She seemed pretty spiritual, like a lot of people here in SF, and has changed her name quite a few times. I don’t recall an exact number, except she said at intervals of 7 years she’d change her name and start a new chapter of her life. She said she’s analysed strengths and weaknesses of past names and had synchronicity that led her to each new name.

I thought it was pretty interesting because I’ve never really felt like a Simon. Her belief was that her name affected the direction of her life, but under her grounds for getting a name change I don’t see any reason to change mine. I have no problems with how my life’s going. In fact, I like the amount of responsiveness I have to everything happening!

This all came up in relation to a sequence of events that caused her to be late for our life drawing session. Turns out she’d changed her name again this morning, to Ishta if I recall correctly.

And now some Nu Pastel drawings. Dark green and pale yellow on halftone paper.

Look at how sharp the area around its shoulder is. I went in and painted the forms with textural brushes, then to get it so sharp I used the hard round brush to just clean up the areas where surfaces meet. But it’s such a subtle cleanup that I can retain most of the texture.

I felt like I was summoning all these things I’d observed in Nic Klein‘s work back when I started digital painting. I love the way he paints robots, same with people like Jon Foster, Ashley Wood, Phil Hale and other classics that have a similar graphic style.

I didn’t even attempt the smoke but he handled that very well. I may go back into the background and pick out some shapes, but otherwise I’m very happy with this! Haven’t indulged in inking before but it sure makes rendering clothing easy, and it’s so much faster than trying to ink on Photoshop… Unless you make a mistake.

Also, I tried a compositional ‘trick’ called counterchange. Where you have a dark shape on a light shape switching to a light shape on a dark shape.

Slow and steady. Well, maybe just slow. The charcoal pencil had a mind of its own, wiggling its way across the page. Not to mention whenever I drew a line I was too close to look at the model, or even the rest of the drawing. For each line placed the distance was estimated. Plus, when mouth drawing different directions achieved different extents of wiggle, and drawing down sometimes caused a machinegun stippling effect.
Here’s a closeup of the area I screwed up next to his arm, and more stippling on the hip.

After the first one I’d come to terms with how the charcoal behaves and did this mouth drawing in about 10 minutes during the next pose.

I really like how these drawings turned out, I think they have a lot of charm. The lines just flow without careful deliberation. The wiggly lines and distorted proportions remind me of Egon Schiele‘s work. All I needed to do was compromise my motor skills. I could see where the lines needed to be, and had all the knowledge to place them, I just needed to coerce the charcoal pencil to place them in the right vicinity.

I’ve also been studying torso anatomy lately (outside of TAD) as this has always been a weakness. So, to encorporate more skin to render my zombie became a trashy consumer zombie.

And here’s a painting I did on Monday. Our live model did a 2hour pose and I jumped into Photoshop to try out a soft airbrush rendering technique. It’s a sidestep from the painterly stuff I like to do.

Even though I haven’t fully rendered it here’s a .gif showing its progression at 20 minute intervals. I missed a step though, so one jump is 40 minutes.

Nu pastel on smooth, halftone paper.

The aim of a block-in is to map out the shape of the cast and then break it into light and dark masses.

It’s all about seeing shapes over ‘things’ – things being what they are in real life. When you start thinking of the cast as a cast (with a torso, some legs and so on) you fall into the trap of drawing what you think a torso or leg looks like instead of seeing the shapes they’re actually made from. You’re not really observing, you’re making bits up. By seeing the object as a collection of (2-dimensional/flat) shapes you can draw it more easily, and one trick in doing this it to squint and/or picture the shapes as something else.

Here’s one of my block-ins, along with a shape visualisation example:

To help draw the shape I highlighted in red, aside from squinting and just matching the angles I could’ve imagined that shape as the bottom of a crocodile’s jaw. It could be anything, there’s no significance in choosing a crocodile. The purpose is to psychologically trick you into looking at it in a different way, like an optical illusion. After this I just need to match that shape on my drawing.

Doing block-ins/constructs is a great way to train your eye, and at traditional ateliers art students will keep doing block-ins until they’re good enough to move onto the next phase, which involves rendering the form.

Tools used: graphite block, smudge stick, kneadable eraser, 2H and 4B pencils.

I also found that if I use a sharp 2H pencil to draw it digs the line into the page so when you go over with the graphite block those lines remain light. This could be useful! I must experiment further.

A picture of the man himself beside the portrait.

Jon does a few demo oil paintings at the San Fran POD.

Jarkko the crazy Finnish viking and myself display our enthusiasm while Jon paints.