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A few more figures!

A 10-15min drawing people seem to like. I was playing more with softening edges for this one, also keeping in mind the idea of ‘sensitivity’. Paying attention to the marks you’re making and not being really heavy handed. This ties in with the rendering form in general; blending the pastels where the shadow softens and turns the form.

Plus an untimed drawing. I intended on using this for a poster but did a painting instead.

The aforementioned painting. Oil painting on canvas + digital wizardry. It was a bit of a rush; kept it very simple, reliant on implied detail. The poster design is in the works and due Monday!

Information! Process! Pastels!

Here’s my impersonation of someone trying to start something cool. I thought it’d be a good idea to have a TAD student tutorial blog.

I definitely learn the most when I know what I should be thinking about, or the specific benefits of a medium/approach.

There’s so much subtext in one person’s particular process that it may help to hear how other students approached a piece, or thought about when executing their particular process. The ‘why’s as well as the ‘how’s. These tutorials would be less of a demonstration, but more a singling out one particular process point and elaborating on why they made a choice which applies to the whole image.

I made a tutorial to elaborate on this (click to view larger):

The main point of this tutorial is to treat pastels like a painting medium. As long as the paper isn’t overloaded with pastel they can be applied very opaquely. This leads to a technique I adopted years ago after looking at concept artists that paint on a single layer, and ofcourse it’s also true for painters with opaque mediums. To adjust a shape involves painting adjacent colours over one another until the edge is in the right place. This idea translates to working with pastels, and I think when I realised it was about painting and not drawing was when it made sense. I see a handful of students trying this for the first time by drawing the silhouette then working inwards. This is the kind of tutorial I thought would help address that approach.

At the start of the year I was invited to do a digital painting demonstration by the Alfred Cove Art Society, who meet at the Atwell Art Gallery on the last Thursday of every month. I was slotted in for this week passed, and went along to share what I could with a room full of fine artists. When it comes to demonstrations I typically don’t have enough time to do anything really ‘finished’, so focus on showing different techniques. In this case I tried to liken it to painting equivalents. eg. Overlay mode is like glazing, painting in selections is like using masking fluid, and ‘undo’ is like travelling back in time. Something I do on a regular basis here in Perth.

There were an abundance of questions throughout my 1 hour painting, which was great! It’s nice to have an engaged audience, they all seemed really eager and interested.

I received a little traditional vs digital effectiveness and timeliness questioning along the way, which can be hard to field since I haven’t spent nearly as much time with traditional mediums as digital. Anyway, after I’d mostly been focussing on painting the boats one lady challenged me to paint a tree. As you might imagine I had a sly grin when responding “Sure, I’ll draw a tree.” and opened my brush list to select an appropriate tree. Then with a single swoosh a forest appeared and the room cried out “That’s cheating!”

I was amused.

But really it requires more manipulation than just slapping a line of tree clones in, and it was a nice segue into showing them brush creation.

Anyway, I worked the demo image into the painting shown below after painting into a lot of it.

It was mostly referenced from a photo I took at the Amazon River in Peru which I’d always wanted to paint. I loved the mass of boats sitting unattended as we approached the canoe we were boarding. It was almost like a dumping ground, all looking a bit abandoned like raw husks of their former glory. It’s almost haunting. I also added the bird, an escort of sorts. Your guide across the waters, like you need some protection from what lurks beneath. The Amazon is built up as a dangerous place with lots of animals quite capable of eating you and your new safari outfi; yet it looks so placid…

The sketch group for sketching. As a group. In Perth. has been born kicking! Created yesterday and it’s already held an event. People have been talking about getting regular sketch groups going in Perth for ages, and now it’s happening. The group had its first meetup today, which was basically Jeff and I telling everyone we were meeting at Hyde Park to draw/paint, and anyone else interested was welcome.

I bet Jeff that noone else would come.

I was pleasantly surprised when 3 other people came along, 2 of which were complete strangers to Jeff and myself! Thus is the power of the interwebs.

And here is a picture – Party of 5 (incl me)!

We’ll probably make Saturdays a regular thing so join the group if you want to join us.

I used the opportunity to do a watercolour painting for Mother’s Day. I referenced a black and white Daily Mirror (Sydney) newspaper clipping from 1985, just after I was born. Mum and I made page 5 with a very punny article entitled “Boxer’s a champ at just eight pounds.”

I went to Dr Sketchy’s last night to draw and paint Celestina from the Melbourne performance group Eccentrix. For those not familiar with the Dr Sketchy format, there’s a handful of quick poses, a break, then a model performance and some longer more poses.

This particular model’s “specialty” was fire with some sort of ~sensual wiggling~ similar to bellydancing, and during her performance she had flaming things (?) on her shoulders and arms… And I just realised I don’t know what they’re called. They were kind of like little poles with a flammable piece on the end.

Anyway, I’m not sure whether it was the way she moved, the bright flames dancing around, or the fact that I was ridiculously tired that sent me into a light trance, but it was hypnotic! One of the best Dr Sketchy’s performances I’ve seen.

And here are some watercolours. This was a 15min pose with greenish lighting:

I want to study the affects of coloured lighting more as some of the shadows were kind of orangey. My colours are exaggerated though.

Here’s one of the earlier 10 minute poses under orange light. I was trying to get a big patch of orangey skintone down then bleed shadows back over it. A much simpler palette, but since I didn’t get time to paint around the form and expose the white highlight I just painted a solid colour background in digitally.

Last of all, a little gift for Mel. She left her facebook signed in the other day so I did the obligatory status update. I then noticed she didn’t have anything in the “Write something about yourself” section, so it promptly became “I’m a sparkly princess YAY!”.

And without further ado, here is sparkly princess Mel:

Just a simple landscape. Very minimal, which is something that interests me. Sparth did a series of quite minimal landscapes some years back that struck me, but I can’t seem to find them on his website. Still, looking at the way he paints makes it very evident that I should be using a wider range of values.

The second ‘speedpainting’ lab I did at Murdoch was a little more structured (sorry 1st lab crew).  I just chose a reference photo I could easily demonstrate a few things with:

• Breaking the image into basic parts/layers. In this case a background (leaves, sky, ground), a layer for the dark tree branches, and a layer for the house.
• Blocking in sections and using masks/selections to paint with crisp shapes where necessary. ie. Focal points that benefit from a clearly defined silhouette. A lot of concept artists don’t do this at all when speedpainting, and I usually save it for when I’m refining the image (if required).
• Using custom brushes and brush modes to give the impression of appropriate textures (grass, leaves, paint, rust etc).
• Creating custom brushes (most of them had minimal prior experience with Photoshop).

Unlike the first class, I also had more time to actually complete my image since I was demoing it to show students while they did the same.

On a whole I was pleased with the class and how the students handled the task. Got some good results in a reasonable timeframe.

I did my digital painting classes at Murdoch University today, specifically focussed on ‘speedpainting’, which to me basically means painting an ‘impression’. Something I do quite often. Sometimes too often.

Anyway, for the first tutorial I chose 3 photos as references and let students take their pic. They then proceeded to replicated the photo using brushes to depict different surfaces/textures and I periodically went around and helped each student at their desk, giving mini demonstrations depending on where they were stumped.

In the time between wandering I whipped up a study of my own from one of the images.

Setup snap!

Half a day on and work is on the walls! We’re pretty much ready to roll.

Unfortunately I overestimated the amount of space we have. Or underestimated the amount of work… There’s just enough room to get everyone’s main pieces in without being too crammed. However, the digital painting in my previous post didn’t make the cut – I’ve only put in oil paintings. You’ll just have to oggle it here on my blog.

Big thanks to everyone that’s been pimping the exhibition!! Really nice to see it getting so much publicity, especially since I didn’t even ask people to post about it! Big loves.

Also, the exhibition made it onto SixThousand amongst other websites.

I made this intending to make it a diptych for the exhibition, but I’m not sure if I’ll actually display it as 2 pieces.

This pretty much marks the completion of my works, I just need to varnish the last few paintings! I’m hoping they’re dry by now as we’re hanging tomorrow.

A few oil painting learnings thus far: Read the rest of this entry →