So last night we had a new model and he dress up in a trench coat with guns.  That was fun.  I drew on some old Fox River paper with a Tombo marker that was about 20 years old and almost dried up along with some white charcoal.  I felt like I was on a decent enough roll last night.

I tried out some new Photoshop brushes from Marco Bucci, my layout instructor.  I pretty much Zhuzhu's brushes, but I have been modifying them a bit.

I'm still having issues about process.  I like some of the results I get starting out with traditional mediums, more than just being purely digital lately.  But I have to admit, last night was fun.  It's a lot easier to draw when you're not putting pressure on yourself.

End of an Era

Several years ago, I came up with a suggestion for an Open Life Drawing Workshop, at the Art Institute of Las Vegas. What I had envisioned was something similar to we had at Art Center. The Workshop was one of the major reasons I got better as an artist. When approval came through, Kevin Anderson was in charge of it, with me occasionally subbing when he wasn't available.

Now the Workshop is supposedly on the chopping block. Not surprising, but what are you going to do? In any case, seven years was a good run. These images are my drawings from the past month. It was good to draw again from life.

But the end of the workshop will alter what I do with this blog.

This is a drawing of Steve.  He's pretty easy to draw.  I find that I have more fun with his features when I try to think of him from another era.

I like drawing him, but we get him a lot as a model.  Personally, I'd like a little more variety.   There might have been some other models, but for the past couple of weeks I hadn't been going to the workshop because I had been fighting off walking pneumonia and a sinus infection.  Those two weeks were the most miserable I have had in a long time.  I didn't see the point in trying to show up, and power through the illness.

At best I would have delayed my recovery.  At worst, I would have gotten some students sick.  So I thought better of it and decided to stay home.  I always hated people who showed up to the office and made everyone else sick and then left.  That had happened a number of times when my wife had gone to work and someone showed up for an unnecessary meeting, coughed their germs into the air and then left early.  Inconsiderate.  

This model, I never got her name.  She reminded me of Thelma from Scooby Doo.  I liked her figure, but her glasses and her hair obscured here eyes a bit too much for my tastes.  Thankfully, she removed them at my request.

Something someone had said about my professional website had been irking me.  They said that I had too much work on my site.  I can understand where they are coming from with that sort of criticism, but I am also aware, that you never know what your jobs are going be or where they come from. In this economy, beggars can't be choosers.  So I chose to highlight my versatility and range.  The criticism had been that potential clients wouldn't know what to do with me.

My site probably looks like a mish mash of Jack of All Trades type of assignments.  I think that criticism is fair and I will probably change it up once I have some more new work that fits closer with what I want to do.  I don't mind the work I am getting now, but I would prefer to shift industries.  I have a plan to make that happen, but I'm not ready to implement it just yet.  I had an interview yesterday that I felt went pretty well.  I also got another couple of leads, but I will wait and see how things play out.  They say when it rains it pours.

This model is Melissa.  I've drawn her before, but like Steve, I realize that if I start playing with her forms, I can turn her into something/someone else.  It becomes more fun because she becomes a character.  One of the things that makes me really bored is when I just capture a likeness without capturing any personality.  The drawing just becomes a technical exercise.  While that can be good for the ego, it doesn't do much for the art.  I also want to scribble more.  I feel there's something more organic in making something that way.  Sometimes, I like how the drawing turns out when the process doesn't have a hard and clear cut goal.  I find that I often must remind myself to have fun and stop taking it all so seriously.

Technique, I'm bored

So last week I drew with Prismas and Turp again.  I'm already bored of the technique.  While it is effective, I hate carrying around the supplies.  Also, I've been looking some people who are drawing digitally, and I want to go back to that.  For the sake of speed and revisions, you can't beat working digitally.

I had been striving for some method of combining the best of the two, but it seems to escape me.

What I would ideally like is a digital method that acceptably imitates watercolor and gouache.  I haven't found one to my satisfaction yet.

The other thing I'm realizing is that the speed with which I can pump these out isn't really obvious in the finished piece.  It looks like I spend more time on this than I really did.
All the drawings on this page were between 5 and 8 minutes.  The last one probably being a 10 minute pose.

The thing I like about the technique is that it really gives a lot of value range to fabric.  You can work quickly doing this, but the sacrifice is precision, especially with a short pose.

This one to the right is probably the one I'm most happy with.  I like that it's mostly shape, without a whole lot of detail.

I think something needs to be done with the lighting in that room so that we can get some variety.

I'm not completely disappointed in this one.  It still feels a bit rough, but I'm trying some different things so it is what it is.

I like that my attitude of maintaining fun hasn't died out yet.  What I'm hoping to gain from these sessions is a process and right now I feel like I'm narrowing things down.

I think the real test will be when I see how some of these frames look on my various devices.

Digital or Traditional

So I have experimenting with different processes for drawing from the live figure.  I've been playing with Flame painter.  What I like about it is that it is similar to Alchemy in that the results are unpredictable.  In the same way this is like the unpredictable nature of drawing with watercolor or in ink washes.  You count on there being accidents and you also count on having the skill to salvage a drawing.

That said, this program is too unpredictable to be used with consistency.  While I like it a lot, I think I can only utilize it for certain subject matter or certain poses.  It's that hard to control.  But I also have been playing with bringing the image into Artrage and altering it further.

It's kind of a pain the fact that some of your favorite tools are in different programs and none of them save in the same format.

Another idea I've been playing with is the notion of doing mor with less.  When I was teaching, I was trying to get across the idea of nailing the pose with a couple of lines.  I used to Artrage to do my lectures because I didn't think the students would get all confused by the interface. The demo yielded this.

Now when you look at this, it seems clear that I was going for a simple silhouette shape and some gestural lines.  If I recall, this was a two minute drawing.  Even if it doesn't have much there, it has enough.

The model broke the pose and later on I played with the palette knife in Artrage.  I like this too better than the equivalent tool in Painter.  Painter seems to have too many controls.  I like that Artrage has limitations.  You can work within limitation to get the results that you want.  Anyway, to the right is the image above with a few strokes of the palette knife.  It didn't take that much more work, and it had a loose fresh quality that I liked.

I debate on whether or not I will keep using this method of drawing with the ink pen and then applying the palette knife.  It is good for modeling forms without looking too airbrushy or clean.  Maybe I will play with it tomorrow night at the Open Session.

Last Night's Session

So for the past month I have been going back to the Open Session at AILV.  I had wanted to minimize my presence there, but all sources of personal friction are now gone, I see no reason to not show up.  Besides, I could use the socializing.  Too much time alone is not good Daniel-san.

I had taken long breaks before, but those breaks were more of the nature of me hitting a wall and not being able to get past it.  My attitude since then is now I'm just drawing for fun.  And it has really helped.

Also I'm wrestling with what technique I should use for a big upcoming personal project.  For the sake of speed, I was thinking of going all digital.  But lately I've been wavering on it.

Been drawing in ink with a Copic Technical pen.  Enjoying doing quick sketches with it.  Ones, Twos, and Fives. 12 x 18 vellum.  So the drawings are between 1 to 4 inches tall.  That tall drawing in the middle was from an old session years ago.

  My favorite one of the set.  It's about 4 inches tall, not including the headdress. 2 minutes.

Last night I was debating on what to bring.  I was considering thick charcoal sticks and I was frustrated that I had somehow misplaced my Yarka Charcoals.  It was  new box too with a bunch of sticks I had sharpened yet had not yet had a chance to draw with.

In the end I decided on using prismas and turpenoid.  I hadn't done that in a while and missed it.  It also has a lot of accidental qualities that I like.  As I get older, I find that I've become less of a control freak when it comes to mediums and I've learned to welcome accidents and unpredictability.

This was the last drawing of the night.  The poses were 8's and 10's but I just kept on the drawings that I liked.  I'm not wild about the understructure, but this was mostly about me getting the hang of using this medium again after not having used it in years.  I'm fairly satisfied with the results.

Blogging again

I thought I should start up a sketchblog.  I've been drawing again recently and I've been producing more stuff than I really want on my website.  I will get to scanning in the morning.

Regarding the goal of this blog, there isn't one other than to document my growth and experiments with mediums and techniques.  I play with so many different things it's getting hard for me to remember exactly what I did unless I write it down.

Also, keeping the blog on my site was tedious.  Every time I move or change templates or upgrade software, it messes up everything.  It's just easier to keep it off site and let google maintain it.

I was planning on monetizing it, but I doubt I'll see much traffic.  In addition, with nude figure drawings, that falls under adult content which is a strict no-no under Adsense guidelines.  I will monetize my other blog as it really won't have any pictures on it.