day #365 - the end of an era

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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
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day #82 - Insomniac Crowds

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So here we are, it's already 5:30am and I'm just starting the write the blog-post for the day. I'm late by 3-4h. Not a good start. Still:
In the morning I had a bout of insomnia so eventually I got up and started drawing. I was going to do some automatic drawing (it's long now that I've lost interesting in doing self-portraits) when I realized that I could incorporate human figures in it! It was an automatic crowd around a bonfire; perhaps the burning man festival? Later on, I went and did another scene full of bodies which I'll call for now "60s american beach". As if I would know.

The bodies that came out of my imagination during the morning insomnia were very exciting! Until now I was starting with the skeleton and fleshing it out. I wasn't able to finish 5 such bodies, let alone 20 or 30! Now this is so much faster, and while not as precise, the bodies are very expressive and sensual! Definitely inspired by Crepax' comics that I've been reading these days.

I like the variety of bodies, the looseness,  the different ages. There is finally some character! People feel alive, tired, bored, old and young. Not like before, that everybody was a dancer ...exaggerating postures. I also like the perspective (while I didn't put much thought into it) - I like how I started integrating people into their environment. Finally, I like how I had the opportunity to draw people of different ages.


I felt quiet relaxed and non-judgemental so I decided to do some left-hand drawings too during my morning sleep-break! They turned out very interesting, in particular the first one looks a lot like van gogh to me. it's a very dear and exciting piece. The composition feels tantalizing.
Finally I colorized the comic page from yesterday and did all the practice for the day (hand, posture and gesture and silhouettes - I even did some warming up ellipses and lines that I usually omit).

Not much here, except that I'm well progressing into this new era of drawing postures as silhouettes. This has enabled me to do some amazing new stuff, like the ones I've already described above. Plus the added benefit that I now have even more ways of approaching the gesture/posture and this helps fight off boredom!  I don't know whether I like the colors too much, though for sure I've managed to build on the palette already passed onto me. This one was more of a refresher but good to see it finalized.

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