Skeletor atop his throne

Posted by: Dave | 10.14.08


Category: General  |  5 Comments





Digital Sketches

Posted by: Dave | 10.07.08





Alright, so about that webpage redesign. It's still coming. :) I've been too busy drawing and painting.

And working with my new laptop/Wacom. Here's a couple digital paintings.

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In transition

Posted by: Dave | 08.26.08

The page is getting a facelift, and it might take a little while to go over all the old paint.

Also, for the record, that's supposed to be a paint splatter, not a blood splatter in the logo. The chroma is a lot more purple and orange on my monitor. But I think I'm going to give it another overhaul anyway. The new logo doesn't have enough tie-in with the title. Back to the drawing board. Literally... .

Yeah, I'm an artist not a comedian.

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But how about another foot first?

Posted by: Dave | 07.31.08





The other foot has officially dropped.

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Posted by: Dave | 07.28.08

I'm going to be doing some revisions around here...

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Banan'er

Posted by: Dave | 07.21.08


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The Latest Bargue Study

Posted by: Dave | 07.05.08



This image is pretty blurry/grainy compared to the actual product. I think I'll try another photo in better lighting conditions. Maybe a zoom in or two for detail.

Here's the story on my latest Bargue Study.

I'm doing these studies purely with sticks of sharpened vine charcoal, which is in a constant state of fragility against the surface of the paper. It's carefully and painstakingly (though it's getting less painful) hatched in. Spray fixative is not an option because I may still need to make revisions -- and the stuff will likely change the reflectivity of light and position of the grains of charcoal. If you touch or even breathe on the surface of the paper, the subtleties of shading may be lost entirely in a given area.

Time frame for this drawing: 60+ hours. Every time I complete a long project, this sense of dread overwhelms me as I get it ready for presentation. The stage where I cut a matte and frame it is the most dangerous for me, because all 60+ hours of previous labor can easily be rendered useless with one simple mistake.

So this time, I recruited my good drawing buddy (who will remain nameless) to help me frame my drawing. With a few minutes of work left on the project, I'm standing in the kitchen eating a grapefruit. He's carefully aligning the picture to frame it (we can't both do it), and it touches the glass. 10% of the drawing leaves the paper to print itself on the frame-glass.

I gingerly picked up the drawing to survey the damages and placed it on the kitchen table. The wet kitchen table -- possibly from water, possibly grapefruit juice. The moisture left a divot in the paper. Agonizing. But on the bright side, it's more or less dried itself out.

So I needed to go back and fix it, but now it's looking better than before. I'm going to do a new one this week. It's another view of the foot, but the plan is to bring it to the level of this piece and get it done within the week.

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Recent Sketches

Posted by: Dave | 06.05.08

The cats are from a Nature documentary, the skull is from Elliot Goldfinger's animal anatomy book. The rest of the animals are from life at the Wild Animal Park. I have some gouache landscape studies in there - the village is from a sweet photo I found online. Closing the set out, I've got a tonal ballpoint drawing I did of my friend Kin and a ballpoint of a tank. When I do my sketchbook work, I'm starting to sketch with pen almost exclusively because I'm trying to work on my lines and ability to commit to one accurate decision. I'll go back to pencils at some point, but right now I'm enjoying this.





















This is a response to Kenton's questions under the comments of the Bargue foot study. I was going to post it to his Xanga, but I couldn't remember my password and I'm running out of time on this library computer. Besides, other people might think the thoughts are interesting:

You're right about sight size. The key is that the subject and drawing _appear_ (not actually are) the same size from the vantage point where you take your measurements. I made a mistake there.

About half of my paintings so far are gouache and the other half are oil. I just started experimenting with color in gouache. Up until the past few weeks, I just used it for black and white value studies. Initially, in many ways gouache is harder to handle than oil, but once you can control the beast, it's one of the fastest tools next to digital. I'm still working on it. Ron is an animal with the stuff.

As far as painting traditions, classical art (mostly in the European tradition) was taught in much different ways and with much more rigor in the past. although representational fine art is resurging in a big way. I really recommend looking at Juliet Aristides' drawing book when you get the chance. I think it can be found at B&N or Border's. But it explains what I'm doing with the sight size stuff.

It's very different from the sketching stuff I do, and Vilppu, etc.

The sight size stuff is all about accuracy, and if you're going to learn it, something with the subtlety, control and design that went into Bargue's drawing course is great to study. When I do one of those studies, I want it to look exactly like the original. It's a bit of a misnomer that copying others' art or even photos is bad. Tracing photos is even a great learning aid at certain stages. The only point where it becomes bad is when you rely on those things and you can't draw from life or do your own thing.

As a learning tool, I think we've shot ourselves in the foot by saying that imitation is bad. It's like trying to learn how to speak, but then being forced to come up with your own language.

All we really have to operate on as artists is our own visual experience of the world and the art that has been made before. When imitating is prohibited, what often happens is that people still end up imitating, but they aren't fully aware of what they're imitating or how to control it.

Granted, there are individual aspects that are important to art, and we should all develop our own voices. It's got to come from the heart. Sometimes people over-emphasize things like master studies. Emulating other artists has it's place, but it's as an eye tuning device. Part of developing your own voice. Even when we look at other artists we should try to look past their individual style and see the big picture principles they're using and how.

It's our understanding of the foundational stuff that's true of all art that lets us make comparisons and value judgements about the art we look at and what we eventually try to bring in to our own stuff. Culturally, for a long time we've had a problem with making any kind of a quantifiable judgment about art. Especially the state colleges and galleries have.

The entertainment marketplace has always demanded a certain level of foundational skill, and the Academy/Atelier standards for art are returning as demand rises for this sort of work in the fine art marketplace.

The art that it's easiest to make judgments about is representational fine art because it is either right or not in an academic setting. Geometric measurements are right or not. Colors or right or not. This kind of demand tunes the eye to truly see things as they are.

Outside of that framework, anything goes as long as it serves the purpose it was made for, but that becomes the main criteria. More subjective. I'll try and e-mail you later this week.

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Morbid Buddy Returns

Posted by: Dave | 05.13.08

I did this one in Vanessa's Monday class. I think it's my best painting so far. I definitely had a good time with it. I was aiming to put the stuff she taught us about composition and mood to work for me. Looking back at the skull drawing I did in '06 there's some solid improvement. Feels good :)


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Long Portrait of the week: The lost foot of Charles Bargue

Posted by: Dave | 05.12.08

Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome created a drawing course in the late 1800s where artists would duplicate original masterworks - using tight visual measurement, students would go from 2 dimensional work, to sculptures and then to drawing from a live model. Each level brings new challenges, but working in such a systematic way is great training for the eye. The original course includes around 200 plates. I'm not necessarily going through the whole thing (Van Gogh did, though before he lost his marbles).

Right now I'm using Bargue's drawings to learn the sight-size method, which involves having a model and a drawing that are exactly the same size. When the artist flicks their eyes between the model and the drawing, the principle of constancy of vision (which is the same thing that makes film and animation work) creates an afterimage between the two images that lingers for a fraction of a second. If there are visual jumps between the model and the drawing, those things are adjusted until the finished work is a precise copy of the original.


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