studio business

The self portraits are becoming easy to whip out now. This was a couple hours while eating a sandwich. It's going to serve as an underpainting for painting class Thursday. We're using monochrome underpaintings and b&w reference photos, and copying the color treatment from an image of an admired artist. I'm trying to go with Ann Gale, but not sure if it's going to work out for me due to a dearth of good images of her paintings. I just sloppily slathered some shellac over the drawing and learned a couple great ways NOT to shellac a drawing. Did you know that shellac is a resin secreted by the Lac bug in Africa to build coccoons? So this shiny stuff is bug secretion suspended in alcohol. I love it.





Ribcage Charlie. This guy is fantastic. I've worked with him quite a lot lately, 9 hours on this pose, and 4 straight weeks in anatomy/sculpture. This was my first completely nice experience with linen and a sort of weirdly luminous lighting setup coming from below.




This model is never very inspiring to me at first, but everybody's drawings seem to turn out nicely.

more mini self portraits

I finished the series of 14 but will just post a few more. These all had weird self-imposed limitations and the colors turned out a bit muddy in the photos. The hardest was the all cool palette. Our of alizarin crimson, cad lemon, and pthalo blue it's really easy to make fluorescent greens and purples, but much harder to approach flesh tones. Basically just have to make it as muddy as possible and work into it with chroma from there. Learned a lot and nearly killed myself. I'm going to continue on as a side project though.



limitation: all warms (cad red deep, cad yellow deep, ultramarine)


limitation: all cools (alizarin crimson, cad lemon, pthalo)


limitation: use just liner brush


limitation: speed and simplicity


limitation: as few strokes as possible

sometimes the lectures are a bit dry

Sometimes the lectures are a bit dry and my notebook gets fun. Check out the close-up of the second image - I was having fun with those faces and an old dried up micron pen.

self 3, 4, 5

self portraits 3, 4, 5 of 14. I'm up to #9 and just got so utterly sick of looking in the mirror yesterday that I couldn't do anything. That said, I'll probably continue doing this for a long time. They're turning into sort of an interesting series.

I'm hitting what I suppose would be the midterm portion of school - getting slammed with these 14 portraits due next week along with a big painting and 3 cast drawings. Plus a makeup anatomy class on Sunday, oh boy. In my big painting, I'm finally starting to back away from the strict representational academic moda and putting together a totally different style that might bridge some of my old school work with the representational skills. Hopefully I'll have something exciting to show on it a week from now.

weiners, models, bento.

I'm in the midst of a posting frenzy! Anything to avoid finishing my readings on the size of the phallus throughout Art History. (actually it's quite interesting)

And a few words of advice. Firstly, don't lose your keys. However, if you do lose your keys (it happens) and your roommates have a bunny (name, Bento) make sure the bunny is locked up. If you do lose your keys AND your bunny isn't locked up AND you need to run around the house in a frenzied keyhunt because you're late for school, don't leave your breakfast on the table because bunnies are hungry in the morning too.



Going on, if you're late to drawing class you get the crap spot. In this case, looking down at the models head from slightly behind profile on the shadow side. Ted Schmidt says "uhhh...well...Degas did a striking portrait from this angle once." but unfortunately I'm just Jason. After a couple hours of fudging headstuffs around I ended up with something presentable. The other drawing I prefer, but it photographs horribly for whatever reason.





Enjoy your cage, Bento.

more painting class

This was an absolutely ridiculous still life arrangement followed by an even more ridiculous lighting setup. I only captured about 25% of our spread, including the skull, Gumby, Planet of the Apes Ape, soldering buddy, and old timey camera. On top of that it was lit with a red gel for the main light source and a blue gel for the reflected light. I actually learned quite a bit about shadow in this exercise - not to think of it as a lack of light, but as a different (temp and value) light source - and also to really think about that line where the 2 light sources combine (terminator or whatever).



and the finished dead palette self portrait ... not too unhappy with this one.

1 of 14

I've become accustomed to staring at myself in the mirror for about 3 hours per day doing these self portraits. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself when this series is done with.

The current assignment is 14 in 14 days at a maximum size of 4"x4".



Things learned: don't fuck it up on the last stroke ... 30 min can easily turn into 3 hours.

Profiles, Big Hands, and Hips

paintings

In progress. I think the lower half of my mug is a bit long, but I sort of like that. Again, amazed you can get pretty close to accurate colors using this dead palette, maybe its because I'm a painting zombie. Dead palette by the way is earth primary colors (yellow ochre, blue-black, trans red + white).



same painting, colors a little more accurate than the last update.





The whole thing - pigeon is pretty much done but all the background is in limbo. This was an perspective assignment.

My paintbrush is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life.

Last week was ROUGH.

I can't help but think of the Rifleman's Creed scene in Full Metal Jacket this week. My paintbrush, without me, is useless. Without my brush, I am useless.

Anatomy studies of hip and ribcage due Monday.
Cast drawing due Tuesday.
2 readings for Thursday.
3 paintings (2 self portraits in different palettes and a still life) Thursday
1 big painting Friday.

All that being sick and having a messed up back, that has to be about as hectic as it can get. I've been keeping a pretty regular schedule of 9am-11pm in the studio M-F and I was also in from noon-9pm Saturday. Pizza and coffee, coffee and Pizza. Sunday was a well deserved football day.

I've already had to paint 4 self portraits for painting class homeworks and 1 drawn for drawing class. Our esteemed painting prof has warned us that in a couple weeks we're going to have to do one small self portrait per day for 14 days. He's trying to kill us off, I'm sure of it, but we're becoming decent fast.


This is the way I left the studio today. The drawing is a little wonky but I think the light is looking pretty good. Pardon the poor iphone shot. It's a red-oxide, blue-black, yellow ochre (dead) palette.




Warm-cool still life in about 9 hours. Red-oxide and blue-black. It's amazing what you can do with 2 colors and white.




This model held this pose for 6 hours! You could tell he was hurting at the end of the day. This is with the iphone, but I'll post a better photo later on. Gotta love the male nude holding a pole.




A close-up of my first painting for History of Composition and Design. I'll get a better photo of the whole thing and post it. The only requirement was that it use Renaissance perspective (single point window). I was having some trouble getting the lamp-lit dark room to come together, but I just put down a glaze of transparent red-brown mix and it worked! The light just all fused and makes sense.




This was the product of probably my fastest painting session ever. I threw this warm-cool self portrait together in about 90 minutes and just decided to keep it loose because I knew I'd just mess it up with time.