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 #224 - Cityscape Duelists and Expectations

-
This has been a good day. I resumed working on my pastel painting (I'm starting to feel it's dragging, but since natural light is limited I can't work more than 1-2h per day so it's not that long a painting altogether).
I was done for the day, so I wasn't planning on doing anything else art-related today, but I got a substitute apple pencil that I wanted to test and logged onto Discord to do some extensive doodling. Eventualy I filled two sheets. I'm not even sure the pencil works better than mine. But in the process I did some extra, unexpected work. In other words, I'm happy with the production yield of the day.
So, what did I like about my work today? The pastel painting has become a meditative act where I render bounce lights on solids and I am definitely enjoying it a lot. Good thing I'm not feeling eager to move on to some new piece (like the constant feeling merely a couple months ago in the studio). This painting also allows me to practice color, which is nice and long-overdue. While painting, I trying to modulate the color of an object by combining the object's color and the bounched/direct light color cast.
The doodles on the first sheet where quite simplistic but the second one was more interesting (remember to pay tribute to the narrative and world-building gods!). I had a run-in with perspective, architecture, and vehicles. I particularly like (ie feel inspired by) the giant anime-cat spaceship design, and the postures of the duelists (as well as the giant robot in the background). This is probably one of the most interesting stagings I've done too - I can count 6 planes (foreground, midground, background and three more in between) which feels very alive and cinematic. A happy accident I'd say, Some time I'll study it a bit to understand why it seems to be working. That's all for now, 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 #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