Yesterday's Dream

The next painting?

Actually Carrying It Out

Following on my previous post, I decided to actually carry out a painting based on the last SketchUp prototype. Here is the procedure I used this time:

1. Export SketchUp image from LayOut (SketchUp Pro required) as a ‘hybrid’ PDF image
2. Import PDF to Photoshop
3. Size to actual painting size (11” x 14”), 300 or so DPI
4. Convert to grey scale
5. Convert to bitmap, diffusion dither, 600 DPI (a good match for my printer, an ancient HP LaserJet 6MP, which I keep around solely because it’s awesome for this transfer technique)
6. Divide image into four (in this case) separate images less than 8” x 10.5” (unless you have a large printer or want to use Kinko’s)
7. Print out the image panels
8. Cut and glue the printouts together using acrylic gel medium, leaving a small ‘leaf’ to one side of each inner boundary and gluing adjacent printout to that ‘leaf’
9. Coat printed side with a few thin layers of gel medium. This helps avoid wrinkling during the transfer.
10. Use acrylic matte medium applied to both assembled transfer sheet and stretched, primed canvas. Place image face down on canvas. Use spoon to remove bubbles and smooth out areas where more medium has gathered.
11. Allow dry AT LEAST 8 hours
12. Spray water to back of paper and gradually remove paper using a sponge. This can take awhile, but I find it a satisfying process.

The four panels are still clearly visible, though they become rather less so after the paper is removed. Any remaining texture can be smoothed out with a few layers of gel medium, applied with a palette knife or credit card

By the way, I adopted this from a technique described by Gregory Gillespie in the early 1990s when he was a visiting artist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and have developed it for my own work for quite some time. The procedure takes some practice to get right, but there are many variants, each of which is suitable for a different texture, level of accuracy, speed, etc. For more variants of the technique, see Hollis Brown Thornton‘s writeup.

When the transfer is done, you can then start painting. Acrylics work well at this point, or you can go straight in with oil (but then, no acrylics on top of the oil, or your painting can develop adhesion issues down the road). I use and absolutely adore water-soluble oils, so these days I typically go straight to those. My studio is 99.9% free of organic solvents (I still use a tiny bit of cobalt drier from time to time, which has a bit of solvent in it).

I doubt I would be able to develop this kind of imaginary mechanical structure in correct perspective without the aid of SketchUp or other 3D modeling software.

The current state is shown here. I expect more color to develop and possibly even radical changes down the road:

Parenthetically, it is exceptionally rare that I get to apply 3D vector mathematics and programming (for the SketchUp plugin) and painting in the same project. Ironic, too, that though I work in physics, I am using all that juicy math for art, rather than for physics!

More Prototyping

A month ago I spent an enthusiastic weekend or two writing more Ruby plugins, one result being a tool whereby one can take any rectangular face oriented in any direction, and ‘draw’ with it by tiling it repeatedly in any plane. The result is that one can make fairly complex, architectural-looking co-planar geometries quickly. I find it fun to use. It expect I’ll publish the plugin eventually as part of a set of drawing tools.

But the goal is still to make paintings! I have been making progress on a few old paintings, sketching, and occasionally putting together images with SketchUp which might make sense to transfer to panels or canvases and then render in oil paint. For example, the following image was drawn with combination of the new tiling plugin, creating a surface of revolution with the Follow Me tool, and ‘texturing’ it with Fredo 6’s Tools on Surface. Final camera vew tilted before export and then colors tweaked with iPhoto.

Tilting

Until today, I was frustrated by a minor “feature” in SketchUp that no matter how one wheeled about one’s model with the Orbit tool, the horizon was always horizontal. That meant exporting larger 2D images and then rotating and cropping in Photoshop or iPhoto.

Today, I accidentally discovered that holding down the ‘option’ key (on a Mac) while orbiting allows one to tilt the horizon in the camera’s view. A minor trick, perhaps, but one I had wanted, and all the more enjoyable for its accidental discovery.

Volcanic Surfaces of Revolution

Flags and Bubbles

While the paint dried on several paintings today I spent some more time playing with structures in SketchUp for future paintings. Here are a few tricks used in this one:

• Soap bubble plugin for the hanging fabrics
• Using the rotate tool with option held down to clone, then typing, e.g., “15x” to create the prayer flags along an arc
• Making curved flat shapes and then extruding them using the Follow Me tool for curved surfaces
• Extruding shapes and “intersect with model” to cut doorways through curved faces
• View->Hidden Geometry and using the Move tool on vertices to carefully suture pieces together when an imperfect match between adjacent surfaces occurs.

As the stuff becomes second nature, you find yourself limited by imagination more than by the tool… the sign of a good tool.

The Poetry of Small Things

Work continues on the study for the next painting.

Ideally the painting would be large enough for the figures on the far left to be clearly resolved. Something like 40” wide, 20” high or even larger.

Transfer options:

1. Export from SketchUp as ‘hybrid’ PDF. Bring it to Kinko’s and have them make a large print. Transfer as usual.
2. Buy a digital projector and project onto canvas like the old-school photorealists. I’ve never tried that but have been curious to.

More Invisible Cities

3D sketches for a putative future painting.

Notes:

1. Fractal design elements
   1. S P A C E
   2. intersection/union/XOR
   3. greebling of plausible architectural forms
   4. people/cars/trees/pets
2. Transfer to painting
3. Drawn, weathered surface, like the trailer painting [a long-standing work-in-progress], like weathered/varnished prints on paper/découpage.

The title ‘Invisible Cities’ is from an amazing book by Italo Calvino.

Completion

This painting went through many iterations. What you see here is a toner transfer of a 3D (SketchUp) scene onto the paint surface, with a bit more painting on top. I think this painting actually might be done.

I’m excited about doing more work like this.

Snow

Heavy snowfall on Tuesday, which cut the attendance way down at the U of Chicago figure drawing group.

Here are some drawings from that session, with one from the week before. Can you guess which one?

Big Structure Studies

Busy, busy week, but I did get a chance to fiddle a bit with an idea I have for a painting, which will involve some sort of very large, complex building, printed out large, transferred to a large canvas, and then elaborated upon in paint.

SketchUp studies for the painting:

I thought this could go in the direction of a sort of graphical arcology, a vertical, constructed habitat whose denizens would inhabit, by extension, the painting, whatever space the painting lives in, and the minds of its viewers’.

Silhouettes

I finally figured out how to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, namely, to quickly make silhouetted, 2D figures (“components”) for things which would be painful (and pointless) to model in 3D. I’ve tried doing this numerous times in SketchUp, but the inference engine always moves points and lines where you don’t want them. Drawing that way is like having someone jerk the paper around underneath your pencil while you sketch.

Illustrator doesn’t do that, and you can export Illustrator paths in AutoCAD format and then import them into SketchUp. Make them forward-facing components, and, voilà!

In the following scene, only the block the woman is sitting on is a 3D object. The woman is traced from one of my figure drawings, and the bird is traced from a photo I took this morning on the Point (temperature, 1 degree F). Even the mountain is a freehand shape drawn in Illustrator—mountains and clouds and other distant forms are prime candidates for this sort of simplified treatment.

Sea and Silence

Did a lot of drawing prior to and during winter break (and I may post some after a little more water goes under the bridge); but now the Sketchup itch has hit again, once again as a tool for potentially making large paintings.

Some experiments:

We shall see where it leads, if indeed it leads anywhere. If not, that’s OK too.

I kind of like the way these little mock-ups hint at narratives. Narratives that aren’t actually stories, but more like little dreams.

Another project (possibly related to what is rattling around with the above experiments) relates to a book of blues lyrics which my brother had kicking around his basement music studio. I like the idea of having the lyrics accompany some drawings—like comics, but without an explicit story.

I am broke and hungry
          ragged and dirty too
I said I'm broke and hungry
          ragged and dirty too
Mama, if I clean up can
          I go home with you.

                   -- Blind Lemon Jefferson.


Ohhhhh
        blood hounds are on my trail
Mmmmmmm
        blood hounds are on my trail
They want to take me back
        to that cold old lonesome jail

...

I know I've done wrong
        but he kicked me and blacked my eye
But if the blood hounds ever catch me
        in the 'lectric chair I'll die

                   --Victoria Spivey

Lyrics from The Blues Line—from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters, compiled by Eric Sackheim.

Collected Planets

Collected planets and moons, mostly from APOD, organized in iPhoto.

I’m spending the day attempting to organize nearly four thousand reference images I’ve collected from various sources online. If I get a good system for these (so far iPhoto’s keywords are looking good), I can start the rather more daunting task of organizing the tens thousands of photos I’ve taken myself.

OTL

I’m excited that Outside the Lines, the University of Chicago Figure Drawing club, has started up this Fall after a long hiatus. I’ve been twice since it started up and the room was filled to capacity each time.

The timing of the group’s rebirth is good, since I have been drawing a lot lately, all of it figurative, though mostly without a model. I’ll try to post a few more recent sketches here soon.

I was talking to a few of the (very energetic and engaged) young women who are organizing it, and they asked if I’d come to the group in the past. Their eyes widened when I said I’d been coming since 2003 (when many of the attendees were in middle school). As I chuckled and mentioned I’d been drawing from the model for nearly twenty years, I realized I was old enough to be the father of nearly every person there.

Time is a strange thing.

Veneto

Just got this photo from friend and IceCube colleague Azriel Goldschmidt who spoke at a conference in Venice entitled the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena. He showed some images inspired by the Antarctic experience, including the one above from the White Continent. He said the conference was attended by artists, philosophers, priests, musicians, astronomers and historians and…. Sounds like a lot of fun.

The previous one was in Chicago, and I missed it.

Photoshop on a Dime

As a side benefit of transitioning back from European time since returning home last week, I have been waking up early most mornings and getting in a bit of painting. Some days there is nothing like gradually improving old paintings, scumbling, glazing and blending with some quiet music going and the sun slowly rising outside.

As satisfying as that can be, I don’t want to only rehash the same unfinished paintings endlessly (some may be beyond help). I keep coming back to the problem of composing new pictures—what to put in a piece, and where to put it. When I draw (or just close my eyes), many images or ideas arise… not to mention the thousands of photos I take or the images I “clip” from books and the Web. But it can be hard to knit this slurry of ideas and source material into something which works, which has, in other words, a unique and compelling aesthetic logic. Painting is such a slow process (at least the way I do it) that it can be painful to make the required compositional choices once a piece is “launched.”

I have posted before about making studies and preliminary drawings, but I keep tweaking my methods, looking for processes which will help generate the most compelling images (at least to me) and will add more momentum and fun to art making.

One thing which I’ve tried before and which I returned to this morning is the use of transparent overlays to make preliminary studies. I first encountered this method of drawing in slides of Eric Fischl’s work. A few years back I tried a variant of the process for composing pictures, using transparent sheets known as Kemodesk. While trying to add some content to a sketchbook drawing this morning, I tried it again, and it seemed powerful and slightly magical, as if I had a physical version of Photoshop at my fingertips:

1. One ‘composes’ multiple figures, buildings, etc. quickly, simply by moving sheets around on top of each other;
2. You can draw on both sides of the sheet for a greater expressive range;
3. The surface takes graphite like soft, black butter; gouache works too if it’s very ‘dry’ (no washes… probably oil would be fine);
4. Unlike a drawing in a sketchbook, where you have to erase whenever you move or change something, there is very little penalty for making adjustments;
5. It is easy to duplicate a picture element or series of marks;
6. You can trace existing drawings from sketchbooks and incorporate found photos, etc., or just run the Kemodesk directly through a laser printer, making a nice, rich black;
7. You can flip your drawing and see the image in reverse at any time (a good compositional check, essentially the same looking at your painting in the mirror [^]).

Kemodesk looks really good and can be used directly in finished works (as Jack Damer, who introduced me to the material, has done), but probably glassine or other transparent paper would work nearly as well for the preliminary drawings I’m interested in at the moment. Unfortunately I don’t believe anybody is making or selling the stuff at the moment. If anybody knows otherwise, please let me know.

(Oh, why not just use Photoshop? I like Photoshop and use it all the time… but the lack of physicality is offputting at times, and you have to get the images into the computer and back out again. Plus, I already spend 99.9% my time in front of a computer.)

[^] The eye gets used to flaws in a work-in-progress. To counter that problem, in addition to the mirror trick, some people turn their work upside down, or use a convex lens to make it look farther away. Salvador Dalí used to have his wife Gala place his paintings at surprise locations around the house where he could bump into them unexpectedly and be struck by things he hadn’t noticed about them… lacking Gala, most of the rest of us use other tricks.

Back at It

Back posting after a long hiatus. It has been a busy year. Just got back from meetings in Berlin and Mainz. Before the trip I spent a long month or two getting some writing out of my system (I seem to go through a long writing phase every couple of years). Then, just before leaving, I felt the siren song of painting calling again. Went to some art exhibitions in Berlin which fueled the fire. Now D is equal to 6, which is the highest it’s been in awhile. I will try to post some photos of work-in-progress soon. Meanwhile, here are some photos from the trip.

Many thanks to Timo and Melanie in Mainz-Mombach for their generous hospitality!

This was where the first few days of meetings took place. I love architectural models almost as much as architectural drawings.

I took hundreds of photos in and around the trains in Germany. I rarely had to wait more than four minutes for a train or a bus. Why can’t we have that here?

One thing I loved about this enormous exhibit of a Greek temple was how the empty spaces between the fragments spoke as eloquently as the original figurative forms did. This aspect gave the exhibition a contemporary look despite the massive scale.

One of my favorite old-timers is Lucas Cranach the Elder (16th c.). His female figures have this enigmatic, sexy look which is utterly not contemporary.

More Experimental Results

Made some more progress with my approach of using SketchUp to create environments for paintings.

The following in-progress sequence shows the basic idea: create a setting (interior and/or exterior) in SketchUp. Place the camera where you want it. Print out the ‘scene’ and transfer it using a grid to canvas or panel.

In this case, I could have just used the SketchUp figure I had in the drawing, but I had access to a real model and wanted to try combining ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ in one painting. The pose the model took didn’t fit well with the original figure position, so I just moved her in order to get a more consistent visual logic in the painting.

Figure by Reallusion from the 3D Warehouse.

Messing around this way raises the question, Why paint at all? Why not just render it with Kerkythea or another renderer?

The answer is, I still like to have my ‘hand’ in the process, and I think one gets a richer, more beautiful physical surface with paint (though some imagery would be better suited to the flat, photo-like surface that comes from pure digital). I do think, though, that work in virtual 3D and physical 2D media reinforce and support each other nicely: I find I think about volumes and lighting in 2D better after working in 3D, and I think about composition and texture better in 3D as a result of painting and drawing a lot.

Heads

Been working hard on getting reasonable heads modeled in SketchUp. Various YouTube tutorials help, though you have to watch people working in Maya or similar, since the required mesh operations are pushing the envelope in SketchUp.

There is a learning curve, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Hybrids

Been playing around with sculpting heads a bit in SketchUp and am almost to the point where I can make a head I’m satisfied with. Meanwhile, I discovered a cool feature in Google LayOut, the companion to SketchUp, namely that you can export ‘hybrid’ vector+bitmap information to PDFs, allowing one to print ultra-crisp extra large output.

If you zoom into these PDFs, you can see some jagged edges to the shadows, which are easily tolerable, but the lines are infinitely crisp, as shown:

Note clean lines and slightly jagged shadows.

Am I the only person out there who thinks this is really cool?!? You could make really beautiful, really large, really detailed printed images this way.

People

Reallusion, Inc. have some made some nice figures from their iClone software available in the 3D warehouse.

Though I find the figures in their fully-texture-mapped regalia a bit corny, I think they look kind of cool when stripped of their textures. It does inspire me a bit to try modeling my own in more detail. SketchUp doesn’t have the best mesh tools (yet; I am guessing iClone use Maya or 3d Studio Max or ZBrush or something) but I have repeatedly been impressed what’s possible in SketchUp.

Progress

I feel a bit farther along in my project to use SketchUp to create large and/or
complex scenes.

The first development was to finally try the experiment of taking my block figure poses and ‘sketching up’
somewhat more detailed figures based on the mass conceptions. The results are shown below.

Same pose, different view

They are not particularly good or finished drawings but they were very
quick and easy to do, with all the massing/foreshortening problems
essentially solved before starting in with the actual drawing; and the
detailed drawing is so much easier than trying to model a detailed
mesh in 3d. I think the approach still seems promising.

The other experiment was to throw a bunch of recent models into a
combined SketchUp scene, take a fairly high-resolution export of that
down the street to Kinko’s, and get a 36“x60” blow-up of it. Wow!
I’m excited—it’s so big! And so wierd! The original image and the
print are shown below.

How to further pursue works like this? They might become paintings,
with the prints transfered to canvas/panel and painted directly on top,
or photo-transfered like my credit card paintings.
Or they could be framed and hung as-is (there is something CAD-like which I really like about the
giant laser printout). Or they might be produced as large-format color prints via a photo lab.

We shall see.

Strange Blimps

Played some more with Kerkythea rendering out of SketchUp. Basically the same model with
different time settings for the sky and/or added light.

This could get addictive fast.

What you don’t see here is that these images can be as big, as
high-resolution, as you like—poster-sized prints, anybody? It
reminds me of Dali’s quote, that surrealist art is “the
instantaneous color photography of the imaginary world.” I’m not
quite sure that this is what he had in mind….

Rendering

It’s a little off my main trajectory here but I started
playing around with renderers for Sketchup models. Here is a render of the model I was working on this weekend:

There is a lot of phase space to play
with here and I don’t want to get lost in it—clearly one can have a
lot of fun with this, but I still want to keep an eye on making actual
paintings. I also really like the kind of renders that SketchUp produces—they look like
engineering or architectural drawings, which I have always loved.

Though I do also like the clay renders, which remind me of architectural sculptures:

More Posing

After fooling around quite a bit with more complicated schemes for posing figures,
I decided to use just a simple non-heirarchical, single-layer block scheme for posing figures
in a SketchUp drawing. I’m quite happy with both the flexibility and control it provides.

I think this allows me to fairly easily add to the drama of any scene.
If all the figures, buildings, etc. are already there in the scene,
then when I go to transfer one to a painting, all the problems of
composition, perspective and foreshortening will already be solved.

Next stop is just to create some more cool scenes using these tools, and then
make something based on them—
probably a simple goache drawing to start. Eventually these might
become very ambitious, and turn into large, finished artworks (or
prints, or films, or…).

Addendum: ye gods, I can’t stop…

Head

Back to the Hyde Park Art Center for the open figure
studio (had to take a session off due to the trip to the South Pole). I recycled
an old experimental photo transfer, with the following result:

I do like the switching back and forth between SketchUp (see recent previous posts) and paint.

Posing Rigs

Been following along with Justin Chin about how to create posing rigs with SketchUp. Whereas he is using it to pose detailed 3D models (with an eye to making a comic and/or film using SketchUp), my interest relates more to orienting figures in space for paintings—placing the masses, in perspective. So far it seems promising, though I have yet to carry it through to a real painting.

Though the tools are contemporary, the approach dates at least to the 16th Century:

Relapse

I have officially relapsed into my addiction to SketchUp.

Other things I’m thinking about:

Imaginary architecture by Lebbeus Woods

David Becker,
former teacher of mine and artist we saw today at Ann Nathan Gallery.

Tetsuya Noda
—saw a great show of his today at Andrew Bae Gallery here in Chicago.

Daniel Simon—eye candy, high in sugar, low in fiber.

D=1, because the Spring Figure Studio opens Monday at the Hyde Park Art Center, and I need to prepare some
interesting paint surfaces to work into. Thought of doing some SketchUp-created backgrounds for these, we’ll see if that happens.

Imaginary Digital Towns

Long time no post, due to work obligations which have been substantial of late. But have started once again to steal bits and chunks of time and energy for drawing, painting, and what seems to be the beginnings of yet another return to my obsession with SketchUp, with an eye to using that software
to lay out intricate scenarios for painted works. Examples follow.

The idea in these is to start to develop content in a purely abstract
sense, devoid of the seductions of texture and mark-making… content
as mathematical graphs(mathematics)... a kind of
conceptual geometry, to be iterated upon and refined prior to
rendering, in the same way that digital animation is developed, with
the difference that the final rendering would be done by hand with all the
sensuality of actual paint.

The thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to introduce the wildness
of the figure into my thinking on these… how to introduce character, conflict,
territoriality, or sex, or hunger, or personality. With few exceptions,
computer-drawn figures look pathetically lousy. I need a sort of
placeholder, a SketchUp scaffold to hang the associations which will
develop into hand-drawn figures during the intermediate drawing
stages.

“Research in this area is ongoing.” Oh… and D=2.

Metric

Being a geek, I’ve always liked the word ‘metric.’ A metric is a number
or other quantitative object (physicists like ‘metric tensors’) which measures something.

I have three paintings drying right now (i.e., too wet to work into
without screwing up areas). A thought occurred to me as I was
thinking about what to work on next, that the number of drying
paintings could be a metric of how artistically busy you happen to be
at the moment. Call that number of drying paintings the ‘D-number.’
If I start working on another, it would make a ‘D-number’ of four. A
moderately busy period, by my standards.

I wonder what my highest D-number has been. Seven? Surely not ten.

I like working on lots of pieces at once. When you get bored or
stuck, just pick up another. It’s especially nice if your paintings take a long
time to finish, because you might be in the wrong mood for one particular painting,
but in the right mood for another. If you glaze a lot, you have to wait for
layers to dry (I don’t use resins because of the fumes), which artificially
inflates your D-number.

Other painters just pick up a panel and don’t touch anything else
until it’s done. Their D-numbers are always equal to one (that is, if
they paint in oils—acrylic painting makes your D-number usually zero,
due to the quick drying times).

Then there is the U-number—the number of paintings which are
unfinished, kicking around the studio, that you hope to get around to
sometime. Mine’s probably about 15 or 20. A recent goal of mine is
to make U=0, though probably that’s a fool’s hope.

Finally, there is the I-number, which counts the paintings you plan to
do next, or sometime soon, or in a future lifetime. As Van Gogh quoted to
Emile Bernard, “the most beautiful pictures are those one dreams about
when smoking pipes in bed, but which one will never paint.”
I like to keep my I-number as high as possible—it means I’m feeling
especially inspired.

Studies

The classic use for the preliminary drawing is to lay out a complete composition before starting in on the final painting. In the past I’ve found it hard to work that way, preferring to get started with an actual painting and then trying to see my way out of the weeds.

For a long time this process consisted of figuring out content, value, hue, texture, etc. all at the same time through a slow process of trial and error with paint. This process can be frustrating and time consuming, since it’s hard to think about all these things simultaneously, through the brush or otherwise.

Drawing to the rescue: maybe it is simpler or quicker, or maybe drawing just comes more naturally to me, but I have been finding drawing to be a much better ‘process space’ than painting is for figuring out issues of content and composition. When painting, I like to think of painterly things like color and texture. When drawing, the imagination roams free and new ideas spring to life more quickly. I guess a lot of artists have known this for a long time, though there are plenty who don’t use drawing at all.

While traveling back from New Zealand last weekend, I thought, jeez, I’m having so much fun drawing lately, I should leverage that in my paintings more. More specifically:

• photograph the painting with a digital camera on a tripod; download photos
• convert images to greyscale; lighten and adjust levels/contrast as needed
• print image
• draw on printout with pen/pencil/gouache (see posting on conquering the world, below)
• dive back in to painting, drawing with brush, pen or pencil, using grid to copy drawing if precision is called for

I have been trying this procedure this week on some old paintings and feel like it’s a bit of a breakthrough, like I now have a better idea how to get ‘unstuck’ when I’m in the middle of a piece (which is pretty much allways, since I have about 10 or so in-progress and back-burner paintings up at any given time).

Here are the two paintings: before, sketch, and after for each.

Acrylic, oil and toner transfer on canvas.

Acrylic and oil on panel.

I’m curious to see how this process develops. I hope it will open the door for much more content-rich paintings. Or at least get me to the point of finishing some old ones to get them out the door….

Wyeth On Another Planet

Seeing as he died a few days ago, I just want to write a line or two to honor Andrew Wyeth. I spent much of my vacation a few weeks ago soaking in his Kuerner’s drawings.

Several years going I have fetched the South Pole copy of The Helga Pictures from the library there and kept it handy to remind me about drawing and the Real World. Mom sent me a copy of the book the year I worked at CERN outside Geneva, Switzerland. At the time I was trying to better my figure drawing and enjoying what passed for a rural lifestyle housesitting at a friend’s farm house. The book was a perfect companion.

A lot of critics hated Wyeth. He was the kind of artist that you admired in secret (I remember a figurative painting teacher of mine admitting with a chuckle that he liked him). I don’t quite understand why he got so famous. I kind of wish he hadn’t, that I had discovered him on my own to keep in my private collection of relatively unknown artist-muse-mentors, the way you keep a certain fishing or bird watching spot to yourself.

His finished tempera paintings were nice and some of them certainly very iconic (hence his fame, I guess), but it was his looser drawings and watercolors that I fell in love with. Perhaps someday I’ll be able to draw like that, like Wyeth dosed to the gills with Thomas Pynchon, Andrei Tarkovski or Ridley Scott—Wyeth on another planet….

Gouache, and a new system for conquering the world

Here’s my new system for conquering the world. It will solve
all my problems, at least the artistic ones.

Ingredients:

• sketchbook
• pencils of various hardness/thickness/sharpness
• white gouache paint, water and brushes
• Uni-ball micro pen
• Mitsubishi 0.28 micro pen
• 2–3 Kuretake brush pens filled with black ink, and diluted ink
• Kneadable erasers
• Helix battery-powered electric eraser
• Presto correction pen
• My standard sketchbook (I go through several of these a year).

The system is simple. With this extremely portable set of tools I can
capture and eliminate ideas freely and quickly and iterate until I
have a drawing that is worth making a painting of (or at least not
want to rip out of the sketchbook and toss into the fireplace).

In the past, what was missing was the ‘iteration’ part, especially while working in ink. Although
I sometimes lay in material in pencil before going to ink, I find that I ‘think better’ in ink much
of the time… also, pencil drawings tend to get muddy if erased too much.

The gouache solves that by allowing you to quickly obliterate a part of the drawing. And, unlike
acrylic or white-out types of liquid, it is easy to erase and takes graphite and brushed ink nicely.

The details shown here are from the same drawing which I worked on for
a few hours today, eliminating ruthlessly. The drawing on the whole
doesn’t really work (ok, so I guess I haven’t solved all of my
problems) but the technique looks promising.

I guess I’ve steered clear of gouache and watercolor because I like
the rich, layered textures of oil and acrylic. But I know that comic
book inkers use gouache frequently, and I’ve had fun playing with it today.
Yesterday, at the Chicago History Museum,
I saw an aerial rendering of the 1933 World’s Fair, likely done
completely in gouache. Perhaps 72“x30”, it was my favorite thing out of
few thousand artifacts there—utterly photographic from far away,
delightfully graphic when viewed close up.

YAFP (Yet Another Flood Painting)

A long time, anyways. Every once in
awhile I get seized by the muse and it comes out of storage. I’m starting to think
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, though.

In other words,
the meaning, if there is one, is certainly not conscious or explicit. I tend to enjoy
artwork that speaks to the subconscious more than work that has some sort of obvious
agenda.

No, I do not know who these people are. No, this is not about the election.

Dreads

Today’s painting—a very good model today (actually they’ve all been good… actually,
I think all models are good). I felt good about the painting, like the drawing aspects and the
paint handling came together.

It’s been kicking around in my support pile for a few years
until today’s session.

Another work in progress

There was
a floating figure in the sky to the right which really wasn’t working so I painted it
out. Several more hours to go on this one, I think. Oil on top of acrylic on panel.

As you can see from the detail, I transferred a portion of a sketch I did using
the traditional method of gridding both the panel and the sketch.

Columbia

I have been wanting to post some works-in-progress on a blog for awhile… now
that the blog is set up, here’s the first one:

The painting started as a toner transfer on wood with graphite and acrylic added.
I added a cut-out of transparent ‘Kemodesk’ over the figure, and have since been
working in oil on top of it all.

Fall 2008 HPAC Studies

This Fall I signed up for the Open Figure Studio at the Hyde Park Art Center. Unlike many figure drawing groups, in these sessions one can use any medium one wants. So, I’ve started painting directly from the model for the first time since the early 1990s.

I have enjoyed the sessions quite a bit. The work dovetails with my renewed interest in painting (as opposed to photography, drawing, comics, 3d-modeling, ...).

One thing that’s nice is to work hard on a painting for two and a half hours and then put it aside, rather than working on it for days, years, decades…. Paradoxically, it’s also fun to be able to fail and just let it go (the abject failures aren’t shown here).

It’s also fun to be working with other people around.

Of course, there are always ‘drawing group politics,’ which usually center around lighting. I like to actually be able to see my paintings when I’m working on them. I also don’t particularly care for the spotlight on the model. The following passage from Robert Beverly Hale, ‘Master Class in Figure Drawing,’ explains why:

”... Naturally there are certain conditions of light under which an object will give the clearest presentation of its shape. Skilled artists can create these light conditions even though they do not exist. An accomplished artist is able to create his own light source or sources, disregarding, if he wishes, those which do exist.”

The gist of his argument is that in order to communicate most effectively, you have to light the objects in your work such that it shows the forms in a way which satisfies your intention. For that reason, I prefer to have enough light on the model to see the forms clearly, and then practice varying the light in my drawing subtly or drastically to serve some sort of expressive end. This is more difficult to do with spotlit models, because you have to remove cast shadows, highlights, etc. which are in the wrong place (again, to satisfy your expressive
intent).

Others disagree. In some groups, I’ve seen tempers flare. Of late in this group, we have put it to a vote, and we light-lovers have lost.

Same pose as previous week, different angle

Another thing I find funny is when people discover that the model has moved (!) slightly and ask him or her to correct it. This is basically impossible for the model to do better than approximately. He or she just winds up moving something else which someone else finds objectionable,
etc. The fact is that the model, a human being, moves and your painting doesn’t. What you see at any given time presents information which you use in your work. This is why studying anatomy and drawing from imagination are so important: they teach you how to use the information which the model makes abundant… and dynamic.

The session is still a good time, and good practice, and I’m grateful for it.

One last remark—the works here are all wood panels painted with water-woluble oils. Expect to see a future post on this fabulous medium.

See also my page on Figure Drawing