Gouache Again!

 It looks like everybody is using the airtight palettes. Is it just the latest trend, or something I should seriously look into? Especially considering so far I don't do much painting. I think I'll hold off and check into it, see what I can glean about it, and just get back to drawing for now. Maybe a gouache painting every now and then, but no new supplies unless I start to really like it (ie get better at it).

'Nuther great gouache demo

 Had to add this one to get a different take on how to approach it. 

Kim Jung Gi and David Finch on the importance of learning how to draw the geometric solids in perspective

 My thoughts:

I think it's vitally important that he draws things very realistically, even if occasionally more cartoonish. Drawing real things means sometimes you'll draw things sitting in front of you, and that's the best way to develop your accuracy and perspective sense, what I've called the mental 3D engine.

From what he keeps saying, it definitely sounds like he visualizes things in perspective a lot, I mean even when he's not drawing. I never thought to do that! Just now I'm looking around at things in the studio and imagining being a little mini-me floating around and seeing it from various different angles. Including the fish-eye lens he talks about—the 5-point perspective. I think practicing seeing things like that—visualizing even when you're not sitting at the drawing board—is an amazing exercise that will definitely develop your artist's eye. 

With both Kim Jung Gi and the David Finch video I just watched they really push learning how to see and draw everything in perspective, without using the guidelines and vanishing points etc, learning how to imagine everything as geometric solids that you can visually rotate any which way and throw light on however you want. Drawing this a lot helps you to visualize it. 

That's very much the same thing I'm working toward now with anatomy. When you've learned all the parts so well it sinks into the unconscious and you can draw it intuitively, that's when you can just spool off drawings fast and modify the body however you want. When it becomes intuitive you don't have to think consciously about it, and it emerges gracefully and fluidly (Hah! Fluid thinking again FTW!)

Here's the David Finch video:

Incredible gouache painting tutorial—looks like oils or airbrush

I don't know why videos show up so small in here, and in a square format with black bars top and bottom. That does not look good, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it. But this is the best gouache painting tutorial I've ever seen. I got all excited about the airtight palette, found one on Amazon, but then remembered my past experiences trying that with Alkyd paints. Not good—they just dry out. I found a comment where somebody asked her about it, and she said hers tend to dry out too, and I assume she uses it just about every day. 

But I think (one) reason her approach is working so much better than mine is because she has all those well-mixed colors at hand—that's what I call a candy box. I mix mine on a butcher's tray and usually don't make enough colors or close-enough blends. I think I'm afraid of wasting too much paint. 

Another factor is she uses washes a lot more than I've seen before. Plus so many tricks—the ultra-fine miniature brushes, drybrushing etc. She was making a very detailed painting, whereas for the Watts method they're doing sketches. 

She said she's had talent from an early age and just studied every book she could find on art technique. I suspect it's a case of extreme patience and discipline, much like it seems to be for Kim Jung Gi. I watched a bunch of videos about him last night. Inspiration overdose. 

My 90's Alternative Period part 2—What is an Alternative Period?

A society goes through upward and downward cycles or phases. The upward phases are called Classical periods, when classical values are upheld by the majority of people and institutions. These are growth periods, during which the society prospers. But following a classical period there's always a decadent period or downward swing. 

The values of a classical period include things like strength, justice, grace, beauty, youth, courage and confidence. Masculinity is encouraged for men, and femininity for women. In a decadent period everything is reversed. The spotlight moves to everything that was repressed in the classical period, such as weakness, disease and poverty, old age, death, depression, and fear. 

Imagine a wheel painted with the Yin/Yang symbol that's half submerged in water. When the white side is predominantly up out of the water, that's a classical period, but as the wheel turns (inevitable forward march of time) the white (Yang) part starts to rotate back down and the black side (Yin) rises to take its place. This is inevitable and necessary, like the forest fires that purge dead wood and encourage the growth of new trees that would have been unable to get any light under the shadow of the old forest giants. Though it brings immense death and destruction, the fire allows for new life in its wake. Mythologically this is symbolized by the death and resurrection cycle—before you can be reborn purified you must die as who you were.

I drew monstrous goddess figures.
This one is based on Artemis, also known as Diana

Classical periods included Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Victorian age. Each was inevitably followed by its antithesis in the form of Hellenism, The Baroque, and the Modern Art period . I see the Alternative music scene of the 90's as the shadow side of Classic Rock that preceded it. The strutting peacocks of rock were replaced by introverted, emotionally unstable goths who sang about how marginalized and anxious they were. After 2 solid decades of rock we needed to hear from the other side, though we didn't realize it. At the same time I went through my own dark underworld journey of depression that shattered my confidence and naive suppositions about life. It would be about 2 decades before I realized I was emerging from it and moving into a classical phase again, though now purged of naive illusions. 

We each go through the same up and down periods in our lives, in large and small scales. In the ancient world these phases were known as Eros, the movement toward life, joy, and love, and Thanatos—into darkness, disillusion, and ultimately death (yes, this was the basis for Thanos). Each was symbolized as an allegorical figure, Thanatos being a frightening one similar to our more familiar Grim Reaper, and Eros represented by a woman of beauty and grace.

In modern times Eros has been demoted to mean no more than sexuality and romantic love, but originally it meant everything positive and re-affirming about life. 

Here's an excellent breakdown that goes into much greater depth: The Ancient Dance Between Eros and Thanatos

Don't you love it when you go blog-hopping and unexpectedly get a dose of myth, philosophy and psychology? 

My 90's Alternative Period part 1

I know I've posted some of these before, but many of them were colored in, and that was when I was first learning digital painting (and using a mouse to do it I think). Now I want to present some decent images of them, just the pencils, as close as I can get to the way they looked in the 14 x 20 Strathmore sketchbooks I was using back then. I loved drawing in that big format!

I call it my Alternative period, for 2 reasons. I was really into alternative music at the time, and my drawing was very different from what I had done before. Inspired by a few artists I discovered in the pages of Epic Illustrated and 1984 I loosened up and went very intuitive, tapping into fluid intelligence rather than the learned and memorized procedures stored in crystallized intelligence.

Too Much Crystallized Thinking Lowers Fluid Intelligence

Can Physical Activities Improve Fluid Intelligence?

Why are smart people curious? Fluid intelligence, openness to experience, and interest

My Decade Away from Drawing and Painting

In 2001, while the world was still reeling from the events of 9-11 in fact, I took up stopmotion animation (as detailed on my Darkmatters blog) and totally stopped drawing or painting, aside from painting set-pieces, puppets and props, which just doesn't use the same skills. I did that for about a decade. 

In 2013 I took up the pencil again,

but was stunned to discover I had lost all my skills.I quickly went to digital, using a mouse at first, and then got myself a tablet. I thought I could bring my skills up that way, and rapidly get them back to where I had left off, but boy, was I wrong! Drawing on the tablet just wasn't the same at all. My hand didn't remember it nor did I ever take to it, at least for drawing. Over the last few years I started drawing in pencil more, until I decided to devote myself to it entirely, and then the skills did begin to return.

 

I started getting some training, first through Jason Manley's Level Up course @ ConceptArt, then Watts Atelier. All that training has been aimed at realism, which is what I wanted—I believe you need to develop the skills before you cut loose and try to work intuitively, and that was my shortcoming with all these drawings from the 90's. My skills were about halfway there, but they needed reinforcing. 

That's what my training has been for. Specifically I want to firm up on the structure of the figure and head, develop my anatomy, and draw from photographs quite a bit to learn what people really look like. I feel like I'm just about there on the structure part, but will be digging in on the rest of it.

Sorry these are getting weirdly tinted, I'm using an online image editor and it took me a few tries to really get it down. I might go back and re-do these later. I don't know though, they look kind of cool. I might just leave them.

 

95 and 96 were my best years. Most if not all of what I'll be posting comes from those sketchbooks. The one above I did after getting home from seeing Mortal Kombat.

In future posts I'll go into more detail about specifically what an alternative period is, in music and visual art (and in a society). After developing my skills to a certain level I plan to start going alternative like this again, but this time with better understanding. I love the boldness of these, and some of them look really nice, but I feel like my knowledge of the figure and the head and a lot of other things (composition) just was't there yet.

A couple of drawings from 2020

 I didn't draw much last year, but here are a couple of heads. I think there's a real improvement on what came before. 

The top one was completely from imagination, just a head exercise. This one is drawn from a framegrab of Roy Scheider in All That Jazz I think. 

And a double-Fafhrd I did when I was trying to work out what the muscles around the armpit area do when the arms are raised. I like things about both versions, it lost something when I firmed it up and painted out all the pencil lines. It's supposed to be the bodybuilder pose called the double bicep, but it looks more like he's shakin' it on the dance floor.  

I stopped drawing shortly after doing these. I switched from visual art to writing, and have been locked into a message board and buried in books and practicing. I do want to get back to the drawing though, it would really be a shame not to keep pushing my skills after coming this far. I tend to get stuck in one mode though and just want to keep on in it. Hopefully I can work something out so I'm drawing a couple days a week or something. Hey. come to think of it, that's about all I was doing for the last few years anyway lol.