a little up in the air at the moment, but for now you can read us over at Pixeldiggers.
With a winter break stretching before us and a new year on the horizon I’m sure many of us student artist types are thinking about all of the drawing and painting practice we’ve got planned. So I thought it would be fitting to start out my first blog post thinking about how best to come out the other side of winter break with that happy feeling of accomplishment.
This was prompted by a podcast I listened to today, Chris Oatley’s Art Cast. If you’re not familiar with it, I highly recommend it. Chris is a character designer and development artist at Disney, which is pretty fantastic in itself, but he’s also an assiduous life-long learner, and his podcast is chiefly concerned with how he (and by virtue of your listening, you) can improve your artistic skills, attain your career goals, hone your craft, and generally be a bigger better more jewel encrusted you.
In his most recent episode (that would be #58) Chris addresses the idea of making New Year’s Resolutions about improving your art, and how the sort of well meaning but naive goals like “I’ll do a new painting every day” should be avoided, in favor of some more productive alternatives.
I’ll hold my tongue least I spoil the episode for you, it’s well worth a listen, but I will say that one of his recommendations is to focus on a specific project with a measurable end product. This idea runs along a theme I’ve heard recently from a number of artists:
“Projects are the New Portfolios”
Don’t get me wrong, a traditional portfolio is still important. But I think one thing that separates the work in a student portfolio from that of a professional is that professional work is part of a larger end product, and so it reflects the depth and attention to requirements that a larger project demands. Learning to work creatively within those real world strictures is what makes you a better professional.
Making your own projects is a way to practice at that. A good project can be anything as long as it has a clear, tangible end product. Here are some good examples:
- Comic (stand alone short, web comic, series of strips, etc)
- Illustrated Story (book, single page story, etc)
- Collected Sketchbook
- Illustration Series (famous jazz musician portraits, 80′s pop icon tarot cards)
- Poster Design
- Holiday Greeting Card
- Portfolio Web Site
You get the idea. The point is that you have a specific goal so that you have something to work towards, limitations on the scale, size, cost, time, etc, and some discrete physical (or digital) thing to have when you are done.
Now, the trick is to use the project as an excuse to improve some specific skill you want to master. In my case, I would like to get a better handle on character design and 3D form, and I really want to get some experience using Zbrush. So I’ve decided my goal for the next few weeks will be to design a character, sculpt it in Zbrush and Maya, and then have it 3D printed as a (by then belated) holiday trinket to give out to some friends and family.
We’ll see how it goes ^_^.
Our first assignment in perspective class this year was 100 impeccable cubes, freehand. You don’t usually think of perspective class as a place for freehand drawing, but it really should be. Being able to work out a complex perspective problem with a ruler is important but let’s face it, most of the time drawing with a ruler is a drag. Rulers are a tool for finished drawings, not for sketching. But sketching is where all the design happens. I can only speak for myself, but I want to have the sort of draftsmanship skills that I can draw what I want to long before I have to get the ruler out.
As with any hand skills, the only way to build them is muscle memory inducing repetition. So I started drawing cubes. 100 isn’t that many, right?
The first hurdle to get over is to realize that what you think is a cube in your head isn’t. It took me about 45 cubes to realize this. When I started drawing my cubes I did them out of my imagination. They were awful. To help things along we were encourage to build a model to draw from. Here’s mine:
It’s made from foamcoar board, 4 inches on a side, with some geometric printouts pasted on each face. Drawing from the model was a big help. I even taped a knitting needle to the end of my pencil to use as a measuring guide while I worked. I did the next 90 or so cubes this way.
It get’s a little monotonous. Especially when you realize that there are really only 9 views of a cube (think about it). Everything else is just some slight variation of one of those nine.
One drawback to the cube model is that you’re always about the same distance away from it, so the amount of foreshortening and wideangleness is always the same. A good alternative I found was to draw up a cube in a 3D program on my computer and them move the camera around at different focal lengths for variety. This is also nice because you can set it to wireframe and see where the back faces are too. It’s super important to draw the cubes through to the back side to make sure you understand the structure.
By then end of the assignment I had drawn 227 cubes, but quite a few of them were less than impeccable. We were asked to submit 20 of our best. Here are mine (in no particular order):
You can see they’ve got a little of that hand drawn wobble to them, but that’s fine. It just gives them a little class. The point is that my hands have the experience of drawing 227 cubes (and about 20 good ones), and my eyes can recognize a good cube from a bad one.
So as I mentioned in the previous post, we did a number of painted portraits this semester. That last one was all about direct observation of color. This assignment was about observing value. We painted several studies of the portrait in monochrome and then added color through glazes later.
I got the original picture from a very interesting collection of mug shot photos taken by the New South Wales Police Dept. around the turn of the century.
Isn’t this picture fantastic!!! The Historic House Trust has a collection of hundreds of photos like these up on their website. The caption of this image reads:
Dorothy Mort, criminal record number 518LB, 18 April 1921. State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW
Convicted of murder. Mrs Dorothy Mort was having an affair with dashing young doctor Claude Tozer. On 21 December 1920 Tozer visited her home with the intention of breaking off the relationship. Mort shot him dead before attempting to commit suicide. Aged 32. Part of an archive of forensic photography created by the NSW Police between 1912 and 1964.
The photos are all haunting and amazingly detailed.
So anyway, here’s how my underpainting went. I took a photo part way through and then again at the end. I was trying very hard to map out the planes of the face and make her features more angular with the intention of rounding things over when I got to the color stages later.
Because the original photo is in black and white I was going to need to make up the colors for her face so I decided to do a digital paint over to play with a few things. Honestly it didn’t go that well. This was the best of the lot.
When the time came to add the color I decided to take a different tact. This same week in figure class we were working on master copies and were discussing the idea of using another artist’s images a touchstones. I’ve always liked this portrait by Edward Kensella:
In fact, I’ve got a really bad laser printer copy of it on my wall. The color laser printer amps up all the colors and really saturates everything and it gave this picture this angry red glow that is totally absent in the picture above. It seemed like an interesting place to start from. Here’s what I came up with:
Originally the idea was for the color to be a transparent glaze over the underpainting, and it was at first, I swear. But as things moved on and I kept adjusting it turned unto a rather opaque paint over. The glaze still comes through in the eyes. You can see where the black is now a deep red. I’m pretty happy with it.
Oil on board, about 8 in x 10 in
My painting semester is over and I’ve got a bunch of paintings to share.
I got a little behind in posting things. This piece is from way back in October in the first half of the semester when we were still working in traditional paints. The goal for this assignment was to directly mix colors from observation. This was in contrast to the previous assignment where we did monochromatic under paintings and then applied color later.
Because this assignment was an exercise in color matching I decided limit myself from doing any blending or mixing on the canvas. Only splotches of flat color ala Lucian Freud. It came out a little flatter than I was hoping but it was interesting to realize how much variation in color there is in areas that look solid at first glance.
Portraits are kind of a new area for me, so I’ve had a lot of fun practicing.
Oh! Before I forget. I found woman’s picture on the photo stream of photographer Debabrata Ray. Go check out his work, he is very talented. I’m afraid I didn’t give the original photo justice.
Oil on Board, about 8 in x 10 in
Every once in a while someone happens upon my blog while looking for a picture of this or that and asks me if they can use one of my images, which is sooo cool.
I got an e-mail last week from a librarian at the Harris County Public Library (it it turns out is also the Lone Star College-CyFair Branch library, one of only 2 joint use libraries in Texas!) asking if they could use my watercolor portrait of Lincoln for a poster.
The Library is hosting a Lincoln exhibit from the American Library Association from late December to mid-February. The poster promoting the exhibit is going to be hanging in the children’s section for the next few months, and it’s got my picture smack dab in the middle.
I am a huge fan of libraries, so I’m super excited about having my picture up in one. If you’re in Texas and get the chance, go check it out. If you can’t make it, they were kind enough to send me a mockup of the poster design.
