Diane Kraus

Last post here!

2011-09-01T21:46:00.001-07:00

Oh, it was a nice little blog while it lasted! I've set a blog up as my home page though, and everything else, so all the exciting stuff will be happening over there. Head on over to dekraus.com! At least once, then do the following thing on Twitter/Facebook/G+ and I'll be sure to keep everyone informed!

The Puzzle

2011-07-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

Lately, my number-one hobby has been cooking. Specifically, attempting to make those foodstuffs we often buy in stores. It started over a year ago with granola, then this spring with yogurt. Lately I've been working with breads, crackers, tortillas, tomato sauce, various dips and spreads, all with varying results (got the tortillas down though.) Partly I'm enjoying making these things from scratch, and partly I'm enjoying saving some dollars at the grocery store (JUST BUY MORE FLOUR.) What I really love, though, is figuring out how these foods are made and understanding them, so I can throw them together at any time with any random ingredients and get something tasty.

Take yogurt for example. Bought in a tub in the supermarket, this thick dairy stuff is kind of a mystery. It's just milk and cultures. That's all it is. Heat some milk, put in some cultures, let it sit... there's yogurt! Granted, there are some times and temperatures to watch, but the basics are pretty simple. Or, I should say, understanding yogurt is pretty simple.

I recently watched an interview with a successful concept artist, Anthony Jones. Near the end of the interview he talked about how important it is to understand all the various facets of creating art - to understand light and composition and perspective and color. I realized that's the same tack I've been on since classes have ended; I've poked and prodded at some things, looked at them upside down, and said, "I want to understand this." It's not enough to know how to follow my eyes and copy a picture. I want to know how to turn the subject around in my head and draw it every which way. I want to understand the human figure the same way I understand yogurt.

The figure is what I started with, as it's so essential to any scene involving humanity. Despite being good at copying models, I don't understand the figure the way I want to. So I struck out searching for ways to do so, lacking sitting in a room with a real live model before me. I've gone through Loomis' basic structures and started working through Vanderpoel's studies. I read books online about drawing comic-style and anime. I searched Google and came upon a little site tucked away that had an excellent page about drawing the figure but was mostly about color theory. It was the color theory, a tangent to my own quest, that really got me thinking.

Whether you're an artist or not, I beg you to go to this page on the Real Color Wheel and take a moment to scroll down. You don't have to read it. Just look at the charts, the manipulations, the experiments, the lengthy explanations. This is an artist trying to understand color. The color wheel isn't just a spectrum laid out in a circle. The importance of it runs across the circle, in matching complementary pairs in order to bring those colors down to darks without using black. Complementary pairs "mute" each other, taking away brilliance and saturation. This is incredibly important when painting shadows.

Many of us grew up being taught that Red, Yellow, and Blue are the primary colors, and Orange, Green and Violet the secondary. In that color wheel, Red is opposed by Green, Yellow by Violet and Blue by Orange. But what if that's not entirely correct? One artist works his way through his palette and natural sources and says, no, wait, Red is opposed by Cyan (a blue-green) and Yellow by BLUE. What difference does this make? Darks mixed by Red and Green are brownish. Darks mixed from Red and Cyan are cool gray. That's a big difference, when shadows in warm light are meant to be cool.

The puzzle of understanding color in the real world. The puzzle of understanding all the complexities of the human form. The puzzle of taking the three-dimensional world around us and attempting to portray it on two dimensions. These are the puzzles artists have struggled with since they first drew a stick-bison on a cave wall with a bit of burnt stick.

People love to talk about art in terms of "passion" and "talent" and so many other ideals that are hard to quantify. No doubt it takes a certain amount of passion to be dedicated to any pursuit, and no doubt there are natural inclinations - especially those dealing with spacial understanding and a visual mind - that certainly help any artist. But just like doctors must understand human physiology and engineers must understand physics and thermodynamics, there's a wealth of information and ideas artists must understand as well. And because Art isn't considered a science, a lot of it is floating around in the ether between artists, some taught here, some taught there, information fading in and out through the centuries as we learn and relearn again, peering through the world around us to try to understand these things in order to share them with each other through our creations.

I've made a mental list lately of the things I don't quite understand, but need to in order to create the artwork I wish to create. Top of the list, of course, is the human figure. There's a lot I'd like to work with regarding color, too. Composition, something I've never felt good about, also has a pretty prominent place.

Right above making a perfect loaf of whole-wheat bread.

Backwards to go Forwards

2011-07-08T09:56:00.000-07:00

The earliest I remember being really obsessed with drawing was when I was about thirteen years old. Before then, I had done a lot of drawing, as something to do, drawings of the dog, of things around the house, little cartoons, dinosaurs, and so forth. But I didn't obsess over it - I didn't pace around the sketchbook, drawing the same thing over and over again, trying to get it right.

That's one of those fine lines you cross when you really get into creating art. There is an obsession to it. Maybe that's where the idea of the tormented artist comes from. It can make you feel a little crazy sometimes.

When I was thirteen, I saw an excellent TV movie of Treasure Island (the TNT original with Charlton Heston, if anyone remembers) and then I read the book for the first time. Suddenly, my mind was off seafaring in the 1700's, and oh, I wanted to draw those characters. I tried and tried and tried again. As I wrote more of my own stories, I kept trying. Eventually I began picking out photos from magazines of actors and actresses and drawing from them, because I couldn't get it right straight out of my head.

From that point on, I've been on this crazy quest to have the realism and detail of a photograph but also, somehow, bring out a unique character from my head. A lot of times people will say of my character art, "That looks like someone I could pass on the street." And that's good, but - at the same time, I've felt tied to and burdened by my dependence on photo-reference, as I've written about before. It's necessary for what I want to do, but too much, and too focused, and we end up with stand ins and not unique characters, and worse, lose any freedom to create outside the references.

In the time I've had now, without assignments hanging over my head and the freedom to be creative in both my work and studies, I've begun to strip back the references, find out what I can do on my own, and - in the next step - refine it. The top picture took me two years to finish, and had a huge file of references: photos, 3D models, screenshots, etc. I even took pictures of my cat! The character sketches below I worked up in a couple hours, working only from my head, without references.

What surprised me was how much I *could* do without looking at anything else. That maybe I've crossed into some other level where it's possible to put the pieces together myself. They could all be refined using references, but the essentials - the essential *characters* - are there, unique and on their own.

It came out of a lot of planar head drawing, structure studies, lines and circles and measurements. It came out of doing a lot of quick sketches to learn how mouths and eyes and noses can look differently. Practice and understanding. The depth of creativity in art comes from practice and understanding, and THEN detail, or style, or abstraction, can be applied.

Before Picasso began to take his portraits apart in Cubism or other abstractions, he was a wonderful realist painter. A lot of people are surprised when they see his early work. But you have to fully understand what a thing is before you can take it apart in all dimensions, which is essentially what Cubism is.

When I was trying to draw those characters when I was thirteen, I thought I was trying to replicate them in realistic detail, and it was driving me crazy. What I really wanted to do was understand them and bring them to life on paper. The most basic cartoonists hold an understanding to the truth of how we perceive things around us that is immeasurably important in bringing a character to life. But it takes stripping away so much of the beautiful detail I so often get wrapped up in. I have to assure myself, if I can get the basics right, I can add all the detail I can dream of LATER.

This is a start, though, and what I plan to focus on as I move forward in other projects. In a month or two, what will come of it?

I'll be sure to post again before then!

New Prints!

2011-06-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

I just updated my Imagekind Print Gallery with my still life oil paintings from last semester. There's a really wide variety of subject matter, from odd things like cat toys to more traditional vases and books and such. Something for everyone! Take a look!

Very soon I'll be getting most of the originals up for sale at my Etsy shop - I'll be sure to post when I do, as some might end up priced around the same as the prints! There's a whole lot of charcoal drawings to come, too, to satisfy everyone's tastes for naked people.

Stay tuned!

A Place for Everything

2011-05-31T15:08:00.000-07:00

Remember this? The cluttered little corner in which I’ve been making my art for the past 3 years or so?

It’s been transformed into this:

But wait a sec, you say. That’s all banjos and Kermits and ridiculously clean flooring, where are you going to make art now?

Oh, I have a whole room for that now.

That was, previously, the little room featured here:

Let’s take a look around!

First we have the computer center, for all my digital art needs. The bookcase next to it holds all my art and design books for easy reference.

In front of the window is a lovely little spot for a stool and the easel. I’ve never so appreciated the light this little room gets and holds - it’s southern light, and is kind of intense in the winter, but right now seems lovely.

The storage thing by the easel was actually once a printer stand. It still does well for holding lots of office supplies and such. There’s an old glass cutting board on top which will be easy to clean after I fling all my dirty brushes around on it.

The drawing/work table is totally cleared off - and will stay that way. No more stuff piling up around the edges! I’ve spent some time there already in the evenings, working out of Vanderpoel’s The Human Figure and the feeling in the room is so different than what I had. There’s something very still and encapsulating and isolating, which tremendously helps me focus. I’ve been turning the PC on to have Pandora running and loaded up Pidgin on there, too, for the occasional IM, but I find myself not even glancing at chats and such. Just happily drawing away! I very much need to download a work/break timer though, like Pomodoro, just to give my eyes and hands a rest and stretch my back every 20 minutes or so.

The closet in the little gray room has become storage central! I think I carried in 15-20lbs of different papers and canvases alone. This was desperately needed though, especially with all the nice substrates I’ve collected over the years, just to keep them both nice and also close at hand. I think I’ve had the same book of watercolor paper for 10 years. Time to use that stuff!

The top of the cabinet also gives me a nice place for finished works to lie flat, at least until I can afford some drawers specifically for that.

Now this whole transformation took me well over a week. In fact, I just got my banjo-hanger today and still have to put shoe molding down in the closet. That was really the issue, when it got down to it - a lot of little things that have been needing to be done for a long time. I ended up cleaning out that cabinet, three closets, half of the attic, laying about 33’ of molding, washing all the floors, throwing out masses of old stuff, and finally finding the good stuff decent homes.

If you work with charcoal, wash your floors more often than I do:

Actually, I have a Hoover Floormate and do the floors once a week, but that obviously wasn’t enough. In fact, everything needed to be washed/wiped down. Everything. All the furniture was pulled away from the walls and swept behind/washed behind. And that shoe molding, yeah. I laid all the laminate flooring you see between 4-6 years ago. Some places never got that finishing touch of the shoe molding. Outside of one closet, it’s done now (and I just have to do the finishing on the molding for the last closet and it’ll be done, too.)

It’s nice not having ½” cracks catching dirt and cat hair gaping open here and there!

The amount of stuff was just overwhelming, too. I have never moved (well, once when I was 6, literally walking from one house to the new one next door) so there was, of course, a TON of stuff and clutter that just builds up over time. Trails that would sprawl across the room:

I ended up going through all my DVD’s, CD’s, VHS TAPES OMG, old electronics, so on and so forth, and putting a ton in a bag to sell and a ton in a box to recycle. I’ve often read that we really shouldn’t keep anything we don’t use in the past 6 months; that might be overboard, but by the time I was done with this project I was quite happy to be casting stuff out right and left (my dresser drawers and clothes closet remain on the list!)

The change, though, has been remarkable. Having a separate space for work and for relaxation is wonderful. Getting my instruments out of corners and closer to a place I might reach up and grasp one has lead to a lot more use - despite my being very out of practice on the bass and violin! I’m still splitting my gaming time between the big PC in the studio-room and my Mac on the couch in front of the TV, but the odd thing is it’s actually lead me to play a lot less, as I find myself with so many other things at hand to do.

It was also really refreshing to do a house-project like this again. I’ve done a lot of painting, stenciling, flooring, refinishing, etc, but basically nothing in recent years. It was great to smell the paint and spackle again and to put pieces of wood together. It’s gotten me itching to build a model or something. Build something again.

But more than anything, I want to put that little gray room to good use. I feel presumptuous calling it a “studio”, especially when it’s such a humble little space. But it’s already giving me a feeling of such concentrated promise. If there was anything I wanted out of this whole project, it was that.

Preparations and Renovations

2011-05-15T17:27:00.001-07:00

Lo! The end of classes is upon us!

There is, officially, less than a week left of this semester. Unofficially, I'll have all my work in on Thursday. And with nothing scheduled for the summer, that means I can actually plan to successfully Work for Realz.

This is very exciting for me. Anyone who has read this blog for the past year knows I'm terrific at getting ideas and making plans. Very seldom do I actually get things done, however (I still have an ongoing painting started in the summer of 2009 nearly finished.) There are lots of reasons for this, the top ones being that I'm so often Working on Assignments. I don't know how to only spend 40 minutes or an hour on a drawing. I draw or paint until it's good and right. So school assignments eat my time.

I can also only spend so much time wrestling artwork in that little corner pictured above.

If I really want to get some things going this summer, as I plan to, I figured I need to do some renovating. You see, my art-studio space kind of suffered a crisis several years ago when I put all my stuff away and said I'd never draw again. At the time, I was using a very large former bedroom and had plenty of room for two big easels, a worktable, a drafting desk, lots of bins and carts and so forth. But when I put everything away, I decided to make that room a living space, and so turned 2/3rds of the room into a bit of a home theater - big TV, surround sound, big couch, etc. That left me with 1/3rd to use as a workspace when I started drawing and painting again. As you can see above, it's been a little... close.

The other difficulty is that the computer/scanner is in the other room. These days I go back and forth so often between sketchbooks, Photoshop and Painter that I'm constantly carrying things in and out of the smaller office room, which has also been suffering a bit of an identity crisis. In my youth the office was the "playroom" and sewing room, sometimes even a guest room. Ever since our first IBM PC, it's had a computer of one sort or another in it, and for a while had two. Presently it's got my work computer and the printer/scanner/fax, along with a lot of half-used office/storage furniture. It has a large, poorly-used closet and harbors the catbox. I replaced the flooring and repainted a couple years ago, and it's now a lovely neutral shade of gray.

Behold this poorly composited photo:

The glass desk with the big monitor is where I generally do my digital painting and such. It's been problimatic for years because it constantly conducts static electricity to my (homebuilt) PC, switching it off or killing the USB devices if I dare move (usually only in the winter.) I don't know how much work I've lost because of this, but it's been infuriating at times.

SO, after much deliberation, I've decided to take that little office room and turn it into a studio workspace. It is small, but small can be efficient, too. Small can mean I can turn around and flop a sketchbook onto a scanner. Small can mean I can bring up a reference right on a computer screen in the room I'm painting. Small can mean all the mess is concentrated in one space.

Most of all, small means I can open the door to go to work and close it behind me to stop. If you don't get what that means, well, it's probably the biggest challenge when working from home. When your prime workspace is in the same room as the TV and the couch, it's not easy to focus. When your prime relaxing space is in the same room as your workspace, it's not easy to relax. Secondary to the huge time-eater that classwork has been, this has been my biggest stumbling block. It's time to get a new, clean, efficient workspace in order.

And at the same time, reclaim my living space from the charcoal dust and paint!

Thanks to a nifty little online floorplanner I figured out how to fit all my work stuff in that one little room. The glass desk will be brought into the TV room as a home for my Macbook, which has been living on a lapdesk by the couch for the past year. Thankfully the aluminum unibody makes it near-impossible to shock! My work PC will move over to the unused wooden computer desk with the printer/scanner, and my worktable and easel will get moved in where the glass stuff used to be. Big Cabinet will get shoved in the closet - it WILL fit! Catbox and Cattree get moved into the TV room, to get tucked behind a door. The cats will just have to adapt to their change in facilities!

It really ends up giving me a decent space, with all the storage and tools around me that I need.

It's such a relief - and so exciting - just to have this all worked out. I've been trying for several years now to Get Things Done with the current setup, and it just hasn't been working. So once everything is handed in Thursday, I'm going to moving things around. There's some shoe molding I never got in after laying the floors in here years ago, and tons of cleaning and clearing-out to do. Rearranging closet-space. Spackling and touching-up walls. Getting everything cleaned up and organized and ready to do stuff in again.

At very least, it's a good place to start.

Fill 'er Up

2011-04-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about the word "impetus" lately. Kind of an odd word, old Latin thing. "The force or energy with which a body moves." I've been severely lacking in impetus lately.

"Motivation" is a whole other thing. I have tons of motivation. I have a billion reasons *why* I need to do this or that. It's the impetus, the force or energy with which to do so, that's been missing.

I've often compared working creatively to being a big ceramic jug. There's times where the jug is steadily pouring out a lovely stream of water; times where it's even ridiculously overflowing. There's also times where the jug is too low on content to pour out, or even empty. It comes in cycles. In order to create we must be full, or else we have to pause and fill up again.

In the best of times, it's a never-ending cycle. What we do and what we create helps to keep us filled up. We have our own wellsprings and pump systems and the best of us become continual fountains. But even wellsprings run dry sometimes, or pump systems break down. Then we have to go looking for inspiration, for those things that will get us going again.

I wrote last time about wanting to start a webcomic, and that's still forefront in my mind. I've been collecting ideas and images to work into it, writing down some basic plotlines, but I haven't started drawing just yet. I found, while brainstorming, my creativity well is feeling shallow and limited - much like my frustration in only ever posting schoolwork and World of Warcraft fan art. So instead of trying to get somewhere on an empty tank, I've kind of taken some time here to pause and refill the ol' jug.

First things first, I'm looking beyond WoW for the first time in years. (I used to say, "There are no other games!!") Video games are fantastic sources of inspiration because they present the amazing work of other creators - whole massive worlds and storylines, images and styles. The first thing I did was reinstall The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on my PC, with a big graphics overhaul mod made in the last year. I bought myself Morrowind on my birthday in 2002, the first real roleplaying video game I'd ever played, and definitely an amazing introduction. The graphics update brought it up to today's standards (far outshining WoW except in regards to animation) and it's been fun to poke around in such a rich - and unique - world again.

On the lighter side of things, a friend introduced me to the free-to-play League of Legends. This is a pretty simple realtime-strategy type game, where you control a single "champion" in a team with others and try to take over the opponent team's base. No biggie, and a lot of fun to just sit down and play (and free!) The really interesting thing is looking at all the champions, their design and artwork and skillset, how each one is made different from the others, what they represent and how they are portrayed. A game like this tends to take archtypes and turn them up to 11, so they're clearly seen even when only an inch high and manically played for 30 minutes each. It has a wonderful sense of fun and humor and is refreshingly easygoing and lighthearted.

The bigger news is that I've joined up at Lord of the Rings Online, especially now that it's also free-to-play. I had a devil of a time getting it downloaded and installed (ended up getting a client at Fileplanet and using IE - of all things - to get all 12GB downloaded uncorrupted) but once I got it working and started up, well... I'm impressed, to say the least. Yes, in the most basic ways it looks and plays like WoW, but beyond the interface and the basic MMORPG gist of it, it's a whole new world. I was a huge fan of the movies when they came out and subsequently read all the books like mad, but when the game came out I was deep into WoW and couldn't afford neither the time nor the money to also pick up LOTRO. But now it's free? FREE?? Well, a nice little slice of the pie is free, then it's kind of pay-as-you-go. I can live with that much more easily than a monthly subscription.

I have been just... incredibly impressed with it so far. It's a beautiful game to begin with, and it seems like everything WoW roleplayers have ever asked for is freely given in LOTRO. You want armor dyes? Custom outfits? Player housing? Check, check, check. How about some musical instruments you can actually play and some horses that actually look like horses? How about NPC's that don't seem like afterthoughts and quests that pull your interest along? Oh, I am happy with this. I am very happy with this.

WoW offers some awesome stuff - in fact, WoW is all about the awesome, and I love it for that, for it's humor and it's overthetop awesomeness. Yes, I want my nelf to be able to turn into a dragon and carry someone around. But I'm looking forward to refilling some of my creative stores in Tolkien's beautiful, rich world.

Also! We're not just looking into games here. I've also started watching Doctor Who, starting with the new series in 2005. Again, I've been very impressed, I just loved the first season with Christopher Eccleston. I used to watch Doctor Who when I was little, but it was always a bit too "much" for me then. The theme song alone creeped me out, no less the daleks! But I'm finding it fantastic now, though I'm still getting used to David Tennant in season 2 here. I admit I was drawn in by seeing a fantastic trailer for the new season. Why have I not been watching this sooner!?!?

Lastly, movies. One TV show (outside of the Food Network) that I do watch is Nikita, partly because a friend turned me on to Maggie Q (not that Alex isn't quite something, too!) Watching Maggie lead me to a number of movies out of Hong Kong, and I recently watched Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon. Now I had watched some modern-day Hong Kong action films before, and really enjoyed them, but NOTHING like this. This made 300 look silly and the LOTR movies look like Hollywood blockbusters (not that there's anything wrong with that.) There was just so much *art* in this film, from the scale of the historical details to the beautiful cinematography to the dance-like action scenes. I was just stunned, and quickly asked same friend for a list of others I should queue up on Netflix. Watching these, I couldn't help but think, "I want my comic to look like that." That artful, that detailed, that striking. Huge inspiration, with much more to come.

So, between schoolwork and WoW fanart, I'm filling up on these other things. There are 35 days left in the semester, then for the first time in years I have some serious time off - months off - from classwork. I hope by that time I'm overflowing.

Words and Pictures

2011-04-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of thinking in the past few weeks. Thankfully, I've gotten a bit over my frustration obstacles, at least to be happy with what I'm doing right now. I can't argue much with my little still life paintings or anatomy drawings. What I've been thinking about though - for a change - is inspiration. Maybe it was just the horrible headcold I got stopping me in my tracks. Maybe it was other things. But I've come out of it with some interesting replies to the old "Where do I go now?"

"Where do I want to go?" is really the question. "What am I doing?" is another one. All of the... technique stuff - all of these gestures and sketches and anatomy drawings and little oil paintings - they're all like, learning equations for an engineer, rules of physics, all the stuff you need to know to build a bridge. But in the end, you build a bridge. But of course you can't just walk out the door and build a bridge. There has to be a need for a bridge, some specific bridge that needs building. Likewise, an artist needs something to do with their skills and knowledge. And that's something the general public asks artists and art students all the time. "Oh, you're an artist? So what do you DO?"

Because there can be a million different answers. A thousand different jobs and career paths. You've got your conceptual artists and your gallery artists and your fine artists, your wildlife artists and portaiture artists, landscape artists and those folks who go do amazing pen and ink renderings of old factories and steam trains. Then you have your commercial illustrators and your children's book illustrators and your Hallmark illustrators, book cover illustrators, medical illustrators. Concept artists for games and movies, set designers, character designers, fashion designers, storyboard artists. The list goes on and on. Once you know how to draw and paint there's a billion things you can do.

And what have I done, in the past few years? Academic realism renderings from still life or reference, and World of Warcraft fan art. Hm.

It's not really what I mean to do. The reason I went into Illustration instead of Fine Art was because I wanted to tell stories with my pictures. The thing is, there's two things I've done for as long as I can remember: I've drawn pictures, and I've written stories. I started writing stories before I could write, telling them to my grandmother, who would transcribe them for me. Once I could write, I wrote a lot. I wrote a whole darn novel in high school. I wrote short stories in college. When I started playing roleplaying video games seven years ago, I wrote for my characters. I still do. I have hundreds of pages of storytelling - some of the best stuff I've ever written - stowed away for my elves and hunters and alien spacegoats. And of course I've drawn pictures to go alongside.

And this is where I've been left thinking the past few weeks. I've been playing World of Warcraft for over six years now. The game is showing its age, graphically and as far as the entertainment value of the mechanics. The latest expansion still has stuff I want to see and do, and I'm devoted to my friends and my raiding group, but week by week it's falling away as a source of inspiration. It's hard for me to find reason to write for my characters anymore, and when I do artwork of them - like Tavlo's finished concept piece above - it feels more like practice than something finished. There's nothing wrong with doing fan art and I'd still love to get a piece up on the WoW website, but anymore it feels like I should be pushing my skills towards something more. But what? What?

The two things I do well, that I've always done, are drawing pictures and telling stories. For some reason, I've never thought once about doing comics. (Or if I have, I've thought, "What? Me? How??"

We never really had comics in the house growing up. I remember my brother had some great big Superman one, but I think it was just because it was a collector's edition or something. My Dad and I always read the Funnies together out of the Sunday paper, but that was just... Garfield and so forth. I did always love Garfield and had several Garfield books (early love for fat lazy cats... *stares at my Dudley*) but other than that... no Marvel. No DC. We watched movies and cartoons on TV. We just weren't comic people.

So (oddly, like other things in my life) I'd never really considered it. It's funny, because I'm one of those writers who "sees" everything as they write, like a movie playing in my head. It's all already there. I'd just have to pic the shots and draw them and put down the dialog.

It took me about 5 minutes to think up a story and a setting and a handful of characters. Now they're all leaping around through my head chaotically, waiting for a script. And I keep asking myself, "Could I do this?" Could I draw what I see in my head and write this story? Could I merge these two pasttimes into something from which I could build a solid career?

When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher wanted me to be a writer. My Art teacher wanted me to be an artist. My music teacher - well, I'm not a miracle-worker here. Two out of three ain't bad.

Then Fix it, Dear Liza

2011-03-17T13:36:00.001-07:00

So last week I rambled about the frustrations of Making Better Art, then promptly turned on the "How Do I?" machine. Because it always comes down to figuring out HOW to do better; otherwise it's just empty rambling. If you want to do better, you figure out how.

Now and then, a solution pops up that is just... ridiculously obvious and easy. It just brings about this big sigh of relief and a whole lot of inspiration.

Mind you, this isn't an overarching solution to ALL the problems, but it definitely helps with one or two. One of my greatest frustrations working digitally has been struggling with brushes that just don't work how I want them to. I've never really liked working in Photoshop; I still have CS4, so I'm without some of the fancy new blending brushes and such. It always seemed very flat and sterile to me, anyway. So for the past 3 or 4 years now I've been working mostly in Painter, and just using Photoshop for adjustments and effects.

Painter has a HUGE number of brushes, the majority of them designed to replicate natural media. Some, like the Real Pencil brushes, I really like. Others, I just could never get them to work how I wanted to. But I thought, with all those brushes, there must be SOME that work for me, right?? Try as I might, I could never find them.

Now often, I hear digital artists talking about brushes they've made, but so many of them seem just like fancy effects brushes, and I thought, why bother? I have all these pre-made ones anyway. The other day, though, I finally hit my limit of patience with those pre-made ones, and opened up Painter's Brush Creator.

Like most things in Painter, it's hidden in the Windows menu, like it's a palette you need to open and not a "thing you do." It's also a little overwhelming:

ALL the variables to create or adjust ANY brush are all there. The tricky thing is, some only activate depending on other variables, so there's a lot of trial and error. Especially when you're not sure what each variable *does*. I'm sure there's some listing somewhere online. I just went through a lot of trial and error, starting with the scratchboard tool, which I usually use for linework. I wanted something a bit more refined, pressure-sensitive, and variable-width, as linework is a subtle art. After a while I came up with a nice little brush that seemed to be doing what I wanted it to do most of the time.

The week before I'd gone over a character sketch, *trying* to be careful about it, but more or less making a mess:

I started going back over the drawing with my new brush, taking advantage of it's smaller minimum size and ability to widen out and darken where needed:

Huge difference, no?

HUGE difference.

I love traditional media, partly because it's so forgiving. A smudge of charcoal or pencil on paper is in itself delightful because of it's reality, and drawings and paintings are given character through the application of the media. I'm not sure if it's an effect of the opaque media versus painting with light (which is really what you're doing digitally) but digital paintings clamor to be "clean". I think there are a lot of factors involved, but having the right brushes for your style and technique is one of the most important to creating "clean" digital work.

After I got my little lineart pen down, I went back and created a nice soft painting brush as well. Along with two erasures and a blender, I put the new brushes in their own little palette, and I'm very interested in taking some time to experiment with them. If the painting brush can revolutionize my painting (which always looks overly thick and smeary to me) like the linework one revolutionized my lines, I will be extremely happy.

Then I can get to work on all those other things I was frustrated with!

Stretching

2011-03-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

Forgive me if I've written about this before.

One of my biggest frustrations right now is not being able to create what I want to create. Most of what I post here is academic classwork. Figure drawings, still life paintings, studies, etc. that are all created according to assignment parameters with suitable references. I spend a great deal of time on my schoolwork, earn appropriate grades for the time and effort I put into it all. It all looks good and I'm quite content with it, and growing ever more confident in my ability to do a nice figure drawing or paint a still life, or whatever else is asked of me in my classes.

That's not to say I'm not learning anything - the practice alone, of having to do two or three detailed and polished figure drawings a week - is invaluable. The classes themselves have tons of wonderful practical information organized in a way to make learning and understanding easy. I've progressed more in the past two years at AAU than I ever did before.

On the side, however, I'm constantly looking at other artists, tutorials, articles, how-to's, books, and other information. I'm also always experimenting. Usually the experimenting comes in the form of something drawn from my World of Warcraft playing, as that's what my friends and I are talking about all the time and it's fun to interact with them about it. It's a great source of ideas. It's also a great way to pinpoint where I'm lacking.

Schoolwork doesn't tell me where I'm lacking, because I'm not yet focusing on what I really want to do. I'm learning and perfecting, but I'm not *stretching*. Stretching involves going beyond what we know, what we're confident in. It involves reaching for something we can only imagine.

This is slightly related to my entry last week, about the huge difference between free-drawing and relying on copying. This takes it a step further, to the difference between relying on references and working from our own heads. This is where I see the huge bulwark of frustration in my own work. My little experiments are not near what I want them to be. My weaknesses blare out like overzealous horn sections and make me wince and want to look away.

But I'm more driven to keep stretching than anything else.

It's difficult at times to watch a tutorial - like the one I was watching Here, a great resource, the other night - and then attempt to do it myself... and fail miserably. Maybe not giving myself enough time, maybe trying something *too* difficult, but still, the obvious weak points bubble to the surface and infuriate me.

It does no good to feel badly about it, or to sulk about being yet unable to turn out awesome drawings and paintings. The only things that can be done is to look at what works, what doesn't, what can be improved next time. And try to build up some plan of attack to tackle those weak points so there are fewer and fewer Bubbles of Disappointment each time.

My short list:

Spend more time and attention on composition (Still Life course helping here)
Push values and colors even further (Still life also helping here)
Create a focal point and let everything else gradually fall back (Anatomy drawings helping here, actually, in ways I hadn't expected)
Don't rush the drawing (I have a horrible habit, when working away from the easel, of skipping steps in drawing and ending up with incorrect proportions)
Settle on a color scheme (lessons from Color & Design)
Be more accurate in realism and detail (Slow down, practice practice practice)

Even the short list, at times, seems insurmountable. The only thing I can do is try again, with another silly little piece of WoW fanart, or some idea thrown to me by a friend. It feels sometimes that no matter what I do, it will never click together how I hope it will, and I'll be left doing nice drawings and paintings from photographs and references. But the storyteller in me begs me to keep stretching, keep trying.

So keep trying, I shall.

It's All How You See It

2011-03-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

I'm going to write something here that may be a little controversial and/or rub people the wrong way. It's been getting under my skin, though, for a while now, so I just have to say something about it.

I've noticed, especially lately, that there are a whole lot of people out there doing a whole lot of tracing of reference sources, layering over in Photoshop, or using a grid to get their subject on their canvas, whatever that canvas might be. Before I say anything else, I want to insist that all of these techniques can be wonderful tools. I've had instructors comment to students to use a grid to get a proportionally-correct drawing; I've had assignments that stated specifically to use a grid. I've had instructors give the very good advice to trace a reference onto a sheet of translucent paper, then hold it up over a drawing to see where the drawing is wrong (actually, the best way to use tracing.) I'm certainly not talking about using layers in digital programs or sheets of tracing paper to gradually perfect a drawing, either. Basically, I'm talking about using these tools to an extent that you're doing little to no drawing yourself, and doing so until you're dependent on it.

Related to this is the use of the eyedropper tool in digital art to pick up original colors from a reference. There's TONS to be learned by doing this on a few practice paintings, but someday you have to learn to mix those colors yourself. Just like someday you have to learn to draw what you see without any training wheels, without anything showing you the way but your own eyes and sense of space.

I have done all these things myself. When I was doing aviation art, I regretfully admit, I did very little raw drawing. I did a whole lot of gathering reference material and composing a scene, then tracing it onto a canvas. I think it's part of the reason I never felt like a "real" artist in those days. I was painting decently, and I could detail those traced drawings like crazy, but the gist of being an artist escaped me because of the shortcuts I was taking. I was more of an artist when I was in 11th grade, drawing from scratch photos cut out of magazines, than I was when I was making the most money painting airplanes.

When I began classes at AAU, it was that time spent drawing when I was a teenager that came back to me, and the lessons I learned when given Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain when I was 13. Contour line drawing. Drawing upside-down. Drawing negative space. I didn't understand sighting until I got the hang of it in my first class, but after that, it all seemed to make sense. No, it's not easy. It's not always quick. It's not always perfect. But it's incredibly liberating to be able to draw anything you can see before your eyes or in your head with nothing but a pencil in your hand.

Drawing, at its core, is all about seeing relationships. It's about judging the distance between two points, or discerning the angle of a line drawn between them. Drawing gets down to geometry without the numbers. Even if there is only a dot on a page, there's still a relationship between that dot and the corner, or the dot and the edges. If you can judge the relationships, you can take a blank sheet of paper and draw the dot in the same exact spot as the original. Try it. It's a fantastic exercise for *seeing*.

We trace and we grid and we use these tools to correct our imperfect, unpracticed sight. We use them to *learn* where that dot is. The important question, however, is are we using them actively, or passively? If I simply lay my empty paper over the paper with the dot, and make a mark where I see the dot showing through, what am I learning? I'm merely following train tracks, doing nothing myself. However, if I do my best to see where that dot should be, and put it down where I think it should go, THEN lay it over the original to see how close I was to the original mark, and look at the difference, and correct myself, then I'm LEARNING.

We should always, always be LEARNING.

Learning to see is like any other skill. It's like hearing intervals in music or knowing how hard to press the brakes in your car to slow to a stop. Learning to see allows us to look around our world and see it for what it really is, and manipulate that reality to create art. It allows us to take the clear visions we see in our heads - in whatever imaginative style we see them - and put them down on paper, on canvas, on our computers. Seeing relationships correctly is essential in every visual art, whether fashion design, graphic design, interior design, fine art, illustration... We have to be able to put down something that makes visual sense. There is not always a template. There is not always a reference you can trace or copy. The beauty of our own art should come from how we uniquely see and recreate our subjects. You can't be unique and creative and fully develop yourself as an artist if you're constantly riding a train track.

This is not to say, "Throw away your tracing paper, never make another layer in Photoshop again." Copying is a time-tested method of learning from the masters. Just make sure, as I said before, you're learning, and not just taking a shortcut. If you can do it yourself, with your own eyes, do it. Even if you have to go back and correct things after. Learn to see. Learn to draw. Learn that age-old, treasured skill of the artist. It's not something just anyone can do. It's *ours*.

And from there, learn to judge value, to discern color. The world is so much more beautiful when you can see all its shades and hues and know what they really are.

The work on this page is all schoolwork from the past week. There are lots of imperfections, mistakes, areas that could be better. The charcoal anatomical studies took a long time to draw and a longer time to render in value. The still life compositions take no prisoners in their difficulty to initially draw correctly. With all of them, there were moments where I stepped back, grit my teeth, and wiped entire sections off the paper or canvas. All of them were drawn with nothing more than a pencil or brush, my hands, and my eyes.

When you can really see, you can draw anything. The harder I work, the more I progress, the more I desire to learn to see even better. It simply unlocks every possibility an artist could dream of.

Catchup

2011-02-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

I have, unfortunately, let this blog go. For a week. Or two? What was it... I missed a weekly posting, at least. Sinus infection = me staring at the TV on the couch = needing to catch up with work and school = blog getting shoved to the background. But ah, look! You get a veritable smorgasbord for your patience, as I'll now just put up everything.

Anatomy is giving me a lot of opportunities to do... long charcoal drawings. So much so that I'm thinking of tweaking my charcoal technique in order to "get artistic" with them, since the drawings themselves are coming out pretty solid. These two skeletal drawings took several hours each:

They're both done on white paper that's toned with charcoal, then the lights picked out with an erasure and the darks shaded in with charcoal pencil. I'm really thinking of switching to a big charcoal stick for some of the shading though, to loosen it up a little and make application go a bit faster.

I was told last week by the instructor that for the exercises, taking a long time is really a luxury, and he's curious what I could do in less time. So, I limited myself to an hour each with this past week's exercises. I was actually pretty happy I could get down what I did, though I didn't have time to really linger on subtleties and "learn" them. Hopefully he won't mind if I go back to my lingering. I have no idea how we're supposed to learn what a knee really looks like if we're not given time to figure it out!

The thing is, I can do the basic vine drawing for things like this in 10-15 minutes. It's the rendering of the light and shadow and all the little variations in-between that takes forever. So I'm thinking, if I start messing with a half-stick of charcoal instead of the thinner pencil, maybe I can get it down faster, and a little looser as well. I'm sure if nothing else, I'll get even MORE charcoal under my fingernails!

I'm loving the still life painting course - whatever it is I'm doing there, I seem to be doing it right. I did this charming little display of cat toys last week with a limited palette: black, white, terra rosa, yellow ochre, and cadmium yellow. It's amazing what all can be brought out just through those colors.

This week we're using the full palette, but without black - ultramarine and burnt umber instead. Working with the limited palette really does get you thinking very frugally about color. When you can see what you can do with so little, just the barest spots of real red or real yellow make a big difference. I found it also keeps things muted and realistic. We'll see how that keeps up with the full palette paintings this week.

Last but certainly not least, I got to start on a new commission, just in the sketching stage so far. This is very neat because it's a fictional character, and not really a World of Warcraft character, plus Victorian-themed with a lot of fun stuff to play with. She lives a bit of a double-life, so one portrait will be a photographed mugshot, and the other will be a formal oil painting. I'll do both digitally, so there's going to be a lot of development and experimentation. So far, we just have the sketches to start with.

Now that I'm all caught up, I've got more time again for general sketching and on-the-side drawing and painting fun. Hopefully I'll be able to keep that up and throw some of that stuff up here soon, too. =)

Out of Nothing

2011-02-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

A day late here, waylaid by the yearly sinus troubles. Thankfully the antibiotic is kicking in and I have some energy today. So! A quick catch-up entry while I finish my coffee.

Classes started up last week, though the first week is always rather slow to start. The still life painting course did start us up with a little grayscale exercise - "choose two simple white objects" the assignment suggested, so I go bounding off to gather up a Wii remote and oven timer. Let's start off on the right foot, I say!

I was very curious about the whole oil painting thing, because I've figured it's been something I've been doing wrong for quite awhile, having taught myself. From what I've gathered so far, I haven't been "doing it wrong" any more than I'd been drawing wrong - it just all gets down to process. That's really the beauty I've found in AAU courses that I haven't found in others I've taken. I've taken drawing courses that have you do a lot of exercises - negative space drawing, contour line drawing, various subject matter - and that's all great practice and perspective - but the actual process of drawing I've learned in the AAU courses have been ten times more valuable.

I always maintain that the most important part of drawing is learning to draw what you see and not what you think - at least for drawing that has any connection to realism. At the same time, even if you're working purely based on your own imagination, you need a logical process. And that logical process I've been taught in the past year has been the most useful thing.

Step 1: Draw a rough sketch or a thumbnail of what you want to draw. Get an idea.
Step 2: Start with a large form. Rough out smaller forms via measurement, sighting, and careful observation.
Step 3: Refine the line drawing. Designate light and shadow sides.
Step 4: Fill in shadow/light tone.
Step 5: Refine values.

Those steps, every time, create a nice drawing. Step 2 is always the most difficult - it's the real *drawing* part. But once you get through Step 2 successfully, you're sailing.

And what I found last week, it works exactly the same for paint. Sure there's more to do with color and such, but the basics of defining the drawing, the light and shadow sides, then refining all worked the same way. Having that *process* down is just such a confidence booster.

I think one of the biggest mistakes we make is to look at a part of a subject, or a whole idea, and think, "That's too much, that's too difficult." Then we tend to concentrate on that difficult part and put it before all others. I think it's the reason why those who work primarily on drawing portraits, for instance, tend to work on the central features - the eyes, ears, nose and mouth - and forget about the rest of the head. So they'll have a very nice face with an undersized head and poorly-rendered hair. Likewise, in painting something (and I've often done this) we'll get all caught up in rendering the details of the main subject that the background and environment falls into obscurity, despite it being so important to the subject itself. I think of all the airplane paintings I did with very nicely-rendered aircraft and very basic, cheesy land/sky backgrounds, and I just shake my head.

The work has to be seen as a *whole*. And stepping through a process, for whatever subject matter it is, helps it all come together.

I've always felt there's a bit of magic that goes on when you take a blank white sheet of paper or canvas and create art, and put something there that looks like something that wasn't there before. The hardest thing is always making that decision to put that first mark on the page. Where do you put it? What will it become? So often, if you start with the idea of "this line is the eyebrow of a person" that first line will be off, then the whole rest of the drawing will be off. But if you use that first line to define "A person goes here" - and that's *ALL* - then you've started something that can slowly be worked up into something accurate to its source, whether real or imagined.

My first anatomy drawing this semester was a torso study, of a sadly thin woman (I want to feed her cookies!) I'm not used to drawing half a body on a page. I wondered for a moment how I would get it right. I ended up starting with one long vertical line, that ran (and still runs) from the base of her neck to her legs pressed together. That was the start of the process.

She's not perfect - her head is a little small, I'm sure some other things are a bit off - but in other ways, it's that miracle of the process again. Line by line, shape by shape, form by form. Out of nothing.

The Past and the Future

2011-02-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

There was a day back in the year 2000, when I said to myself, "I think I'll try painting airplanes." I'm not sure where this idea came from. I'd gone to a couple airshows, was playing Flight Sims and building models as a hobby. I bought a few beautiful books of airplane photos, mostly warbirds. Then one day I decided I'd figure out how to paint them.

It was the first time I seriously ventured into any artistic arena, and I'm not sure why I hit on airplanes. I'd always drawn portraits and animals, not airplanes. But I did some drawings, copying those beautiful photographs, then got some brushes and canvases and oils, and in the summer of 2001 I sold my first painting. It was pretty exciting. And I just took it from there.

I had no idea what I was doing. For the next four years I did the best I could, learning as I went, taking commissions, painting a lot of X-planes and P-51 Mustangs. I donated a painting to the Civil Air Patrol and ended up doing a big commission for their Headquarters in Washington. I had my stuff put on veteran's calendars and inside model kit boxes and all kinds of fun things. And I had no idea what I was doing.

I simply wore out from the scrabble. Imagine trying to climb a mountain with no equipment, instead creating cleats and picks and ropes and things from the rocks and scrub around you. For as far as I was able to go with it, it exhausted me. When I finally called it quits, I didn't pick up a pencil again to draw, at all, for the next eight months.

The above UH-1E Huey, a Marine gunship from VMO-2 in 1966, is my first piece of aviation art since 2005. It was a commission from a friend. It's drawn in charcoal - which I'd never used for an aircraft before - and was researched on an Internet so much more expanded and easy-to-use than it was just 6 years ago. I enjoyed the research, I enjoyed the history, I enjoyed drawing and rendering the aircraft itself. It didn't quite hold the same magic and excitement as aviation art had for me once before, though. Would I do another aircraft? Oh sure, of course, any day. But I'm pretty sure I'll never pursue it - "I'm going to paint airplanes!" - the way I once did.

After I finished up the Huey, I ended up pulling up these PDF versions of Andrew Loomis' books I've had saved for a while. Andrew Loomis was one of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century, and is referenced in a lot of illustration and drawing classes. In 1939 he put out his first book, "Fun with a Pencil." It's very lighthearted and has a wonderful style to it that just yells "1930's". At the same time, his easy-to-follow system of deconstructing heads and bodies, features and faces, is invaluable.

I've never been a cartoonist. It's something I consider a weakness now, as I struggle to capture movement or emotion in an efficient number of lines. I spent the next three days drawing Loomis' heads out of his book. Pages and pages of them.

Now I want to go back to my mugshots and try to do cartoon faces that capture character and expression. The next part of the book is about bodies and figures, and I'm looking forward to that, too. My Anatomy class started Monday, and I can't wait to get drawing. What excites me now isn't a certain thing in my head that I want to draw or paint, but rather gaining the tools and abilities to draw whatever comes to mind. Maybe it will be an airplane. Maybe it will be three people working on an airplane and a car driving up in the foreground to drop off a passenger.

Starting to climb the mountain, this time I've got cleats on. THAT is exciting.

Tiny Sketchez

2011-01-27T07:58:00.000-08:00

I always like to finish things. See things through. Polish and shine to as close to perfection as possible. I've never been so much about ideas as I am about process and completion, so I've often relied on other sources for inspiration - such as commissions or asking people to suggest certain subjects. The ideas I do have often get put on hold until everything else is done, and often never get realized at all.

In some ways, it's been a bit of a handicap, because most of what I've done I've done to create a finished picture, and therefore most of my time has gone into detailing and finishing. Once I started drawing academically it soon became clear there were two clear stages of a drawing: one, creating the drawing itself, and the other, finishing. Having always been good at the finishing (I used to do a lot of tracing or using grids to get my initial outline) it's taken me a while to get the hang of doing that drawing. It's always an exhausting challenge, and I always feel relieved when I can just sit back and start rendering value and detail.

That said, there's a whole other... pre-drawing concept that I've hardly ever touched at all. And that's the little miracle of the sketch.

Sketches are like notes taken for writing a paper or a story; they aren't full sentences, and are often poorly spelled and sometimes illegible. They're an idea slapped down for later, or just to get it out and down so you no longer have to hold it in your head. They don't have to be perfect and they certainly don't have to be finished. I've never really bothered with them much, because they've always bothered *me*. They never look "right" or "correct". They're never detailed or exact. They're never finished. They're throwaway art and a waste of time when I could be working on something bigger.

But what's to work on, without the ideas? What's an illustrator without something to illustrate?

My biggest hobby is writing fanfiction for World of Warcraft. I've been doing it for... oh, five years now, and have a whole stable full of beloved characters and chapters and chapters of story for all of them. A few weeks ago one of my friends (and fellow-writer) asked me if I ever thought about illustrating my stories. I said she must be crazy, as making illustrations, even black and white ones, would take forever. No no, she said, not finished illustrations, just little sketches. Quick little sketches to go along with the story.

What a concept.

Surprisingly, it only takes about a half hour to do five or six - plenty for the usual length of my stories. They're very basic, very loose. But they surprise me every time. Every time, I say, "Wow, I *could* draw that." Drawing a figure - or two - in a certain pose or scene, or drawing an environment in perspective, or an object... things I would never do otherwise, but pop out of the writing for me to draw. I even did a friend's story, just for fun. And sure they are just notations - honestly, they're less than thumbnails - but if I really wanted to, any of them could be developed into a full illustration. And that's what being an illustrator is all about, isn't it?

And now I can't post a story without including some tiny sketchez.

Off We Go

2011-01-20T07:19:00.000-08:00

Now that the website is finally done (check out the fancy new dekraus.com!) I've got about 10 days left to pursue... other things. Other things have ended up being some commissioned work (which is awesome) and some fix-my-computer work (which I don't mind!) along with a few other things on the side.

One of the commissions was actually started back before the holidays, of a World of Warcraft character. I'm always happy when these pop up because that's mostly what I draw myself on my own time, so I'm pretty familiar. This fellow gave me a unique look to work with, which I really enjoyed, especially all the detailing (like all that hair!) This was also the first time I used the DAZ 3D studio for my reference. I ended up changing his right arm from the model's, but having the general pose and lighting was super-useful.

The other commission is actually *gasp* aviation art, which I haven't done in a long time. I've been gleefully going through references for Huey helicopters for the past three or four days, figuring out the proper variant and markings and doo-dads on the sides. I'd forgotten how much fun that is. It's going to be a large charcoal, too, which I'm also excited about. Charcoal has recently become a favorite medium of mine, but I've never done anything like aircraft with it. Very exciting!

Here is a little study I did yesterday while "getting to know" the Huey. It's wonky in a lot of ways because I was trying to turn a UH-1H into a UH-1E. DON'T GET ME STARTED!

I've also continued doing my drawing exercises, though I haven't been as steady with them as I would like. I've especially slacked off on the painting ones, due in part to some frustration with Painter. When I finally find a brush I like using cheese will fall from the sky and everyone will win a million dollars. Really.

But here's a lovely sketch of Julianne Moore, just because.

I know, kind of doesn't look like her. Oh well. That's what sketches are for.

Website Whoas

2011-01-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

I wish I had some art to show this week, but unfortunately 80% of my time has gone INTO THE WEBSITE.

I tend to do this - instead of just adding a few more pictures to my website, I decide to rewrite the whole thing. This year, I'm adding some Flash galleries, and I figured out how to do a php contact form. I've never worked with Flash or php before. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm not a web designer. Let's make that clear. I wouldn't even say I dabble in web design, or that I particularly enjoy it. It's just been a necessity for the past 10 years. When I first started showing my work online, there was no DeviantArt or the many other gallery sites - at least not that I could find. Everyone had a Geocities site. I got myself one and an "HTML for Dummies" book and went at it.

My first site was hand-coded in a text-based HTML editor. It didn't take long to memorize how to format tables and all the "a href=" "" and so forth. But that wasn't enough!! By then I was getting the hang of Photoshop, and soon started to make Photoshop-based sites with slices and rollovers, figuring it out by trial and error and whatever tutorials I could find.

Sometime in the past 6 years or so, I did take a web design class or two, and ended up with Adobe Dreamweaver. Having such an advanced site builder/editor was a miraculous advancement. I could build and modify and maintain sites so much easier - I even made a couple for some other people! And for the most part, the little things I knew how to do or could figure out were enough. But never for my own site!

One of the big questions is always, "How do I display images online in a way convenient and interesting to viewers?" You have to think about loading times, and thumbnails, and galleries and navigation. How many images to show and how many to leave out, how to display them, how to protect them, so on and so forth. I've always wanted to use Flash galleries, and I've had Adobe Flash for some time, but no idea how to use it. This year, I found some fantastic tutorials and tackled it.

I just spent the last hour and a half trying to add a tiny preloader to my first gallery (which took me two hours to build) and so far failing. It's been like this every day. Two steps forward, one and a half back, incredibly slow. The payoff is that it's a thing I toss up on the Internet and can leave alone for a year. But these weeks putting it together... AUGH.

The website though... beyond this blog, beyond my DA account, beyond my online AAU portfolio - the website is the home of my artwork online. It has to speak for my work, not just where it is and what it is, but where I want it to be and how I want others to interpret my professionalism most of all. If I will spend hours and hours polishing a website to the best of my ability, having no clue whatsoever what I'm doing... imagine what I'll do with a piece of artwork.

Then I'll have to rebuild a gallery to contain it. =P

Getting Down to Business

2011-01-06T06:55:00.000-08:00

This year, I'm trying something new.

One of the interesting things about being self-employed (as well as being an online student) is handling your schedule. I've had people say to me, "I'd never have the self-discipline!" and I also know there's just as many envying the fact I can (or could!) pretty much get up whenever I want to and never be held to a work schedule set by someone else. One of my good friends is a retail manager who sometimes has to get up at 5AM and be stuck at his store for the next 12 hours. I also think of my mother, who got up at 6AM to go to her classroom until 4PM every single weekday from September until June. That kind of set schedule and routine is incredibly intimidating to me, so hats off to everyone who does the 9-5 thing!

That said, there's also something really important about that kind of schedule, and it's not just the assured work-time. That's the obvious part - that here you've got time set aside to *work*. The less obvious part is that scheduled work days also give a person scheduled time *off*. Sure there are sometimes extra things to bring home now and then, but a lot of folks when they leave work, they leave work.

Working for yourself, you never leave work. It's always there. Prodding you. Poking you. Telling you you'd better look at this or do that. Maybe it comes up in the morning; sometimes it comes up at night. Days set aside to be specifically taken "off" end up with this background static of stress because of all the little work things buzzing at you to be done. Sometimes there just are no days off, and it goes on and on and gets more and more stressful and really unpleasant overall.

So before New Year's - actually, on New Year's eve - I had a long long talk with my buddy the retail manager. I have been worn out, stressed out, not getting enough done and not getting good rest, and wanted to change. He explained to me the *reward* of keeping to a schedule - how if you work 6 hours or whatever, you can then walk away and *reward* yourself with absolutely free relaxation time. That sounded awfully good to me, since because most of my efforts go into schoolwork, I see very little reward from it all (A's are nice and all, but they can't pay for a movie!) So together we worked out a viable schedule which *gasp* included me getting up at a respectable hour, doing nothing but *work* (no breaks for Cheezburger sites!!), taking a lunch break, working some more, then having the evening off.

The evenings are the important bits. During the semester I'd often be working very hard until 9 or 9:30, then it would take me forever to wind down to be able to sleep, then I'd be tired the next day.

So I installed a site-blocker addon for Firefox, made up some schedule spreadsheets and printed them up, and set my alarm for 7:40. This week has been fantastic so far.

I've scheduled two hours a day for drawing exercises. Simple things like drawing a bunch of hands....

Or doing a quick master copy...

Or just experimenting with Painter and Photoshop (that's scheduled for this afternoon!)

In between those two exercise hours I have "project time" - which could be anything. This week it's updating and redesigning my website, dekraus.com. I've learned some Flash to build some custom galleries, and will hopefully get it up and running by next week.

Tuesday is a day off, since that's grocery day! I also took Sunday off, since my mom and I often have brunch that day. On Tuesday I just relaxed, played games, did some chores, but then in the evening I ended up drawing just for my own pleasure, a little sketch of my WoW goblin, Elli:

I don't know how often I've *wanted* to do little sketches like that but never had the time, because there was always work to do. Drawing for fun on my days off?? What a concept!

So my New Year's resolution is to stick to this schedule. I'm really curious how it will work for school, and really hopeful it will help prevent some of the exhausting 12-hour painting marathons I had last semester. At very least I feel like I'm really working, and not just *trying* to work, which is a subtle thing but very good for my whole mentality.

The other good thing is that I've got in the schedule to update this blog once a week. No more months between updates! I promise!

Looking... Sideways

2010-12-28T15:36:00.000-08:00

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

At the end of the year, "looking ahead" and "looking behind" seem to be the things to do. I'm taking a more conservative approach this year and looking sideways, like in my self-portrait up there, which was part of my Intermediate Figure Drawing final. Sometimes it's not about what you did last year or what you plan to do in the coming year, but more about how your current state might take you unexpected places. I've found that it's nearly impossible, at least when the semester is in full swing, to get anything I've planned to do done, hence why I'm not going to make any concrete predictions for the coming new year. I'd much rather take a few sidelong glances and see what's been happening and where it all might be leading.

What's special about the artwork I'm including in this entry is that all of them pulled me towards different places. I'm used to doing "good" drawings or paintings, but I'm not used to surprising myself creatively. As I've said before, I'm not always the most creative artist, because I tend to concentrate so much on realism and likeness that I don't bother with it. The following assignments forced me to take the time to be creative. And they ended up pulling me off sideways, taking me to places I hadn't expected to go.

The above charcoal drawing I call, "Bigger than I Am". It came about during the composition module of my intermediate figure drawing course, during which we were supposed to use light and shadow to design a figurative composition. Usually for figure drawing classes I just take a photo and draw it and not worry about composition. For this one, I ended up taking about 20 photos of myself in my exercise clothes lit by a clip-on lamp at about knee level. But when I got to drawing it, it started to mean something. Maybe something bigger than I am. It was a breakthrough for me in the application of the figure.

What that did for figures, the above gouache painting from Color & Design, our second big project, did for color. Before this painting, I'd always painted colors as I saw them. This time, I had a black and white printout of my composition and a limited palette of six colors. I never would have painted a blue-green rock or given the sea a touch of violet. But when I went ahead and did it, it *worked*. Granted, the above image was later tweaked - her hair is too orange, the shirt too purple, the skin too warm - and I'll upload a new version once I get it back from the school. But the thing was, I found out I didn't need to copy colors anymore - that I could make choices based on the entire mood I wanted to convey, use colors to set the scene, and still pull it all together and make it believable. Another breakthrough.

A bit later in Intermediate Figure Drawing, we were given a photo of a model and told to be creative with it. Now, I'd struggled some in the "exaggeration" model - I don't like to exaggerate or stylize if I don't have to. REAL REAL REAL!!! LIKENESS!! I admit to being a little caught up. So I paced around quite a bit with this one, staring at this guy curled up on a podium. What came across to me was this mood carried across in his posture, and the feathers came from there. I call it "The Shame of Flight." Every now and then a gift feels like a burden, doesn't it?

I've always thought that exaggeration or stylization would turn my figures into cartoons. But it could turn them into something else, perhaps not real, but just *as* real as I'm used to. That was another breakthrough, learning to use the figure to pull something absolutely unreal out of the ether and make it appear real.

This last one is the second half of my Intermediate Figure Drawing final. I'm honestly not sure if my figure drawing has improved that much from Spring semester, but what I do with it has certainly been freed up a lot. I think it helped to have a more open-minded, easy-going instructor who encouraged what I did right and graciously nitpicked what I did wrong (i.e. he told me the strings on the head and upraised arm should be taut - oh, I know, I know!) I mean, it's great to be able to draw figures, but even more inspiring to be able to DO something with them. And the more I draw them, the more I remember about certain bones and muscles, the landscape of the body, so it becomes easier and easier to do it every time, and easier and easier to apply those things to more creative pursuits. I still feel it's absolutely necessary to take some kind of figurative course every semester (I have anatomy coming up in the spring) but at the same time, the further I go the more confident I get.

This last thing I'm putting up here is my final project for Color & Design, my mandala. Being a bit of a Buddhist myself, when I found out we were doing mandalas as the final project I was all sorts of enthusiastic and interested, as I've actually thought of making them in the past. When we got to the actual project though, for some reason my mind went to trees. Maybe because it was late fall and they were all going to sleep; maybe because I have this weird obsession with preserving them... maybe simply because natural elements fall into place so nicely in a design. Anyway, I ended up with this Ode to Trees, with the old beech that grew on my grandparent's land featured in the center. It fell to pieces years ago after a heavy ice-storm and I've always wanted to do a piece of artwork for it. So, here we are.

I really don't know what to say about this piece. I'm posting it because I did a split-complementary color scheme right, about the most complex application of color we studied. I'm posting it because I created a balanced and interesting design with a clear focus point. I'm posting it because the thumbnails, lineart, 6" value rough, three 6" color roughs and the 10" final took more hours of tedious painting than I can calculate. I'm posting it because I did it and it was deemed successful.

It's so far off to the side of any work I'd planned to do this year, and any work I can imagine doing next year, but I learned a whole lot in doing it, which is what makes it so worthwhile. This past year has been tremendously frustrating in a lot of ways, as most all of my time gets sucked into doing the schoolwork above. I keep my fingers crossed for an eventual payoff in the future, but for the time-being, sideways we go, learning all the while.

By the way, I've got prints available of most of the above pieces at both Imagekind (fine fancy prints) and DeviantArt (less expensive prints and mugs and stuff), if anyone is interested!

Random Weird Things

2010-11-10T17:40:00.000-08:00

I've been owing this blog a post for a while. For a couple weeks my Color & Design class was just murder, and then I had to... recover. There was one Monday in there that I did more in one day than I thought was ever humanly possible to do. The good thing about that was discovering I could do a whole lot more in a day if I really, really had to.

This was the big project:

I lovingly refer to it as "Blood and Absinthe." It's Rachel Weisz looking a little scary. Or a WoW-player's character Heulwen, as she described "Getting out of the shower very angry." Or something like that. I was going to make a long post describing just how this was painted, but it's really complicated and I'm not sure how much sense my explanation would make. It is painted, by hand, with gouache - red, green, white and black, mixed together to make 9 different colors. Well, plus the reds in the dagger. It measures about 7.5" x 10".

This is the outline which I painted using a combination of carefully cut frisket and painfully intricate brushwork:

As one of my classmates described it, it was "paint by number on crack."

And right now we're starting a second big design project that's just like it, except MORE COLORS. Huzzah. I *will* survive this class. I will.

Partly because we also get to paint fun little things like this:

PURPLE CATOCTOPUS WITH A FISH YESSSSSS.

The same week I was painting the final for Blood & Absinthe, we also had huge anatomical drawings due for my figure drawing class. Now, I love anatomical drawings, I really do. I love the detail and complexity and seeing everything underneath. But the last thing I needed that week were detailed anatomical drawings!! Even if they could be done very large and in charcoal. This was the week before Halloween, too, and it was just so creepy and appropriate. By the time I was doing these torsos, I was near crazy. I have a few memories of working on artwork - I don't know what makes some moments stand out - but working on these torsos while *exhausted* the night they were due, getting charcoal everywhere and living off the tunes Pandora kept pumping out (These were drawn to Lady Gaga songs, lol) will not leave my memory any time soon.

Creeeepy....

Since that midterm hump things have calmed down a lot. Doing things like hands and feet in figure drawing, and a lot of fascinating *content* in Color & Design that takes a lot to sink in. It all makes sense (light temperature affecting local color, atmospheric perspective in color, etc.) but it's pretty big concepts. The next project will be our second to last big one, then - hard to believe - we'll start working on our final project. I think as soon as next week we'll be working up ideas. Wow, time flies.

I'm really looking forward to the Winter break to do some things to apply all this new stuff. =)

I've started a morning digital painting exercise, too, that I'll post about as soon as I've got a few studies to show for it. It's so difficult to find time to paint on my own, I decided I should just do it as soon as I get up, and make it an exercise like taking a jog or something. Some ideas worked out and so far it's been lots of fun, even though I lost one yesterday due to static-shocking my computer. =O

I'll show them off soon though! Until then!

On Portraiture

2010-10-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

Just a few quick things this week. I've had a bear of an assignment in my Color & Design class - two days straight of working bent over the drawing board with a tiny brush for 6-8 hours at a go. I am determined to get it right, but WOW has it been exhausting. Aside from all that though (the end result will be posted next week!) we were doing our portraiture module in intermediate figure drawing, which gave me the opportunity to do a nice portrait, something that doesn't come up all the time.

I got out the good charcoal paper for the assignment before I ever found my reference. There's something about portraiture that's just... *special*. It's an honor to put a person's likeness to paper. I don't get into all the stuff about "transferring the soul of the subject" or anything - I just want a good likeness, and a nice work of art. At the same time, it is intensely personal. I've been drawing portraits a long time. Over 15 years ago I started seriously trying to capture realism and likeness and personality in my drawings of faces, and I copied lots and lots of photos. But there's a big difference between copying a photo and creating a piece of art from the act of doing so.

You can't just draw an object when you're doing a portrait. I mean, every little thing an artist draws or paints is, essentially, breaking down the subject into shapes and lines and values and colors. It's very scientific and very impersonal. That's why our figure drawings aren't titillating unless we mean them to be. The figure is just another collection of lines and shapes and values. There's no difference between a breast and a coffee mug. And especially working academically, there's no deeper feeling involved outside of wanting it to look right, and the thrill of getting it to look right, whatever it is.

Again, I'm speaking only for myself. I'm sure other more passionate and expressive artists might disagree with me. But expressive art is a whole different subject.

But portraiture. Portraiture *has* to be personal. A model goes up on a platform, disrobes, and says "Draw this!" That's what they're there for. But a PORTRAIT. How often do you just go up to someone and touch their face? It's an incredibly intimate gesture. So much of creating art is touching, though transferred from the eye to the hand. So when approaching a portrait, I always come in humbled. Humbled that I would be allowed this intimacy and trust. It doesn't matter if the subject is some celebrity in a press photo or someone's photographs of their family or from life. A portrait is something special.

This week, I was looking for references for my Color & Design project when a photo of Rachel Weisz jumped out at me for the portrait assignment. It was very simple, very sedate, a profile with a lot of black and white contrast. This feather in her hat had a lovely way of curving down to match up with the curve of her jawline. I said, that's the one, that's the ref for this week's portrait. So I spent quite a few hours with Rachel, muttering apologies about how big I'd often mistakenly draw her nose, before finally ending up with a lovely portrait.

It was just SO PLEASANT to spend time doing such a thing this week. I have to draw arms and torsos next. Not quite so special.

While on the subject of portraiture, a couple months ago I was asked to do a caricature of the pastor of my mom's church, First Presbyterian Church of Clarks Summit (shameless plug since I'm not a member, but really, it's a great place up there!) It was for a big celebration event for some of major milestones, and the caricature was to be one of the presented gifts. Oh boy. Well, I've never done a caricature. I've always thought it's a cool thing, especially when you see folks set up on sidewalks and such doing them in 10 minutes for $20 or whatever. But I also think it's related to that gift cartoonists have, of being able to capture expression and likeness in a minimum amount of lines. I don't have that gift of efficiency, unfortunately. I had to draw a portrait, then work backwards to simplicity.

I didn't, of course, start with a portrait like the one above. Heaven's no - I would have presented that instead of the caricature if I did! I did do several quick sketches though, like any I would do, trying to learn the facial features and so forth and add them to the personality I'm familiar with. Then came the choices - what to accentuate? What to minimize? How to make the design work around it? I was very glad to be taking a design course right now, as I think it helped I had some of those ideas in mind. Anyway, I put everything together and drew it in pen and marker (terrifying unerasable media!) on layout bond paper, with a bit of graphite for shading. I crossed my fingers and handed it over, hoping it would be well-received.

Sadly, I only have one kind of shoddy picture of it, since I forgot to take one apparently before I framed it and handed it over.

I was really, really surprised by how many congregation members came up to me after the event and told me how well it captured their pastor. I was also really, really relieved! Because it wasn't just a picture. Even though it was a caricature, it was still a portrait, and I was still humbled and honored to draw it.

Portraits are just special like that.

So Much!

2010-10-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

Ah, the semester is in full swing, and it's amazing how intense and time-consuming schoolwork can be. Both classes are going well though. I'm learning tons in Color & Design and getting a lot of good practice in Intermediate Figure Drawing. Both classes are stretching me quite a bit, which is a good thing. Color & Design is like constant flashes of insight and wonder. I've taken some color theory in the past, but nothing like this. There is not enough time to experiment and practice the way I want to.

Look, I made a color wheel!

The trick is, that whole wheel was mixed from just six different tubes of paint (the swatches with dots over them). Now we all know that yellow and blue make green, but it's very different to gradually mix blue into yellow and "discover" greens, one at a time. It's almost like learning words, seeing how letters fit together to create a pattern that means something. Except it's colors fitting together to create a recognizable hue. And then you add to that black and white and mixing complements, etc. and it's all really very exciting.

Plus you get to do nice things like this monochromatic portrait. I used the same reference a while back in this blog for some painting, but I sure like it better like this, in lovely blue-violets and lilac:

So next up we'll be combining hues and values and so forth to do a portrait design, and I'm very excited about it. I've never had such a handle on color before - it's totally not the same as just matching what you see. There's so much more. It's hard to put into words.

And now to flood you all with tons of naked people!

The week before last we started doing full-value drawings like the one above, and I felt very confident about it. We also did this value portrait, which was great for forcing oneself to get a lot of charcoal on the page (and also great fun for using the kneaded erasure to lift it out again):

I think it was the week before that we copied a photo of this statue, too, which was also very good practice at shading and values, though the torso nearly drove me crazy:

So getting high marks on those, I was feeling pretty confident in my drawing skills and my charcoal technique. I also took photos as I went along for one of the exercises, so I have this nice step-by-step to share with you!

Step 1:

This is the hardest part, doing the actual drawing, putting a figure on a blank page. You can see a lot of my measurements and plumb lines here, and some corrections. I work in vine for this stage so I can brush it off easily, and try to use as many straight lines as possible.

Step 2:

Here I've outlined the drawing in charcoal pencil, and put in the basic shadow-shapes.

Step 3:

I then use a tissue to smear the charcoal all over the paper. Once everything is a gray mess, I pick out the highlights again with a kneaded erasure.

Step 4:

Here we go back in with the charcoal and work on the shadows. This step takes a very, very long time, as I go over everything, adding darks and smoothing them into midtones, then picking out the highlights again.

And here is the finished drawing:

Now that I have a handle on that technique, which seems to work every time (at least that's what the grades show!) I've started to experiment more with gesture and texture and more expressiveness. I hope it won't end up a detriment, as I haven't gotten grades back yet this week! But here are two more, with, I hope, a little added "oomph":

That second one, I'm really proud of. It seems to me to be more than just a figure drawing exercise, that it captures some moment or some emotion. Not bad for a drawing off a photo of a model!

So there's the past few weeks, and hopefully I won't let so much time pass before the next post here! There's some pretty exciting fun stuff ahead, so I'll try to keep track of it and post when I can!

Second Week In

2010-09-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

Oh, baby! A blog entry before the middle of the semester? Unheard of!

Up above there, you can see Koby, a little 12"x12" oil painting I did for some family friends. He's the first oil portrait I've done in about... 6 years. My technique was rusty, but my heart was in the right place. I meant to scan it before I gave it away, but I didn't, so one poor photo will have to do. As much as I fell back on some of my old habits (like never putting more than a millimeter of paint on the canvas if I can help it) I did try some new things as far as coloring and composition. The folks I gave it to were very happy with it at least, and I very much enjoyed doing it. I did put my palette away again last night, but I almost left it out. I will be doing more oil painting soon.

Speaking of color and composition, that's the focus of one of my classes this semester, Color & Design. I was lucky enough to get my instructor from Analysis of Form last Fall, so I'm super happy about that and so far the class has gone well. It's a very different, very interesting class. I took about a year of graphic design classes before starting Illustration at AAU, so I felt I was at least aware of the elements of design. I never got such practice with them, though, or such hands-on, crafty assignments. Everything gets painted or rendered by hand, with a lot of mixing and judging value. Our second assignment consisted of creating an interesting design and then coloring it in with 9 different shades of black pencil. Extremely tedious. Then we cut out these things and past them on pages to make a neat little Color & Design book.

It's been a lot of work, especially with the tedious crafting of everything, but at the same time a very good class. I've always felt very weak in my compositional skills so I hope this helps. I'll just have to start trying to *make* compositions instead of just drawing a subject, and see.

The second class is Intermediate Figure Drawing. Coming out of the direct-drawing Clothed Figure Drawing class from this summer, slowing down and starting over with gestures almost seems too easy. In the first week we did 30 various 2-3 minute gestures. Though there's always room for more progress and refinement, I'm beginning to feel like I've got the basics down.

I want to make my gestures *prettier* and more artistic, as far as line weight and such goes. Once the proportions are there and the movement and pose, that's really what makes a gesture stand out. After the 30 we did for assignments, the instructor said, "Now do 50 more for fun!" I need to start taking a half hour out of every day and just banging them out, as many as I can in that time, and get a real method and technique down.

Drawing genuine people is probably more important to me than anything else. People tell stories just by *being*. To be able to portray a character visually opens up so many opportunities for illustration, even if there is nothing else going on in the picture. And if there is more going on, more composition, more environment, props, storytelling, etc. the genuine, real person just tells the story better.

So I strive for that with every figure drawing I do. This guy below came out as one of the best I've done in a long time. I'm not particularly fond of the model, but we had to use him, so I did the best with what I had. It's one of the first figure drawings where using lines of rhythm really came through to me. I had these great big bows drawn on the paper before I ever started his body and limbs, and they somehow helped guide the pose. I've been taught about rhythm several times, but this was the first time it fell into place. Hopefully composition will click the same way sometime soon!

In the meantime, I have a World of Warcraft project from last summer that I'm intent on finishing soon, among other things, and then I'm going to hunker down and start doing character sketches for serious. I have not given up on my list of things from the summer! In fact, before I put the palette and oil easel away, I was thinking of doing a cat face next, and all that blue in Koby's painting reminded me I want to do that Yelena Isinbayeva piece. I have not given up on them!!

Scheduling my time remains as difficult as always. I am taking Sundays OFF work and schoolwork. Hence the blog post. I might even keep up with them!

Then Summer Did Me In

2010-08-20T07:05:00.000-07:00

So. It's August 20th, and summer is almost at an end. It's amazing how fast it goes, and how things pop up to get in the way of plans. For me, it was summer semester classes with AAU - taking both Perspective and Clothed Figure Drawing online.

One of the big things about taking classes online is scheduling. Because you're not actually *going* to class and sitting there for an hour or two doing work, you have to schedule that time in yourself. The online classes make it somewhat easy by giving a nice 15-week outline, with a module full of content and assignments for each week. In a normal semester, it's not difficult to schedule in what day to read the material, what day to do the exercises, what day to watch the videos, what day(s) to work on assignments, etc. There are 7 days in a week, after all. In the summer semester though, each module only spans 3.5 days. With two classes, one of them involving projects that take a minimum of 10-20 hours, this becomes a little more stressful.

Okay, it was very stressful. It took up all my time. Pretty much every day between June 21st and August 11th, I was working on schoolwork. I did take a day off for my birthday. And the classes were extremely worthwhile and really overall wonderful. But wow, was it intense and stressful.

The drawing at the top is from my clothed figure drawing class, and I'll get to that in a moment. I want to talk about Perspective first. I've taken perspective classes before and had it covered in other classes, so I knew the gist of it, of one-point, two-point, three-point, atmospheric, etc. I could draw cubes in space. The beauty of this class was the depth and application of those familiar theories. For one thing, on almost every project, we applied light and shadow in perspective. For another, we were able to choose our own subject matter. This made me challenge myself much more than any "draw seven boxes" assignment ever could.

I wanted to draw my WoW characters and stories, mostly. It was great to be able to use them and get some fan art out of it. The first big assignment using isometric perspective (which I'd never used before!) I got to recreate the residence of my blood elf. We've been dreaming up this living space in game for three years now. Finally, we could *see* it.

Most of the work in this class was drawn in pencil, then inked with Micron pens and shaded with Prismacolor markers in a range of cool gray. I quickly wore out my markers, mostly because I was terrible with them. I fell in love with the Micron pens though, which brought out some lovely linework I had never known I could do. I've always been one to fully render, but using the pens finally allowed me to just work in line, and be more expressive in line, and free myself from shading for a while.

I also found myself able to fully realize a space, which for someone who has always been a "I'll draw the subject and forget about the background" person, was really amazing. Even in atmospheric perspective, not having to worry about vanishing points and such, I found myself pushing to go back farther and farther, and nearer and nearer. The drawing isn't anything to write home about, but the creation of space was liberating to me.

And to be able to show characters interacting within an environment was even better. To create a *scene*. Yes, it took a lot of work. The image below was built up over the course of four drawings, done on top of each other on tracing paper, slowly refining everything while being sure the perspective was correct. Then of course there were the 6-8 lighting thumbnails. Well worth it in the end.

I got to have some fun with things, too. It had been suggested that I draw Tinkertown, the gnome refuge in Ironforge, and some other WoW players had thrown out some ideas. So for the two-point vertical project I drew up some of their crazy, crowded tenements. Again, it took a lot of time. I think overall just the inking on this one took 6 hours. But I'd never drawn anything like it before. I never imagined I could.

Last but not least, our final big project was to create a storyboard or comic. I'm not a big fan of comics. I appreciate the artwork, but I have trouble reading them - there's some disconnect in my brain between looking at pictures and reading words: I want to do one or the other, not both at the same time. But I found more value in it while creating my own comic, and found it really terribly thrilling to create all these images that sequentially told a story. I worked like crazy on this, drawing as fast as I possibly could to get it all down, and I can't imagine now the kind of mad skills some comic artists have to spew out this stuff with deadlines. It really does almost demand that you have a kind of template for bodies and faces and such. Me, I'd rather spend the 30 hours on one well-rendered scene. These two pages were utterly exhausting!

That last project though, drawing all those people as quickly as I could with no time for references, really benefited from my clothed figure drawing class. I want to, from here on out, try to take a figure drawing class each semester, just to keep developing that kind of instinctive feel for the human figure, so I can draw it quickly and easily when I need to.

The clothed figure drawing class was a bit revolutionary for me, because it focused on direct drawing. I have always leaned on sketching basic structure first - the little stick man, or mannequin figure, to make sure my proportions and gesture is correct before I begin detailing the figure I'm drawing. This class threw that out the window and just said, "DRAW THAT PERSON." Start at the head and work down - or at the feet and work up if it suits you. Just draw. Just draw that person immediately and as quickly as you can.

For several weeks I boggled at this and struggled, especially with the timer ticking away beside me. Then it began to click, and I began to apply all the relationship lines and plumb lines and gestures and proportions in my head as I drew. And I found out I could JUST DRAW, which was an amazing boost to my confidence.

Most of the work in the class was done with charcoal on newsprint, so I really have very little to show. Most of the drawings were, in essence, just large, quick sketches. After Spring semester and the long, tedious figure drawing I'd done, of beautiful, fully-rendered bodies, I was a little disappointed not to have anything solid and developed to show. Near the end of the class I started drawing on layout bond again, just to have a few "finished" pieces to show from the class.

Composition still gets me, as in the above work. The drawing is pretty good and pretty finished, but the composition is kind of sucky and it was done for the module on composition. I'm hoping that the "design" part of Color & Design that I'm taking in the fall will help with that.

On the other hand, I'm very happy with where my figure drawing is now. For the most part we drew from photos, with some drawing-from-life thrown in, but I still tried to challenge myself when working from photos. The above drawing was done from two separate photos that I wanted to bring together into a believable scene. The girl with the sword was drawn from her head to her feet, then to get the proportions and relationships correct, I drew the girl with the staff from the feet up. I honestly didn't know I could do such a thing and get a decent drawing from it!

Last but not least is my final from clothed figure drawing, using myself and my mom as models. She posed a lot for me during the class, so I thought I owed her some payback, in the form of a nice Rockwellian image of me presenting that long-awaited diploma. OH is she surprised! Well, we tried. It's actually very difficult to pose just right, and a lot of time in this class involved taking reference pics. So, two months of intensive work for a new understanding of space, a huge amount of fresh confidence in drawing, and a whole new bucket of tools. It almost drove me crazy, but was well worthwhile!

In the fall, I have intermediate figure drawing and Color & Design to look forward to. I'm really hoping that those two classes help me polish up a lot of my weaker points, like composition, natural, interactive and intuitive poses for figures, and of course ADDING COLOR. By spring of next year I'll officially be a Junior, so things should really start hopping.

In the meantime, I still want to do all the things I mentioned in my last post. I still want to do some oil paintings, some cat faces, and yes, Yelena jumping to hang over my couch. I have a baby portrait oil painting that is first on the list, however, but I'm going to try to keep drawing and sketching, especially using the Micron pens with linework. I'd very much like to get a nice, quick, "easy" way to sketch characters together in order to offer some low-cost commissions. It's taken a while, but I'm finally beginning to be able to pare down my tedious, time-consuming over-rendering habits.

Might just make an artist out of me yet. =P

Best Intentions

2010-06-02T10:15:00.001-07:00

It tends to be a lot more likely I get things done when I commit them to writing, so here I am to describe what I hope to be producing in the next month or two. I've sort of been letting these ideas evolve in the past week while I did a lot of cleaning/organizing (which I'm still not done with) but I'm getting to have time to start working on them seriously. In the meantime I've been doing a lot of experimental practice sketching, mostly just seeing what I've learned that has stuck and what I need to work on, and what the most useful techniques are. It's funny how you sort of have to "compile" the skills after the fact, and see how they fit into your own processes and techniques.

Anyway, the Summer Art List:

The Big Project: I've used photos of amazing and stunning Russian pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva for reference for one of my WoW characters for a while, which always makes me feel a bit guilty. So in return, I'd like to do a painting of HER, doing what she does best, magically leaping very high. I have in my closet a 20"x48" canvas that's been sitting there a long time, and I think it would be awesome to do a monochromatic value painting of her, in a good deep blue, with maybe a few red highlights. I've started doing some preliminary sketches off photos, but it's going to take a while to get together the right pose, lighting, and background. I'll probably be doing a charcoal or two, maybe even one full-size, before I start to paint. I don't expect to get it done before maybe August.
Cat Faces: I love painting cats. I've mostly done it in Photoshop and Painter, but I just bought two 8"x"8 gallery-wrapped canvases and I'd like to try it in oils. I also want to focus in and do *just* the face, on that square format. It's a little like "Green Eyes" below, but I want to zoom in even more, so it's just the cat face.

I would love to do more cat commissions, but I think what scares people away is the digital format I've been working in, and also all the fiddling with different reference photos and getting poses right and so forth. If I can just work from one good photo and make a unique little oil painting, it might be something people would more likely go for. I'm going to be doing two of our dearly-departed kitties for the two canvases I have: Peter, who was a silver tiger and had a gorgeous striped face with a ruddy nose, and Maggi, my mother's adorable, round-eyed tortie-and-white. Not only will they be nice samples, but I will certainly find a good place for them to hang in the house, and when I can manage it I will do Bruce (above) to match.
Last but not least is a little experimental project I want to do, surrounding a lot of nature photos I've taken and a batch of little 5"x7" canvas boards I recently bought. After finally getting the gist of what Impressionism is all about in my last Art History class, I want to try to loosen up and do some painterly, impressionistic paintings of ... natural things. I was going to devote myself to trees, but I might just pick out a number of interesting photos and paint from each one, and see what happens. At very least I'll hopefully make some things along the lines of "Rocks, Wind and Trees" but more focused and more a snapshot than a landscape like that.

So those are the personal plans - I also have a logo I'm currently working on and a big drawing I have to do of my WoW raid group for our get-together in August. My intersession course started yesterday and WOW is it compacted. 15 weekly modules over the course of 18 days, so generally one module is gone through a day. I was hoping it would be something I could do quickly each morning, but these past two days it's taken me two hours to get through all the material and assignments!

Anyway, there are my plans! I will complete them! And I will make updates along the way!

At Last!

2010-05-25T12:19:00.000-07:00

Warning! This post contains possibly NSFW nude figure drawings! Proceed at your own risk!

Spring semester at the Academy of Art University ended on the 22nd. I handed in my last figure drawing and my sculpted clay portrait head, made sure everything was tied up neatly for my Art History classes, Facebook'ed a few new friends and closed the sessions up for good. One of the little cons about online classes is that once they're gone they're gone - no textbooks or handouts you can keep, unless you copied and downloaded quite a bit as you went. It's just all *poof* gone, along with all the names and faces and comments and discussions along the way.

The longer I'm at AAU the more I regret that, especially in regards to the module content. I did save a lot of the models from the figure drawing class, as they'll be excellent to practice from again and again.

The gist of it, of course, is always, "What did you learn?" Hence the reason why I'm taking classes anyway. The biggest thing I learned in Figure Drawing was this: Get it right. Get it right at the beginning, at the start, and don't move on until you know it's right.

That guy above took a long time to get right. And a lot of checking and correcting and fixing again, all in horribly scribbly vine charcoal before I ever went near the page with anything permanent. It's amazing though, how much you can depend on that scribbly mess of lines when you know they're right. Then you can just relax and just go over it and find the values and details and style the lines, etc.

The hardest part of a drawing is the first half hour.

In Figure Sculpting, it was all about what lies underneath.

I've drawn lots of skulls. I've drawn "planar heads". But I didn't *get* it until I sculpted them. I didn't get things like the ridge around the outside of the eye socket or how the cheekbone flows back to the ear. These are things you can *see* when you look at a face, but understanding what's underneath makes it so much easier to draw.

We did a lot of full-figure work, too, but I was just too clumsy with the clay to get as much out of it as far as learning underlying structure goes. I did get a much better sense of the hip mass and the chest mass and how they are connected, as well as some nifty things about shoulders (the egg-shape of the chest mass with shoulders then attached, instead of an upside-down triangle of chest mass with arms stuck on the top).

That kind of understanding helped a lot when drawing poses like this:

And this:

It's funny how you come to see the chest/ribcage area as kind of... not well-attached to the hips. But it allows for all kinds of tilting and rolling around and such, letting the abdomen be all springy and twisty in the middle. It's something I want to do a lot more practice with.

And then, of course, we have the back:

Which is still very complicated to me! Shoulder blades have lost some of their mystery though. Overall, both classes helped demystify the human figure for me quite a bit. I feel a lot more confident now, and know that if I'm careful and check over things and keep a lot of what I've learned in mind as I draw (and practice practice practice!) I'll be able to keep things together, and better yet, put together figures from various references and such for original poses.

Lastly, I had some huge revelations while taking my Art History through the 19th Century class. I've always been one of those academic naturalism snobs. There, I admit it. I was the person who thought Bouguereau was all that ever needed to be, utter perfection, and everyone should aspire to paint like that. Maybe it was seeing the whole progress of art from the Renaissance to Impressionism, or maybe it was learning how varied things really were, but I really found my mind opened to different styles and techniques. I can't say I love *all* Impressionism now, but I do love a lot of the Realism painters and some that came after, and I have a greater appreciation for texture and color and painting light through color instead of value. I also have a greater appreciation for preserving line, right in contradiction with my new appreciation for more painterly brushstrokes. So I'm very curious what I'll do when I start painting again.

All I know is that I *might* allow myself not to labor over every brushmark and making sure every outline is totally rendered over!

Anyway, I wrote my final term paper on martyrdom and Goya and Ribera, and if anyone would like to read it, I have it online here. Don't steal it!!

Yesterday I bought a half dozen little 5"x7" canvasboards and two 8"x8" little gallery wrapped squares. I have a week off still before my intersession class starts (20th Century Art History) and still a dozen things on my to-do-before-then list, but I am absolutely certain I will get to painting SOON!

These Hands

2010-04-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

Often, it seems, people want to avoid drawing hands. Put them behind a leg, or in the grass, or behind a head, or wrapped in fabric - just somewhere, anywhere they don't have to be drawn. Hands are complicated. People have a torso and two legs and two arms and a head. A hand has an arm and a wrist and a palm and four fingers AND a thumb. Not to mention knuckles and fingernails and all those intricate wrinkles and veins and sometimes even fine little hairs.

Like portraits, hands are expressive entities within themselves. How often has a hand carried more gesture and meaning than a face? Second to eyes, they can be used to express so much... if they can be drawn well.

The two drawings above were done for my current figure drawing class. The first was from life, of my own left hand, which was an incredibly awkward way to draw. The second was drawn from a photograph of my hand, and having the photo-reference allowed me to comfortably work over it for a longer time. These were done with charcoal on layout bond, a paper I'm liking more and more the longer I use it.

The big thing is, no matter how much anatomy you go over or how deeply you understand the various tendons and bones of the hand, it's drawn like any other thing. The knowledge of anatomy helps guide your eyes around the various landmarks - we know how the thumb is kind of like a turkey leg, with that big meaty part in the palm, and we know basic arc of the knuckles from one finger to the next. But as the hand twists and turns and moves about, we're forced to sight and measure it like any other object. Thankfully, with all those flat planes and long structures, the hand gives itself over to measurement really rather well.

I took photos as I drew my third project for the week, which was to be two hands interacting. I had some fun getting a reference photo of my right hand clipping a clothespin onto my left, giving them some emotion and expression. Like God granting Adam the touch of life, but OW!!! I worked on 18"x24" layout bond with vine charcoal and soft charcoal pencils.

The first step, as always, is the straight-line block-in. This is the most difficult step of any drawing. This is the foundation. Every angle must be sighted and every length must be measured. I used the length of the clothespin to measure everything else. This was all done in vine, which brushes right off the layout bond like it never existed.

Once the basic vine drawing looks accurate and clearly defines the two hands, I got out my sharpened 6B charcoal pencil and went over the outlines, following some of the more subtle curves and details of the forms. I also blocked in the basic shading, very loosely.

Then I ruined it all with a tissue by smearing everything around.

Actually, this is very important when working with charcoal, as this is where we do two things: cover our mistakes, and build up a midtone. By wiping out all the prior work, we also wipe out the plumb lines and various other lines used to build the sketch, and we give the whole drawing a nice layer of light grey.

Time to outline and shade again! Mostly shading this time around, being a bit more careful and detailed in the shadow areas. These are going to be the deepest shadows, the ones that really bring out the forms.

Then we wipe it out AGAIN. Really?? What??? What did that charcoal ever do to you? Well, I want a good midtone. Midtones so often get overlooked, which causes things to look severely lit and lose a lot of "roundness." So I like a nice medium gray. Now the fun begins.

Dudley is already having a lot of fun, see? =D

With the kneaded erasure sculpted into a thin wedge, the light areas and highlights are picked out. Any area that is not *absolutely* white gets smeared with my finger again to tone it back. What we're doing here is letting our five values gradually build up and blend together without a whole lot of effort on our part. When the lighter tones are in, the forms and details really begin to pop out.

The last stage is the longest and most tedious, especially depending on how much time I have and what kind of mood I'm in. Going back with the soft charcoal pencil, the outlines are carefully reintroduced, the shadows are deepened, and the details are brought to life. The tissue and the erasure come back into play, and there's a lot of finger smearing. It's all just plain diligence and a good bit of luck as to how the charcoal will lay and how the drawing when come together.

About 3-4 hours after the sketch was starting, the drawing is all done. I've been going over the smeary background a bit with a shamois, but there's not too much that can be done about it. For an academic drawing, though, it kind of looks appropriate.

In the end, hands are no more a mystery than anything else; they just demand time and attention. And they're so worth it when they come out right, so expressive and such bearers of humanity. So now and then, it's good to lift them out of the grass, or put them out in front of the clothing. It'll be worth it. =)

Practicing the Masters

2010-04-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

When I was in 7th grade I took up the violin, followed by piano in 8th grade. For both instruments I took private lessons, and for both some of the first pieces I played were adaptations of works by Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Within a year, I was playing full compositions by these Classical master composers. It was expected. It was part of the learning process, to play these great works, even though I was just starting out.

Why is it then, after over fifteen years of working on my drawing skills, have I just now copied a Michelangelo?

It was also one of the most intimidating drawing exercises I have done.

It goes without saying that art education is fairly limited before one heads into art school (and even then it's iffy) but when I realized how long I had gone without even considering the idea of learning from the masters - and how intimidated I was by the thought of it - my jaw dropped. I have, in the past, done some oil copies of a few works, but never really with the intent to *learn*. When you're playing the violin and presented with a little ditty by Mozart, you don't learn it just to have a song to play; you learn it in order to play the violin better. Likewise, anyone with any interest in drawing should copy drawings by the old masters (or new masters, for that matter) not just to make a copy of a beautiful work, but to learn how to draw better.

What did I learn by making the copy of the Michelangelo above? I learned about the subtleties of anatomy that can't be learned by copying from the rigid diagrams of an anatomy book. I learned about the massive twisting gesture of the human torso that requires more "oomph" than it ever appears to. I learned how line can curve and strengthen and weaken and fade in order to describe a shape without outlining it. I learned how value can show depth and texture, the tilt of a head and even expression. And all of that built on the basics of capturing a pose through the usual block-in, measurement and sighting.

I could have been given a photo of a person in the same pose and never learned so much. I have been working from photos forever, and have ended up with very inexpressive lines and shading that is often too light and narrow in value. It's one thing to copy the subject of a photo; it's another to *capture* the subject, as the masters captured theirs. By copying their drawings we learn how they did it, even just a little, to add to our own bag of tricks.

The Michelangelo copy was an assignment in my current figure drawing class, and even though it seemed a bit out of place in the usual process of drawing from photos of live models, I found it immensely educational - as you can tell! It was followed the next week by the Raphael drawing below. By the time I had started the Raphael I had lost the sense of intimidation I had when faced with copying the Michelangelo; I felt like this was something I *should* be doing.

It's something everyone learning to draw should try from time to time, and definitely something that should be introduced in art classes and private lessons. Once again, it's all about breaking down the mystery surrounding art. It isn't magic. It's little different than any other creative skill. All it takes is practical experience and knowing how.

To Draw or Not to Draw

2010-03-18T13:50:00.001-07:00

The time change has killed me this year for some reason. I am super-sleepy once again today. But this little experiment has been sitting around a while, so I figured I'd better finish up and get it up.

One of the things I most admire about a lot of illustrators today is how they can start with a few bloblike areas of color, and gradually refine these areas into figures or faces or environments. As I keep trying to do 30-minute sketches, I admire this skill more and more. How great would it be to not have to do a sketch first? So I thought I would give it a try.

Today's model is the lovely Russian pole-vaulter Yelena Isenbeyeva. Long story. Lovely model, even for just a portrait. I'm posting the photo ref since for this it's really important to see where all I went wrong.

Last week I sat down and painted the following portrait outright. Just started painting with the photo ref open beside the canvas, no sketch first, just paint paint paint.

Uhhh, yeah. Ouch. You can tell what I thought of it by how I totally blew off everything surrounding the horribly badly proportioned face.

And yes, nose is always too big.

So I figured out that outright painting, for me, right now, would not work. I took some time (these were supposed to be 30-minute things again) and sketched from the same photo ref again, using my usual method for placing features, etc. This time we got...

Still not perfect, but BETTER. Definitely better, and definitely worth the time it took to do the drawing underneath. I didn't quite catch her likeness or expression, which I could see when I finished the sketch, but I went ahead and painted it anyway. I've finally gotten a handle on some brushes that work well with my old tablet on this computer, so I wanted to practice some with them.

Overall, a disappointing experiment, but one that has opened up a lot of other questions, such as what does it take to be able to paint outright? A better sense of proportions? Is there more drawing involved with the paint? Less guesswork than I was doing? Is there some way to take advantage of values and colors to help guide things?

More to learn, I guess. =) Always more to learn!

Monday School Stuffs

2010-03-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

So Monday is the day I have to hand in my weekly assignments for my classes, so I thought I'd share them here, too. I'm taking figure drawing and figure modeling this semester at AAU, and most people ask me "How do you do figure drawing online?" or "are you making pottery with all that clay?"

To answer the first question, we draw from photos of the same models presumably used for the onsite classes (since the instructor seems to recognize a few). I usually print the photos up as 8x10's and tape them next to my drawing board on my easel. I know, it's not as awesome as drawing from a live model. But it is better than what a previous online drawing class had us do, which was a full-size self-portrait, yes, in the nude. I can't quite express how uncomfortable drawing oneself in front of a mirror *naked* is. For eight hours. Yeah.

I'm quite happy drawing from the photos. I also have one of the Virtual Pose books/DVD's that have lots of Quicktime models that can be rotated 360-degrees, so that's nice. At any rate, I've been drawing lots of figures from pictures.

The figure modeling class is much the same except it's sculpting of course, with 50-lbs of clay. I've never worked with clay before and I probably wouldn't choose to. It's very educational though, and kind of fun and pleasant at times.

Anyway, this week is the week before midterm assignments are due. The drawn figures are the most "complete" we've done so far.

This is the exercise for the week, charcoal on layout bond paper. I love how layout bond is toothy enough to hold a lot of charcoal, but will also clean off very easily too. It took some getting used to after working on the "soft" texture of charcoal paper, but now I like it very much.

Following here is a value study for the main assignment, also on layout bond:

Really lovely pose. One thing I'm working with a lot is line quality around the edges. I generally render everything to death so there's no outlines, so working with line is new to me.

Here is the final assignment, chalk and charcoal on toned charcoal paper. I have always wanted to draw on this stuff, mostly because I adore Pierre-Paul Prud'hon's drawings. What I had available here was incredibly expensive though ($2) a sheet, and the texture wasn't as workable or soft/toothy as I'd like. Anyway.

Lastly, I'll dare to share Pasta Lady, a.k.a my contrapasto-posed female sculpture. I have some BIG adjustments to make with her, but here is where she stands as it is tonight:

Yeeaaah... I dunno.

Next week for drawing I'll be copying a statue by Bellini and for sculpting finishing Pasta Lady there. I might not be updating here as much as I'll be putting a lot of hours in on those. Midterms!!!

And I have an Art History exam Wednesday but I'm not too worried about that. Hard to believe the semester is half-over! Spring is coming soon. =)

It's not at all what you think

2010-03-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

Drawing is hard. One of the things that makes drawing difficult is nothing is anything like anyone would said it would be. At times, drawing is the world's most disappointing exercise. You go in thinking you know exactly how you'll approach everything, then you find out that nothing you're looking at is quite as you thought it was.

Tricky that way.

In the end, drawing is a puzzle. It's a matter of seeing how things fit together, then fitting them together again yourself. That line intersects that other line at a 45-degree angle. The finger meets the thumb one inch from the first joint. The round of the shoulder makes a shape like a teardrop. These are all abstractions, but at the same time, they describe a truth that's hard to replicate unless it is abstracted. You can't just "draw a nose". A nose isn't a nose. It's a combination of lines and forms that create the shape we recognize as a nose.

Realistic drawing is perhaps even more an abstraction than abstract drawing, when you think of it. Or else, you could say, the abstract artists just take it all two-hundred steps further.

At any rate, my thirty minutes went by very quickly today and ended up turning into 40 minutes before I decided I had to stop and get on with the day. I still haven't found the brushes I want in Painter, but I'm getting there. At least I know what I want to look for.

One of the real challenges of drawing digitally - unless you're lucky and have something like a Wacom Cintiq - is that you can't bring your measured angles via sighted-along-a-pencil to the page. All I've got under my hand is this blank gray 4x6 plastic pad and and my drawing is sitting vertically on the screen in front of me. More challenges.

Anyway, here is the result of 40 minutes with a photo of Helen Mirren.

Yeah, I didn't get near finished. "You didn't even add a highlight to her lips! That would have only taken a moment!"

But I'd gone on 40 minutes already! Ah well, practice practice.

Some days...

2010-03-10T13:03:00.001-08:00

Some days you have just gotten your shiny new blog straightened out, and you want to have some shiny new stuff to put on it. So, some days you sit down to do your 30-minute speedpaint practice, and some days things don't come out well at all. So some days you just have a couple sketches from the night before to put up.

So we have a nifty action-sketch of Shu Qi from the movie So Close. It's a very fun movie. I don't do dynamic poses often, so it was a challenge. Hands are fail.

I also don't do non-standard body types often, so last night I sketched this burly guy from my Virtual Pose DVD:

Last night I was all "RAWR! I'm going to do FIVE FIGURES BEFORE CHOPPED COMES ON!!" Well, I did these two. This morning got eaten up with domain/website issues, emails that needed answering, and further fiddly bits. Sometimes there seems to be more administration going on than artwork, but I'm not always putting up new blogs sites and updating my website and everything every day either.

I am going to sit down with Painter now and figure out a nice brush set for basic drawing/painting. At very least I *attempted* my 30-minute drawing today.

As far as schoolwork goes, I have to tear down my lovely clay man to make way for a lovely clay woman. And download the tutorials for the week. And practice some figures for the figure drawing class. Thankfully this week and next are set aside for midterms for my art history class, so not much to do there.

I'm beginning to be a little miffed at my figure drawing class, because it really should be requiring a lot more than the assignments are giving. I mean, last week we had one figure and a portrait assigned. This week it's two figures. Now granted, each week we look at different aspects of how the figure can be seen and drawn, and each week we bring them to a higher level of finish, but the assignments just don't even suggest the amount of *practice* that should be going on. I mean, figure drawing is something that you have to put time into, work on constantly, do figure after figure, if you want to really get a good feel for it. Just doing one or two a week isn't going to cut it.

So expect to see more sketches like those above. I will get back to painting when I get Painter figured out here, or when the big PC in the other room starts behaving and not shocking itself to death every time I touch the desk the wrong way.

As an extra bonus, here is a link to a great tutorial on drawing heads. I've been using this method for a couple months now and really like it!

Moving Over

2010-03-09T09:10:00.000-08:00

First official post in my shiny new blog. I'm moving here in part to get out of Deviant Art, and in part to create a better front page for my website. Please be patient with formatting and design of this page as I fiddle with things - I like it well enough now, but there's always more that can be done! This will work for the time being.

The blogger URL here will always work, but I hope eventually to get the dekraus.com domain to point here as well.

I'm also hoping to post fairly often, even if it's only the day's sketches. I've been trying to do 30-minute portraits every day, usually of my WoW characters. For an example, here's today's!

I just got a new MacBook Pro that runs Painter beautifully, but I'm using an *old* small Wacom tablet with it, and really need to take some time to find the right brushes to work with it. It's great to be able to paint whenever, sitting here on the couch, but still very clumsy compared to the setup I have on the desktop in the other room.

Good enough for sketches though.

Test Post

2010-03-08T15:28:00.001-08:00

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