Off We Go

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!