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 #101 - To what end?

-

So what happens now that I've crossed 100 days? I don't know. I don't what will allow me to conclude this "infinite days challenge". Anyway, I keep moaning about it. Let's move on to something else. So today I did some 20x 45sec postures, 20x 30sec gestures and 4x 5min postures and finally 20x 45sec hand studies.  I'm happy with all of it. I still struggling to simplify but I feel there is life into the postures/gestures - though come to think about it, I didn't really do gestures today; I did mostly quick skeletons. Doing the postures was more exciting and I'm quite happy with most of them. I had the opportunity to work with the male body and nail down some muscles. Finally hands have been considerably better that other days. To wrap up I did some skulls trying to regain the ability to draw them I'm quite happy with most of them; It was obvious that I had already warmed up by that time; hands and bodies were alive and fast. I even did some exciting ones like the dancing fat people, the bandit and fishman. Then I tried some vehicle designs and some landscapes with beasts and finally a temple complex. I like most the fact that (and this is not the first time) that some times my hand is "warm". I don't know after how much time it is ready (could be somewhere between 30mins to 3h of preparation or something unrelated to time) but there is definitely a state that the hand is more "aligned" and "tuned" to my inner eye than normally. This has nothing to do however with creativity, or the ability to do beautiful stuff; merely with mind-to-hand coordination.

To wrap up, I'm happy I did this much practice today, that certain things are falling to place (I've even managed to draw thin legs) and how I'm discovering the body at a deeper level. Now I'm more worried about the cleanliness of my lines but I have not decided whether it's important (or even how to approach it).

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 #283 - Ancient City of Zor

-
Image
Today's highlight has been this explorative piece that I did with the new iPad. The new apple pencil, has a button (unlike the first which had none). This allowed me to remap some other functions, and I suddeny have an ever more streamlined way of switching between drawing, erasing, and smudging (that I hadn't used until now) in an instant! I enjoyed a lot creating this piece (though I don't like it much), feeling a lot in command of everything down to the texture. What's most important though is that the details were coming easily. As if I was discovering the details of the architecture. This is my favourite way of painting/drawing! How I wish this was more frequent! I even got somewhat transported to that realm. The rest of the sheets are my attempts at comparing the two ipads/pencils; the old and the new one. I'm a tools-guy. I still like the old so much more but I hope I get used to the new one since spec-wise it's so much much better. Both sheets, carry ve
Read more