day #365 - the end of an era

-
Image
I thought I was on top of it; I had finished early and was looking for a movie to watch already 3 hours ago. And I don't know how time went by. A phonecall, some networking studying, some online shopping and here we are, already past the time for an early movie. Regardless, today is a special day. The blog is over! I finished 365 days of daily painting and recording it, whatever that means. A big part of the process I will have to keep doing mainly for myself. Perhaps taking daily photos of my work and saving it on some folder. This has provem useful many times when I trying to date a piece I've been working on. Also making a small diary of today's achievements. It's still useful. But this will be done for my eyes only. I also don't know if I will be continuing my obsessively daily painting. How would life be if I had days off? Now for example that I'm moving out and I have to daily chores that until now were completely taken care of, perhaps I'll allow my
Post a Comment

day #6 - Unhappy in Candyland

-


Once again I find myself scared of risking a bad sketch. Semi-consciously I try and replicated the day before yesterday's success: Nice colors and composition.  I try not to stay to close so I fill my page with a different color. Yet, now that I see it, the sky has turned yellow once again. I don't even know what it is that I painted. A mashmellowish landscape? I don't know. Even though I tried really hard to create variety in colors (and there are dozens on suptle hues and tones), the end results looks like an "right of the tube red, yellow and blue" palette. I'm not very proud of those. Or at least I stopped being when my father commented on an older painting.
I like the bluegreenish spill towards into the sky the appears at the dead center of the sketch. It wasn't intentional; it just happened because I had too much water. But it looks very intentional: It's dead center, and the fuzzy silhouette contrasts nicely with the very well-defined silhouettes of the blockish masses surrounding it. Speak of a happy accident, well done luck!
The whole painting could had almost been much worse; the colors were turning muddy but at the very end some purity was recovered. Particularly in the shades of the masses. I hate the tilted horizon in the composition though it marginally works. I am also disappointed that nothing really emerged out of it. Other than the stripes pattern in the blue floor and candylike stripped rock in the foreground, I feel that I just drew some lifeless boxes, unimaginative boxes on a slopped hill.

And this is the second day in row that I drew because I felt I needed to do something for the blog, though very tired and uninterested. I'm worried that this isn't going to go very well overall; I've avoided social media and productivity expectations from others forever and the built up consistency in my regularity practice has been too fragile and precious to jeopardize so early on. I'm no longer sure I'm ready to add this pressure to myself. I'll need to think about it with a more clear head, time for bed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

day #2 - Skulls, Perspective and Vehicles

-
Image
Days like today, I feel as if there is a race I need to excel at. I was watching a video on the very impressive Kim Jung Gi and suddenly here I am again, trying to improve my skills at drawing things into perspective. Some days (most days in the recent past one year or so) I work for hours inside small digital gray boxes (so I don't feel the pressure of wasting paper), filling them up with skulls, faces, body postures, vehicles, architecture and all things into perspective. This has been an improvement since two years ago. Back then, I'd fill sheets of paper with hand-drawn lines, triangles and ellipses. A whole lot of pages. I wish I could call this warming up and maybe it is too, but the truth is that it's a self-worth deficiency response mechanism (in my own words). When I don't feel enough (worthy of, capable of) doing anything remotely creative, I tend to do repetitive and measurable things that I call practice. On one hand I get the feeling that eventually I will
Read more

day #223 - Colorizing

-
Image
Today's piece has been an experiment (aren't they all?). I decided to try the "underpainting" technique, something that I only recently found out! To my disbelief, the habit of laying tha values first before the colors is not something only photoshop artists use, but has been around since forever. So I created a monochromatic painting of mere red values. It was quite beautiful. I hesitated attempting to add color since I didn't know whether it would work out, but eventually I took the plunge: I started with the sky and the background mountains. I wasn't too happy with the tampering but it was already late to go back. I moved on to adding color to the ground, which worked amazingly well and fast since you don't need to be too precise! Apparently it's easier and nicer to "colorize" the complex ground than the minimalistic sky. Perhaps again, red plus blue (purple), and red plus green (gray) are not compatible. Perhaps I had used too much water
Read more

day #175 - back to Sketching

-
Image
Today I did some head drawing and some VR sculpting which I won't include here since I don't even know how to export it. I'm satisfied with the overall results,they are interesting. I'm still struggling with the eyes - I need to get back to formally studying it at some point. I did a coule of poses too and they were better than anticipated given that I hadn't done it for quite some time!
Read more