Drifting Embers

A portrait of my daughter.

My husband bought me a Samsung tablet a while back so I could paint away from my desk. Taking it outside causes a lot of glare on the screen, so he bought me a folding chair with a canopy cover. We threw an old quilt over it, and it seemed to work fine. I wonder if it will work at the beach with all the wind. My husband is so very sweet.

What to say? I get frustrated with these.

My daughter came home from school one day with a poster made up of various cartoon faces showing different emotions. They had talked about them in kindergarten class. The Asian faces were all drawn with their eyes like narrow angular slits while all the other eyes were very large and round. Ugh... Really? Please don't draw with this stereotype. Asians have eyes that are a different SHAPE, not SIZE. They may have an epicanthic fold that covers the inner corner of their eye. As a group they have a variety of eye sizes like everyone else. I stare into a beautiful pair on my husband's face all the time. He has very definite epicanthic folds, but they are paired with lovely, normal sized eyes. I can even measure his eyes and they are the exact same size as my Caucasian ones. Asians do not go around seeing the world through narrow little slits.

I dislike doing gestures but I keep trying...

More painting from life.

Painted a pony.

I am not happy with this because it looks more polished than I wanted. I was just trying to design an outfit, but then I had no idea about the colours. So I tried choosing colours, but couldn't visualise it well without lighting. So I thought I'd try making it like a concept piece. I added lighting, and my brushwork was atrocious, since I have trouble with brushwork. Even though I'm using bigger brushes at higher opacities than I used to, I'm still having to repeatedly paint over areas to make it more "chunky" and defined with the right shapes as opposed to "splotchy" and messy. I tried very hard to think in terms of paint-by-number instead of constant blending, and I still don't think I'm doing it right. I'd like to get the earlier stages of a piece to read better.

Yuck: She's kind of a slumpy girl. I used a mirror and thought a lot about the underlying anatomy, but my attempts at it still made her look unnatural.
Yay: I learned a lot about leather boots, pants, and various facial expressions.

Studying the shoulder girdle and the muscles attached to the scapula. Couple more attempts at composition design.

I am a very slow and inefficient person in life. It grates on me all the time. It annoyed me enough the other day that I completely analysed my workspace in Photoshop and streamlined it. Remapped a bunch of my tablet's keys. Learned how to auto-hide panels. Figured out where to put my keyboard while I'm painting so I can actually use keyboard hotkeys. Was amazed at how much time it shaved off.

I painted the arm to my art mannequin to try out the shading techniques I learned in the workshop I took last year. I think it took around 20-30 minutes.

I started doing value studies of paintings I like, kind of like this (Sargeant) and this (Giancola). I was mostly concerned with composition and looking at value masses and hard vs. soft/lost edges. Then I decided after every one or two I finish I will throw something together of my own for composition practise. This time was a waterfall.

Still working on anatomy. Tried drawing figures from photographs while thinking in terms of spheres. Drew my husband's back. Had no idea what I was looking at. Except for the arm, I knew the muscles there! Looks like my sketch smeared there though. Hmmph. I think some technical studies of the scapula area are in order.

I chose to study a photograph with a highly unnatural pose and fabric preventing me from discerning the back leg very well mainly because the arm and front leg were situated in a way that I did not have any muscle diagrams that matched. I wanted to try figuring out where they would be located.

When I drew the gesture, I drew the overlaps in the upper arms backwards because I didn't understand how the deltoid insertion moves with the arm. I also noticed one of my previous studies looks like I connected the iliotibial band to the femur instead of the tibia. Lots to learn.

Trying to get faster at doing quick sketches.

Gesture drawings and an attempt to visualise the muscles in a photograph of a male ballet dancer.

I have learned that a great way to get time for personal projects is to fall down the stairs and break your foot! I have been completely rewriting my webcomic script. I was also able to watch a Vilppu video on gesture. These are the most prodigiously counterintuitive drawings I have ever tried. You can tell me to "feel" the pull and "experience" the pose, and my brain is obliged to respond with complete blankness.

Drawing my hand.

I'm currently recovering from surgery. Feeling much better. It seems that my trick for ending up bed-ridden is to set any kind of drawing goals, as they've coincided for months.

Well, before all that I did a couple quick photograph studies. My husband had agreed to sit for me every night for half an hour or so and I drew him a few times. I think he's gorgeous, but his unusually large skull gives me a bit of trouble. I tried out Posemaniacs for gesture drawing, set to something around a minute per image. I did a Caravaggio study of a detail from The Calling of Saint Matthew.