NO ANGELS

I don't know what I am doing with this painting. There are so many paintings that I have started and stopped and put in a closet some where. In the top one I decided to put an angel and then decided I didn't like it so I covered it over with some molding paste. I'll keep you updated on this one. UPDATE: This painting has been scrapped and runs the risk of being painted right over.

Magazine Collage

It's So Easy Being Green...

With all this talk of going green, I've been thinking about ways to recycle, reuse, repurpose. Lately, I have been using old magazines to help practice with my composition. Before you throw out your magazines, go through all of the pages and pull out images that are intereresting to you. Then make a collage out of them. I try not to think about it too much and just grab pictures that grab me and then go to work quickly.

Texturizer

TEXTURE

The Ugly: Hot Mess on a Platter

Strike that Pose!

"Dont blame it on the pose Bitch. Your ass can't draw!"

I warned you. Some days would be ugly. Today was beyond ugly. It was "oogly" to the bone. First of all, Frank was MIA from antaomy class. Second, so too was the mojo I had harnessed from last class. I was a mess. A hot mess. On a golden platter. One thing remained the same though. The model was in the same pose shifting and shuffling a million times a minute as usual. Scratching here and there. Of course I would like to pass the buck and blame today's ineptitude on a bad model...but I have absolutely no excuse. We had a substitute teacher. And he was exactly that...substitute.

I began by trying to find that dang "pelvic box". I found it alright and then proceeded to draw it incorrectly...and with confidence no less. As a result my figure began to take on a form that was a cross between a human...and an alien. My attitude was bad. My enery was low. I needed a drink. Maybe next time I'll toss back a few before I come into class. Am I too stiff? Is that why many artistics were also notorious alcoholics?

Damn. It just wasn't working out today. Me. The Model. The pose. The charcoal. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I wondered if the model is the only one who's posing. Am I posing as artist when I really was artistically inept.

I stopped at the Wine store around the corner on the way home and bought a bottle of sparkling Shiraz. Is there a law against drunk drawing? Not in my house there isn't. Not in my house.

Everything But the Kitchen Sink...

Junk Yard Orchid

Sunday's are proving to be my experimental days I am finding out. I used just about every technique in the book to make this painting. It's on watercolor paper using acrylic, molding paste, gouache, patina (antiquing solution), gel pens, good leaf bits of paper...what else? I really love orchids, so don't be surprised if you see a few other paintings with these flowers in them. I call this "Junkyard Orchid" because I feel like I used every random bit and scrap of old paper I had in my files. I found that dragonfly on a piece of paper under my bed (along with the dust bunnies) and gel-transferred it onto the paper. I took this picture at night using a flash which causes the detail to be lost and for the image to look stark. I find that paintings are best photographed in daylight, so I am going to retake this picture and repost at some point.

Another Experimental Sunday

Landscape

This is acrylic, molding paste, tissue paper and pencil on watercolor paper. I spent about two hours doing this. I am trying to warm up and become more comfortable with the materials. My challenge is that I want every stroke to be perfect, every color to mix exactly, every technique implemented to come out exactly as I envisioned. But I am learning that there are no exacts. I think that this painting is quite overworked. I lost some of the detail in the lower portion of the painting by covering it up with more paint. There comes a time when more is just more and you risk turning the paint into mud. Below is the painting before I started adding more paint. In both painting you will notice a slight rippling. This is because I took the photo while the paper was still damp. I usually like to work on canvas, illustration board or a more sturdy canvas, but since these are experiments, i thought watercolor paper would do just fine.

A stage or two before I added more paint to the paper.

Here is another one I did later on in the day....

Close up and cropped

The World of Figure Drawing

Porcu's Anatomy

When I first started taking Frank Porcu's anatomy class about two and a half months ago, I was a mess. Lost, confused, in the habit of drawing flat two-dimensional figures and unable to keep up with his fast paced medical jargon..."Here you'll find the anterior superior spine, the metacarpus, the tibula, fibula, blah, blah, blah..." At one point I thought that he had suddenly started speaking Vietnamese. He taught us that in order to compose an "anatomically correct" figure drawing we should start by locating "the pelvic box" on the model and then build a three-dimensional "world" from there. Pelvic Box??? That must be located somewhere near the Holy Grail.

So I petered along for about a month or so, drawing stick figures and three-dimensional shapes trying desperately to grasp these concepts. Wait a minute, wasn't I trying to learn how to draw beautiful portraits? Why did I feel like I had wound up in medical school? Just when I was about to quit, Frank Porcu comes over and starts giving me a one-on-one. "You see what you're doing wrong...You see all that (as he wags his charcoal stick like a disapproving finger at my stickish figure), you're trying to draw all that as if it's two-dimensional." He then sits down and begins to sketch on my pad. For the next 15 minutes or so I see all my mistakes. I see the places in which the body can be drawn as a 3-dimensional figure. My eyes go beneath the skin and finally understand that there are bones and muscles at work that operate in exactly the same way in 99.9% of human beings. If I learn how they move and where they are positioned according to the skeleton, I will always be able to draw human figures in almost any position. I got it. I finally got it. Frank excused himself and happily whisked off to help the next student in need of rescue. I'm staying at least another month...no doubt.

NOTE: Porcu picture taken from The Guildhall at SMU website (guildhall.smu.edu)

Drawing before my Porcu Lesson

You see that crazy looking back leg...The victim of two-dimension drawing.

The next class after my Porcu lesson. It's incomplete, but I'm getting there.