Fixing Fafhrd

Getting the colors right makes a huge difference!

In a recent post I showed versions of 3 of my old Fafhrd paintings where I did a simple desaturate and even just that helped a lot. So here I went into a little more work, using Photoshop and Lightroom to selectively desaturate those colors that were just too bright, and to boost the contrast and brightness and apply a couple of photo filters to bring the colors into closer harmony. At this point it doesn't really look like a finished painting yet, but closer to a good underpainting, but with a little hint of the final colors showing here and there. I've brought it all down into an earth tone range, resembling burnt umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and just a few hints of a deep dark red like alizarine crimson, and a bit of ultramarine blue in the background. Interestingly, these are all colors I have in my current oil palette.

Here's a quick rundown of what I did to preserve the steps for posterity:
Used an adjustment layer set to saturation to selectively desaturate only those colors that really detract in the original - yellows and greens for the hair and blues for that glowing background. Then I added 2 photo filters, a warming filter and an orange (they're both essentially different shades of orange) and boosted brightness and contrast to punch it up a bit.

Unfortunately, the only existing photo I seem to have of it anymore is the quite small one I'm working on here, so I think I'll take a new much larger picture using soft diffused lights and start over, repeating what I did to this one (should go pretty quick) and then I plan to work on it digitally a bit more. In fact, I Notice now how messed up the anatomy is in various places - I did this one in either the late 90's or very early 2000's, and my anatomy knowledge has increased a lot since then (I think even for my level of knowledge at the time this was pretty poor). I want to stretch the torso out a bit, elongate the ribcage, twist the midsection slightly, and turn/tilt the neck and head a bit to get his neck in alignment with the spine - that curve should extend all the way through the spine and neck (and his neck seems to be squashed down between the shoulders pretty bad). It also needs work on the bow, the quiver (it's on the wrong side of his body for one thing!) and then some actual digital painting overall just to put the finishing touches on it. If I can make all this work, I just might come out of this with a corrected painting that's far superior to the original.

And then it's time to start to find strategies for color planning/mixing to allow me to take advantage of what I'm learning from these digital adjustments in my future paintings - it would be nice to be able to do all this in oil right from the beginning.

Newsprint - plus Fixing Fafhrd

I randomly found an old newsprint pad from 1991 the other day and decided to try drawing in it with a charcoal pencil - and I discovered it works beautifully. Most of my charcoal drawing has been on totthy  paper, so I'm used to a lot of dust and meass, but as I recalled from school days, the newsprint is slick enough to allow smooth beautiful charcoal work with almost no dust or mess. Results follow:

Oh oops - this on's not on newsprint. But the next 2 are:

The last one was a sketch that I did as reference to try to fix Fafhrd's torso in this digi-painting:

There's no flow through the torso - it looks like the abdominals and ribcage and pelvis are sort of Frankenstein-ed together from mismatched parts. The study above it was to figure out how they're supposed to blend smoothly into each other and just where the dark middle and light values need to be to make it look real and solid. Progress so far:

I hate this stage - I've fixed some things but screwed some things up - the flow does look better, but now it looks weak and pale and shapeless. Needs more work to bring back some oomph. It's really frustrating to work on a piece like this, where I started off with a bad drawing - it takes so much work to go in and fix each little part that needs fixing, and even when I do, the pose is still crap. But it is a great learning experience. Heck, the only reason I want to keep working on it rather than just start something new is because I really like the face - and that went through several stages where it looked terrible.

Some great Christmas presents and a burst of life-drawing inspiration

Got a whole passel of art instruction books for Christmas - all straight from my wish list, so no duds in the bunch!! It's amazing how much better Christmas got thanks to Amazon and the almighty internet.

Imaginative Realism and
Color and Light, both by Gurney,

Other Worlds by Kidd, and

Figure Drawing by Ryder.

Of the 4, the only one I was unsure about was Figure Drawing, as it seems to demonstrate the atelier system of painstaking measurement and super-careful values and shapes - in other words the kind of course where you spend years precisely drawing from plaster casts. But I threw it on the list anyway, intrigued by a system so different from the classical system I'm learning - and I do understand that stepping outside of your comfort zone and learning things that are different is the only way to shock the system into actually growing.

The main reasons I don't favor this approach are that it's expensive and troublesome to always get models to work from, and because I dislike artwork that conveys the listlessness and passivity you generally see in models who have to hold a pose for a long time.

Gurney's work has that quality - as excellent of a painter as he is, his figures (human and dinosaur) look more like bored consumers standing in line at the mall than anything dynamic. So it wasn't too suprising to learn from his books that he goes in for a lot of research for his paintings in the form of arranging for model sessions and photographs, as well as travelling to locations and buying props. It's a bit amazing to discover illustrators really go to that kind of length for their work, but it does make sense.

That same problem is apparent in Ryder's work as well - fantastic, perfectly rendered drawings of lifeless maniquin-looking people in the kind of torporous poses that people assume when they know they have to remain there for hours.

This is not the way I want my work to look - not at all!! In fact, I want just the opposite. That doesn't mean I regret any of these books - quite the contrary. They all contain excellent art (just because it's not the way I want to paint doesn't mean I don't enjoy looking at it when it's well done) - and also they all contain information I'm finding extremely helpful - many things I've never encountered before and probably wouldn't have otherwise. And, even though I dislike the lackluster appearance of artwork done from posed models, I do realize the importance of learning to work from models and from photographs, and I need to learn how it's done (it's all about the gesture). Ryder's book is one big step in that direction.

In a related note - as I've said several times on the blog already, I always feel like I'm only as good as my last drawing. And unfortunately my most recent work has been a group of terrible gesture sketches. One bad one can leave a bad taste, but a dozen bad ones just makes me want to quit.

However, I happened across an amazing sketchbook thread on Conceptart that I just discovered is by a student of Ryder's (taught by him at the Art Academy of San Fran, and now teaching there himself) that shows it doesn't always have to look so listless and bored: http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?147839-a-visual-story-of-one-art-student-s-journey-more-drivel-8-8-12

Even though the poses themselves are still dull as dirt for the most part, his work brings a sparkling energy and dynamism that mostly transcends that. I still plan to work from imagination, but damn - if doing a lot of gesture work can do this for an artist, then count me in!!

I also had a related thought tonight - I used to do what I call VCR Sketches - which are essentially quick poses done while the VCR is paused for 5 minutes - that gave me a definite time limit. At first they were pretty lame, but as I went on I got better at it. In fact it was probably pretty instrumental in my development at that time. Having that experience in my background gives me the confidence to go ahead and plunge back into gestures with the hope that in time I'll get better once again.

Gestures from last 2 days

Just putting them all up at once - also re-adding the one I posted yesterday because I added some wash :

Tried to get them in more or less the order I drew them. Not sure I'm supposed to be thinking and constructing quite as much as in the last 2 - and yet they look the best - I'll keep doing it when it feels right, and it seems like I'll get better at locating the bony landmarks fast and running construction lines between them on the fly. 

Tres Grazie

Just did about 7 or 8 gesture sketches, with a panicy feeling that I have no idea just what the hell I'm supposed to be doing, but after getting the 1st pic the camera died, so I'll upload the rest tomorrow :

I meandered between doing weird surreal out-of-proportion contour drawings, semi-constructed and still out-of-whack figures like the ones above, and a couple where I took way longer than I'm supposed to and drew too carefully. But I guess this is how it's done - you most likely move gradually from panic through stunned acceptance that you'll probably never really know what you're supposed to be drawing or how, and hopefully just from sheer numbers you get better at it in time.

Gesture drawing videos

Good stuff!! A more detailed type of gesture drawing to serve as beginning of a more detailed drawing.

This is more what I always thought it meant - looser, quicker - this is more gesture as a warmup.

Problems with the fountain pen - ALREADY!!

Started having a lot of trouble with the fountain pen - maybe because it was running out of ink (it also had a huge air bubble in it)? Not sure why really - I switched to Higgins Sepia Calligraphy ink after washing it out with a lot of water. Seems to be working a little better, but still not up to 100%.

Really working on shading to develop proper form here. Experimented with devloping the drawings a little farther with aquarelles and conte pencils, with a Cray-Pas highlight on the sphere. Strangely, I can't draw at all over sanguine conte, but over white it suddenly shows up really well - and I can draw slightly over bistre. Once I've put down the waxy aquarelles I can't go over them with anything.

Anyway, I hope I get the pen working again - it was not cheap at all, and I really want it to work like it did on the 1st page (part of it anyway).

Just to detail what I'm trying - here's a page I found with instructions on how to troubleshoot a fountain pen: http://www.rickconner.net/penspotters/troubleshooting.html