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 #89 - Productive yet meh...

-
After doing some logo work, I moved onto some random sketching; characters, postures, faces; eventually I arrived to a point that I had a micro-narrative; a grandfather(?) and two kids discovering a flower. I decided to blow it up, and then ink and colorize it, which I sloppily did but was too tired to do it properly. Eventually I put it aside and did some posture/gesture practice so as not to lose my streak.

What am I proud of today? For start the fact that I did quite some hours of work. This is a guilty pleasure since when I work less, I feel awful. There are a few interesting logos, though none as interesting as the original that I started with. The sketches on the other hand were nice for a change; The pooping dearman, the guy flying and the other one driving, are all very interesting! I like the arms particularly! The inking was very successful and it's nice being able to see an overall progress in my figure-drawing abililites; the whole postures were quite complex and though there was some erasing involved, it wasn't much. Though the childrens' faces are strange there is a charm to them so I won't complain.I'm not as happy about the colorization; I tried using a beautiful palette I saw on some other artwork but I completely failed to apply it!  Still, I manually calculated the colors of the shaded areas and highlights without using automatic blending modes (multiply/overlay) so this is something. I also somewhat happy about the fact that the characters are lighter than the background. Finally I've started rediscovering the feet/toes and had the opportunity to practice a bit of perspective.

The daily postures were extremely fast and I feel very dynamic, even though I feel I'm pushing myself too much for the 45sec mark; nonetheless I'm progressing on the path of understanding leg anatomy. Hands are improving a lot too; tough I haven't started a form of systematic analysis.

Finally, not to forget to mention that I did some creative stuff today other than practice, and even it's probably one of the "worst" completed pieces, it's still a completed one which I'm very happy about since I spend most of my days doodling and never completing anything.



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