sculpey updates

I boiled and mounted my poor-man's Remmy on a hork of Sculpey III, and roughed in the first group of muscles on the ecorche.

Here's a tip: If you can, BOIL sculpey instead of baking it. I burned the hell out of my ecorche, and not only did I have to paint it, it also released some pretty noxious fumes when it was baking. Yikes!

The left side (the one that stays skeletal) is pretty much done at this point. Gotta fix a couple things, and by next saturday he'll be fired and painted. After that we start on the musculature. Good times!

When I first went to art school, the teachers really encouraged us to work quickly. Like really quickly... like so fast that you can't even think consciously about what you're drawing. The idea was that quick marks were inherently more graceful than slow noodly marks, and all the rest of it would come if you drew a zillion drawings a day.

Since I've been down here, I've been exposed to some really talented folks from some really excellent schools, and I'm realizing that a lot of what I was taught in school was... well it was crap.

Taking Rey's class has been like driving down the same road I've gone down before, but instead of whizzing by 10 miles of it, we're combing carefully through just the first mile.

My buddy Izzy gave me some other good advice last week: concentrate on the smallest nugget of skill that you can, and you'll improve quickly. For example, don't practice "anatomy"... concentrate on just the shoulders, or just on getting the basic masses down. That's what I've been trying to do lately, and I feel like I'm learning and retaining much more quickly than before.

Good times!

the unintentionally spooky-bot.

Way too often I try to make something cute, and because I can't leave the poor thing alone, it turns out spooky. It happened with this poor guy, and so out of respect I made a little scenario about how he's actually very sweet, and nobody will hang out with him because I made him look so scary.

Sorry lil' guy.

Super Sculpey Sunday!

Ami and I had a Super Sculpey Sunday!!! (tm) tonight. I made a muppet-ish mouse and some cheese, and it totally ended up looking like Remy from Rattatouille. Could have been worse... could have looked like Rizzo!

Ami made this sweet monkfish-dragon. Notice the superb uvula detail! He also has a sweet Fonz-like greaser curl. Watch out you crazy pups! That fish is gonna EAT you!

Parle vous écorché?

I wish I could show what I've been doing at work (spoiler alert: It's sweet!), but in the interest of keeping my job, take a look at this instead!

I'm taking a class from Rey Bustos at LAAFA. The classes are stupid-small and Rey is about the best anatomy teacher you could ask for.

Bascially, his ecorche class takes you through building an anatomically correct man out of wire and sculpy. This guy knows more about anatomy than just about anyone I've met, and he's genuinely interested in sharing what he knows. It's a just plain awesome class, and if you want to be awesome, you have to take this class. It's a rule. Everyone who doesn't take Rey's class is a jerk. I'm totally serious.

Anyhoo, check out the work in progress! His left side will be skeletal, and the right side will be covered in muscle. Needless to say we haven't covered the skull yet, but I think I pretty much nailed it.

Finally got some painting done this weekend.

Work has been keeping me extremely busy lately, and I haven't had the chance to get away to paint until this weekend. We went to the super awesome Will Rogers state park, Ami read a book and I painted. Yes, we are that exciting!

Anyhoo, new quick paint. I'm learning to rely less on an under drawing, and it's helping things look a lot more lively. The end.

Paint for lunch

Whupped this one up in 40 minutes or so. I think I'm slowly getting better at seeing colors... the waters a lot better than I've done before.

I'm starting to understand why the impressionists were so obsessed over water.... seems if you understand how/why color in water works, then you can apply that concept to anything else, just more subtly and your stuff will rock probably like 43% more.

Comicon!

Ami and I went to Comicon this weekend in San Diego! It was our first time ever going to a convention like that, and we had loads of fun. We even got these sweet badges that said "PROFESSIONAL" in big block print! Hooray! we're important!

I also got to meet some cool artists I read about, and got turned to some new ones too. Nearly all of the artists I met were super friendly and loved yapping about how they do what they do. Good times!

Anyhoo, here's a list of some new-to-me artists that I thought were pretty sweet (in no particular order). Enjoy!

Dustin Nguyen (Awesomely cute watercolors!)
alessandro carloni (ridiculous ink drawings!)
Ashley Wood (incredible blocky paints!)
Eric Powell (neat meaty style!)
Doug Sneyd (super fun drawings, and a super nice guy!)
Chris Sanders (one of my favorite animation-ey artists ever, ever!)

More gouache studies

Here's a couple studies I did this week during my lunch hour. One hour apiece from start to finish.

five lessons from one bad painting.

I tried a quick paint during lunch for the first time, and made lots of useful mistakes. Here's what I learned:

1) I need some sort of table and chair. Working on the ground sucks. You can't control your brush, your paints get all sorts of dirt and crap in them, and you're uncomfortable so you're not focusing completely on the painting. Bad times.

2) I need to keep away from the elements as much as possible. Like a tard, I set up in windy spot right next to a fountain. So on top of the wind flipping around all of my supplies, I got an intermittent spray of chlorine water all over my painting. Argh! Again, this shit takes so much concentration for me that any little annoyance takes away from the end product.

3) I need to block in big areas with a big brush and lots of paint. The huge water and building shapes caught me off guard here, and I ended up hatching away at it with watered down goauche strokes rather than globbing down a bunch of bold strokes like I should have.

4) I picked too complex of a scene for the amount of time I had. 45 minutes to block in and paint this scene was totally overwhelming for me. I need to pick simpler stuff for lunch studies and get more into how the light and shadow colors work on just a couple things.

and most of all:

5) I rushed the painting. I started putting down marks without fully considering what they'd look like. That's a very bad habit I have in general that I need to break.

I'll try something else tomorrow... maybe a simple still life?

Oh my gouache!

Ami and I spent the weekend in Santa Barbara, and each morning I snuck out to do a one hour painting.

A lot of people say gouche is tough to work with, but I took right to it! It's an easy transition from digital paint I guess.

You know, I never would have figured it but the hardest part was figuring out how to organize the paints! After a bunch of trial and error, the best way for me is like this:


...red yellow blue tints, and red yellow blue shades. I have a hunch I'm over complicating things.. I'll have to keep trying.

Undercover

Another cafe portrait I painted up. I'm pretty sure she was a real secret agent and not just some lady on her bluetooth.

Books...GOOD!

Sukru (a super talented artist and even nicer guy) recommended a couple traditional art books he had to read back at Art Center. I feel pretty lucky that so many of these guys have gone to top art schools like that, and that they're so willing to share what they know to chumps like me.

This book in particular has been by my side pretty much constantly for the past month. It's a dense read, full of a lifetime's worth of trial and error from a brilliant painter. I'm so enamoured with this book that it's been in my pack for over a month, reading chapters over and over until the concepts sink in. Here's some tidbits that stuck with me so far:

Never knowingly leave something bad in your work; fix it, don't abandon it.

If you're working so quickly that you aren't fully considering the marks you're putting down, then slow down. There is nothing wrong with working slowly and carefully if that's what you have to do to understand what you're trying to draw.

You don't need to slash wildly around on the canvas to make work that looks lively and dynamic. On the contrary, you need to be very careful and premeditated about the marks you put down, and your controlled, economic strokes will make more impact than a bunch of wonky-random strokes ever will.

Maybe that stuff is "yeah duh" to you the seasoned artist, but for me it was farking gold dripping from the page! I did my best to use what I learned on this last one... I like it a lot more!

14th and Montana

Ok, this is much better.

I set up camp for a couple hours around the neighborhood and just tried to copy down the shapes as best I could without distracting myself with anything fancy. Doing this felt a lot like flexing a muscle: easy to do for a moment or two, but very difficult to maintain for minutes at a time.

It didn't seem like I was doing any better while I was drawing, but the result was a drawing that had real life shapes that I could paint from... which, I mean that's always a help for sure. :)