Art dump
Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 3:49 pmI’ve been drawing quite a bit lately, mainly with pen and watercolour. These are a few pictures I’ve made, with ruminations (insert noise of spitting cud…).
This started off as a simple drawing of a woman’s profile in reddish ink. I dropped a blob of paint on the far right of the page, so I extended the picture rather randomly to cover the blob. I added black ink to deepen the shadows, and soon had quite a mess on my hands. I turned it blue in Photoshop, which was an improvement, but you can still see that the shading is messy and that the whole thing is not well planned. The valuable lesson here was that if you’re making a monochrome composition with a lot of objects, you really need to think about where lights and darks will go. And I drew those fighter planes very badly, too. On the other hand, I’m quite pleased with the dodo. The Kewpie doll made a special point of being in there. I used a reference from Rose O’Neill’s original drawings. I like the quote of hers on that page: “I am in love with magic and monsters, and the drama of form emerging from the formless.” Her titanic “Sweet Monsters”, also on that page, I find wonderful and intriguing — powerful, I won’t say surrealistic, but magical work.
An experiment in painting with minimal preliminary drawing. I discovered that you can lay down a wash with Ecoline dyes and then work back into it with watercolours, or just a wet brush, which will partially lift the wash from the paper, which is what I did here. The little story to go with it is that this is Plonky, of the plonked-down colours, watching over eggs — someone’s eggs, Plonky doesn’t know whose — in the Sepia Cave, where the scanner picking up buckles in the paper causes mysterious patches of light to appear on the walls.
Ludo. Friend. Diluted India ink on tea-stained paper, graffiti in Photoshop. It looks like Ludo, so I’m happy. No Jareth, I’m afraid. Couldn’t see past his crotch to get a good look at the face.
Rough sketch of a violinist in Venice, from here. I made him a bit thinner than the figure in the original. When I get better at painting I might use this guy as a reference for a goblin fiddler or something.
A case of fail better next time. Copied from George Frederic Watts’ painting, with hindquarters added when I realised I’d left too much room. I love the image of the minotaur gazing out to sea (I prefer it without the crushed bird in his fist), so decided to do a pen copy, which turned into pen and watercolour, which turned into a mess. Still, it’s a picture with a background, all painted, nothing Photoshopped. I’m going to try copying Watt’s image again, maybe just in sepia ink.
This is how the D picture finished up. I did chicken out with the background, and just sketched it in with the Wacom, partly because the paper wasn’t stretched, so it would have buckled badly if I’d laid a wash down for the sky, and partly out of sheer cowardice. The result isn’t very good, but I think it’s better than I’d have managed with a paint brush:
I learned a few useful things in the process of painting this, including the helpfulness of white opaque ink for painting hair– you can paint with the ink, then lay watercolour on top of it — like gouache, only it gives a softer effect, or softer than I can manage with gouache, anyway. I flipped the background to make it fit the shape of the figure a little better. I’m pleased with the hair and the armour, the latter more in idea than execution — I can imagine knights in ceramic armour painted like tea sets (”plate” mail!), made by the famous houses of porcelain: Meissen mecha, Spode cyborgs, Willow-pattern warriors, chevaliers de famille rose et famille vert… defenders of the Empire Deluxe, R.C., if you are reading this.
Other useful discoveries: You can paint in Ecoline over ebony pencil without it smudging. Gold Sakura poster colour mixed with Ecoline makes lovely pearlescent paint. And bleach! I read that Rackham used it, so I’m been experimenting. Sure enough, you can lay down a wash and then lift colour off in sections with bleach, although bleach when dry may leave a deposit behind (chlorine crystals?) that’s difficult to paint over. However, thinned bleach seems to do the trick and doesn’t leave as much deposit.
I think my rough drawings, like It Was Rabbit, Forage in the Garden, and No Country for Old Women, have more individuality and life than the things I manage to do when I’m trying to draw well. So it’s definitely time to stop copying Amano. But even when I’m not copying someone else’s style, when I concentrate on technique, I think I tend to produce pictures that are less “mine”; they could almost be anybody’s. However, I know it takes time and patience to get technique and inspiration working together — and the more technique you have, I think, usually, the better you can eventually do when you start to let obvious technique go for the sake of individuality and expression.
Anyway, I think it’s time to go back to drawing for the sake of practice for a while, without trying to produce finished pictures, and to do a few more pages of the doujin, which is looking rather cobwebby and neglected.
October 13th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
This stuff is great. maybe you should give up writing novels and longer stories and start writing and drawing picture books for me. i will pay like a $1.25 a day and all the 4chan your brain can stand
October 13th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Seriously, all this trying to level up with art is somewhat in the name of getting good enough to make saleable pictures and picture books. Even in Thailand, I can’t live on $1.25 and 4chan a day, but I feel encouraged by the spirit of the offer. If 10 people paid me a retainer of a buck a day, with or without 4chan, I could just about manage.
October 13th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
food and water was going to be supplied sun light you were on your own for.
October 13th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
LUDO!!! I love Ludo.
Your artwork is awesome, as usual. You’re going to get tired of me saying that. D finished up lovely and rather viciously delicate and far better than my attempt this week is going to be. I haven’t decided on a subject yet but I bought art supplies and Dante is kicking me in the ankle.
Also, I’m really intrigued by the goblin violinist (fiddler sounds like he does something naughty with them). Are you going to expand on that one?
And you people are evil for making me look at 4chan. Yes, I knew it was there but I had never really LOOKED before (hard as that is to believe). *cries* I’ll never get any writing done now!
*tosses in her buck twenty five* That’s 2.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:08 am
Colin - well, here in the tropics sunlight isn’t a problem, at least.
Kirby - Yay that you bought supplies and are going to draw! Don’t worry if the first pictures don’t turn out as good as you’d like them. Practice seems to be the key to improvement, even if the key turns slowly sometimes.
Praise is always nice, of course, but I’m also keen on critique and suggestions, so if something strikes you as not right, or just naff, do say.
I suppose all goblins fiddle, aherm. (God, the images…) I was thinking of a goblin string quartet, or duelling violinists, but I don’t think I’m ready to try such tricky pictures yet.
Dang it, all this talk of 4chan has made me go there. You know which section. Now I’m stuck. Can’t…move…
(Tugs forelock as coins clink into hat on pavement — Thank ‘ee, ma’am!)
October 14th, 2008 at 6:27 am
Praise is always nice, of course, but I’m also keen on critique and suggestions, so if something strikes you as not right, or just naff, do say.
Oh, I’m a terrible, terrible art critic. I have three chords: like, don’t like, and wtf? The whatthefuckery usually has to do with proportions, digital PoserArt, and just plain bad Photoshop. Seeing none of that here.
And you’re developing a serpentine, detailed Froudian (too bad that isn’t like Freudian, but then we’d all be fantasizing about our fiddlin’ goblin daddies) style that holds a lot of appeal.
Come to think of it, I can name at least one goblin daddy I wouldn’t mind… ahem. And oh damn, now I gotta go watch it.
Who’s’ prettier, Jareth or Sarah?
October 14th, 2008 at 6:37 am
hooray for /b/
October 14th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Kirby - Hmm, Sarah has better hair, Jareth has a better tailor. Too close to call.
I distinctly remember walking into the cinema as a child with a yen to look at Henson puppets and walking out with recurring flashes of a Hoggle’s eye view of Those Tights and a curious electric feeling between my legs. I wonder if the filmmakers had any idea what they were setting up?
Colin - I seem to end up near the other end of the alphabet…
October 14th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Don’t lookit me, I used to fantasize about Race Bannon and Dr. Quest. Big, gun-toting bodyguard Race had to call Dr. Quest “doctor” or “sir” in every sentence and was generally submissive to his orders. That may have led me down some strange paths of thinking, as well as all those “boys in peril” themes and scenarios I watched on TV. Was there ever a boy more kidnapped and threatened with torture and death than Robin? The hero’s cute sidekick always gets in trouble and the Manly One has to rescue him and why does that make my brain go “YUM!”?
I don’t know if the filmmakers of Labyrinth had any idea what they were putting in our heads then (though… those tights. They’re not blind), but I’m certain that Tokyo Pop knows what they’re setting up now with Toby and Jareth.
Day 2 of learning to draw… frustration mounts as I realize the sketch pad has no “undo” button. Ctrl Z! Ctrl Z!!
October 15th, 2008 at 5:15 am
Have you seen The Venture Brothers? I think I’m in love with Brock Samson. The Adam West/Burt Ward Batman show definitely fucked with my head.
Much as I like yaoi in general, Jareth/Toby doesn’t light my candle. I know that a goblin wouldn’t share human social mores; I just can’t get the image of Toby as a baby out of my head.
The eraser is the “undo” button, lol. I find a mechanical pencil and a kneadable eraser is the best combination when you know a lot of undoing will have to be done.
[Edit: P.S. Things don’t always go swimmingly on the art front here. ATM I’m working on a portrait of D that started off looking like a waxwork Chinese whore with mumps and now looks like some horrible icon of the Virgin Mary with a skin disease, eye disease and mumps. It frightens me so much that I think I’m going to have to throw it out — or maybe burn it, just to be on the safe side.]
October 16th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I want your creepy D pic or at least
a look at it