Tag Archives: drawing

Darwin, Australia, paints and pens

My first life drawing session!

life drawing session 1

My first time at a life drawing class. The model was a petite German lady called Bianka, an experienced artist’s model and a sunny, well-travelled, intelligent pixie. Of course it doesn’t matter how petite and trim a model is, when I draw a woman, she puts on 15 kilos just because, well, that’s how I feel about the pose. I am drawing on what I know, and the drawing is not Bianka, nor is it me, but a hybrid third of all those involved. Heh.

Worked with soft and hard chalks. Some pencil for the last drawings, because I was getting tired and knew that my “zone” moment had passed (but I was thrilled that, at some point, I found myself ‘in the zone’, if only for a brief 20 minutes or so) There are some tiny areas in these drawings that I’m happy with…I’m talking about a few inches here or there. On the whole, though, these are learning drawings, and of no value in themselves.

life drawing session 1

I threw most of the drawings away when I got home (and one of the better ones was picked up by the wind and whisked into the water…can’t even remember what it looked like, really, I never got a good look at it.) Only kept a few for these photographs, but will probably end up throwing all (but one) away, after I post this. It’s a tactic to keep me attending the drawing sessions: don’t get precious, don’t ‘collect’, don’t get smug, don’t keep anything…it’s the doing that has value, the finished drawings are nothing.

life drawing session 1

I am so happy I worked up the nerve to go. It was absolutely worth it. The thing I loved the most? The connection, immediate and visceral, that I felt because mind and cleverness were not involved. None of that “start by drawing an egg shape for the head” bullshit. Bianka=eye=heart=hand=drawing. Simple and powerful. There is sooo much work to be done. I hope I can keep the sessions up…to get good at anything, you have to be ready to commit to years of practice.

The Darwin Life Drawing sessions are presented by Shilo McNamee, with the support of the Darwin Visual Arts Association (DVAA). They are held Sunday mornings (check the website or their facebook page to be sure, though, and to tell Shilo you’re coming) at the Winnellie Art Space, 96-a Winnellie Road (next to the large Darwin Bakery/factory)

life drawing session 1

life drawing session 1
life drawing session 1

life drawing session 1

About these ads
Standard
journaling + mail art, stuff i've made

Object Enclosed: one (1) pc. “Ear”

fat ear

Paintings are not going too well. Reached a point yesterday when I thought I would explode…some unnameable despair filling me up, making everything I do hateful and wholly despicable.

Finally I squeezed noodles of paint over the problem canvas, and spread the quinacridone magenta around wildly with my hands, obliterating everything I’d done so far…I cried a little, but the rage subsided, and I felt heaps better for having done it. A feeling of calm filled me, but I also felt tired.

To take a break from all this pathetic, anguished (only happens in movies, surely?) painting, I set about making some mail art  for a friend who is also a painter (probably a less angry painter than I am, but who knows, really, what lurks in the hearts of women who paint?) and I started the epistle with this hilarious first page. I should have attached a small magnet to the stapled ear, so that it could be used as a fridge magnet…what a fun idea! Oh well, maybe next time (there’s always the other ear). ;)

I quite like how I’ve managed to bring the two options together harmoniously by “cutting the painting’s ear off”.

Standard
art + design, paints and pens, stuff i've made

First encounter with anamorphosis

It was one of those tired evenings after work; I came home to a cranky cat and dinner alone (Kris is still out there, somewhere, sailing) and I wanted to do some small creative thing to cheer myself up.

Thought, “I might paint something.”

I took a small canvas, and attempted to splash and drip a base layer of bright happy colors all over it. It didn’t look like anything much when I’d done, and somehow the colors had gone all pastel and sickly looking. This always happens when I haven’t worked with color for a long time…it’s like I have to re-learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to make the paint do what I want it to. Getting rusty. :(

Mood had sunk even lower by this time. I sank deeper into my chair, chewing on my fag end, eyeing the bottle of acrylic ink that was sitting on top of the canvas on the desk before, and a thought about those street artists who draw amazing, 3D images on the sidewalks, popped up.

I’ve looked these anamorphic drawings up before, and have seen some tutorials on Youtube, mostly using grids on Photoshop to distort an image, or a webcam to flatten the image to a single-point perspective.

I wondered if I could do a small anamorphic painting without those aids or gimmicks? Like, what if I just shut one eye (so that what I saw was from a single-point perspective), kept my eyes at the same level as I drew, stretched my pencil hand out in front of me, and tried to get the pencil lines to evoke the ink bottle from that one perspective.

anamorphic first attempt

The pencil drawing itself didn’t look like anything, but as I started to paint in the shape (still sitting low down and back from the canvas, with my arm stretched out) a little bit of that 3D-ness started to creep in.

anamorphic first attempt

By the time I got to the point you see in these pictures, it was 2 a.m…EEP! The picture above, even with such a sketchily done painting of the bottle, looks much more convincing, because this is the lighting I painted it by, and the shadows/highlights of everything else on the desk around are bathed in the same light.

The pictures below were taken the next day, in sunlight…the illusion is less convincing because the slant of light, the shadows (or lack of shadows) and subtle messages the eye sends the brain are telling you that something is not right.

anamorphic 4

anamorphic first attempt

Here’s what the painting looks like, when viewed straight on. I haven’t finished the painting, yet, but even when viewed from the correct perspective I can see that I haven’t made the black rubber dropper bit at the top long enough. But I’m definitely going to be playing a bit more with this tricksy sort of painting, it’s heaps of fun!

anamorphic first attempt

Related articles
Standard
blogging, DIY, paints and pens, stuff i've made

The Cheap & Nasty Sketchbook Makeover, on ilovegifting.me

The Cheap & Nasty Sketchbook Makeover

Last weekend I put together a guest DIY post over on Sarita’s blog,  i love gifting that you might want to go over and look at; it comes out some time today.

In it, I’ve taken one of those generic cheap & nasty sketchbooks (must be hardbound, though; I got mine from Jackson’s Drawing Supplies for AU$12.00) and added a little bit of reinforcing to the binding (so that it is a little bit stronger than the factory-made version, which used something for the mull that really resembled thick loo paper). I replaced the plain white endpapers with caramel-colored Canson Mi-Teintes, and then performed a series of quick techniques with acrylic paints to make the cover colorful, quirky, and very unique.
finished spread

It’s not a bad project for young people, and those of you who don’t want to get into the fiddly process of actually learning to bind books from scratch. Make a dozen for the holidays and give them to people who like to doodle, or compose poetry, or collect quotes, or to your friend who has a very bad case of list-making syndrome. It’s not an heirloom-grade book, the paper will probably disintegrate in 20 years, but not everything we need blank pages for will end up in the Victoria & Albert Museum. This book is for those other things.

This song came on when I was about to start painting the covers of the book, and I just let it take over. A little bit of 80s nostalgia, anyone?

Standard
blogs and sites, Inspirations

Love Bites : : playing with the Harmony Drawing Tool

love bites furry monster

Came across Mr. Doob’s Harmony Drawing Tool via the Drawing Pins blog. There’s no way to undo or erase a mark (other than to start over) but he’s got a fantastic set of brushes. This is the brush/mark-maker called ‘fur’. I could play with Harmony all day. Pretty addictive! (But it’s such a pain in the ass to draw with the Macbook’s track pad. I should really get a mouse)

What is this post? This is nothing. Just playing around, mindless doodling on Harmony, a bit of fluff because I didn’t do anything special today (other than turn 38, which is not something I like to dwell on.)

BUT can you imagine a drawing such as this one made with the fur brush, interpreted in stitch? It starts to look like something, doesn’t it? Suddenly, hmm, there’s potential here, something to explore, to push, corners to tug at, a little seed of a seed of a seed of something…ideas, ideas, ideas, I shit ‘em. LOL

Go make a furry Valentine for someone. Harmony also has “long fur”, for those who like their doodles (or Valentines) REALLY hairy.

bite me

Standard
dscf0211 1
art + design, journaling + mail art, paints and pens

The secret flowering of the Italian language

Heeey, how’ve you been? Busy? Have you made anything over the past couple of months?  I haven’t done as much as I would’ve liked, but I made a few things. I have so much catching up to do here! Just thinking about the job at hand paralyzes me. So I’ll start small and just show you what I made TODAY.

It was a pretty good day, in spite of the stifling, humid weather…I stripped down to my undies, poured big tumblers of ice cubes and water, and spent the day playing with something I got the idea for months ago:

You know that “Prints and Patterns” hoard that you started when you were 16 and that now takes up two filing cabinets and 8 boxes? All the designs you loved and saved—out of magazines or photocopied books, traced, photographed, clipped from wallpaper samples, taken off the net and printed on bond—yeah, THAT hoard, the Tossed Pattern Salad from Hades. Haven’t you always wanted to gather those designs together in a way that was both useful as a reference later on, and beautiful to look at? I have always wanted to transfer all those designs into one big book of patterns that I love.
make your own pattern collection slash coloring book

No, I’m not going to aim for that control-freak’s archive, I’d never get through it all! But I did spend my afternoon copying one little fragment of a pattern…then a second little fragment—

just doodling, no pressure or real purpose, freehand and using a black marker straight away…no pencil lines, no measuring or erasing…not trying very hard to be accurate or faithful to the original, letting my moods and thoughts find their way into the process

—onto the slightly yellowed pages of a large old Cambridge Italian Dictionary (found on a rubbish pile in the city!), and then coloring the pages, using the exercise as a way to explore new color palettes…kind of like hand-drawing your own coloring book,before you do any coloring.

the secret flowering of the Italian language

You know what? I love it. I love the look of the pages, the fragmented patterns and the wonky lines, the oversized, outlandish flowers blooming across the words. Quite by accident the first page I decorated this way started with the word abbell·ire tr. to embellish; to beautify; to adorn; to gild…

Standard