Weekly Animals 2

This past week or two, Toads/Frogs and Caterpillars have been on the list of things to draw. Here's a few pages from my sketchbook. you can also look at some previous ones.

Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth is easily one of my favorite movies of all time. So the other night I went through it and did a few quick "composition studies" in my sketchbook. I watched the audio commentary with Guillermo Del Toro and those are always impressive. The amount of thought that goes behind every decision on one of his movies is incredible.

Still Lifes

In the past year I've done a few still lifes. In the two books I've been going through for oil painting (Oil Painting Techniques and Materials and The Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing) they both suggest to get the drawing down first. Then mix up and paint the background and ground tones. Mix light, halftone and shadow tones for the objects and simplify the tones as much as possible with a big brush. And hold off on details until you have everything else down. 

It sounds straightforward, but when you actually sit down and start painting, things suddenly become incredibly complex and stay that way... Until a few hours later, when you either have a painting that looks similar to what's sitting in front of you or it looks nothing like it and you just have to hope that you learned something useful for next time.

Skull and Flower Pot oil painting

Primitive Tim (The Soundtrack)

About a year and a half ago my friend Timothy asked me to write the music for his show/ youtube channel called Primitive Tim. So over the past year and a half I've written a fairly large amount of songs for him. A few people have asked if they were available online somewhere, and they weren't. Until now!

I put together a cd with all of the more substantial songs and put it up on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon etc. and it finally went live this week.

Famous Artist Course, Lesson 9, Gas Pump Gouache

This week I had an assignment from the Famous Artist Course to design and draw a gas pump, gas can, and V-shaped sign together. It had to be painted in black and white gouache.

I started with some sketches just to find an arrangement i liked (I went with the top left). I later got rid of the modern gas can and went for an older one.

With the basic layout in mind I drew this at the same size as the finished painting.

I brought it into Inkscape really quick and messed around with the tonal arrangement. 

After Inkscape, I did a finished perspective drawing (which for some reason I forgot to photograph) and then painted on top of that. Here's the finished painting. 

And here's a close-up of the gas can, which is about 2 inches tall.

This assignment was fun. Gouache is new to me. I like it, but it has a mind of its own. 

Lights, Cameras, and Sketchbooks. At Staples.

I had about 30 minutes yesterday to sketch something. So I parked behind Staples, it was the first place I saw. The sun was going down. I knew from last time I was around here at the same time that the lighting changes completely within minutes. So I took these two pictures to share on here (I didn't use any of these for the sketch though). 

I took this right before I started sketching. I noticed everything but the sky (and that tiny light) was like a giant dark mass.

I took this one right before I left. Everything had shifted.
Now the sky, ground and buildings had all gone dark together. While that light in the foreground kept appearing lighter and lighter. 

So basically the whole thing had shifted from light in the background, to light in the foreground within 30 minutes.

 In my sketch I tried to meet right in the middle. That weird moment with the last of the sunlight fading, and the power of artificial lights taking over. In the 30 minutes I had, I think I spent about 25 on the pencil drawing. By the time I was finished with that I could hardly see anything. Both inside my car and outside. And I had to go. Next time I'll try to get the drawing done early so I can focus on everything else while it happens.

Clutter and Christmas Sketch

Yesterday I sat down for a while with a ballpoint pen and sketched a corner of my house. I thought about straightening up the area to make a cleaner picture, but decided against it.

I like doing these kinds of sketches of random scenes from everyday life. In a few years when I look at it again, it will seem strange that it was ever real. This sketch will prove that it was and I'll remember it much better than if I had just taken a photo. And all the seemingly insignificant memories of what was going on at the time will return a whole lot more significant.