Here is a before and after shot of a life drawing done from a model. I hardly ever finish a whole drawing with the model sitting in front of me. I like to have some really dark areas, and those take up a lot of time that could be better spent on other areas of the drawing. I think it’s good practice to figure out tones intellectually from time time to time, instead of only observationally.
Unfinished drawing done from a model
Life drawing touched up later
Rhino in Cave of Forgotten Dreams
I finally got around to watching Werner Herzog‘s film ‘the Cave of Forgotten Dreams.’ I was blown away by the drawings and how modern-looking they were (30,000 years old). After taking a ton of drawing classes, I can tell you that not very many people, even with years of training, can draw with the grace and confidence of those cave drawings. I also noticed some sgraffito in many of the drawings. Sgraffito is the fancy Italian term for scratching a painting or drawing to get back to an underlying color (I guess the Italians didn’t invent it, after all). I didn’t hear anyone talk about it in the movie, but maybe I missed it. It’s there though, the highlights around the edges of the rhino’s head and feet, scratched out where the artist is defining the subject by adding the negative space around it.
Here is the movie trailer on YouTube for ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams,’ in case you are the other person who hasn’t seen this movie yet.
Chris Hondros Tribute Painting
Green Revolution
This is a commission I have been working on for the last several months. It is based on Chris Hondros’ photojournalism in Egypt. Mr. Hondros was tragically killed on assignment in Libya in April 2010. This one has a ways to go before being finished, but you get the idea. I’ll be doing several oil glazes to build up nice, deep colors over the chalky white areas. I’ll post more photos and a bit more about the concept when I finish the painting.
Drawing on vellum
I’ve been doing most of my drawings for screen printing on vellum these days. Vellum is basically really nice tracing paper and takes the ink nicely while still being transparent enough to expose with. The image here is black ink on vellum, on top of a two color screen print. I like that the drawings look good by themselves and are a more direct method to transfer to a screen than using a digital print from a scan or photo of a drawing.
I got some new lights and am still trying to figure out how to get the best pictures. I still have a little tweaking to do with the lights and camera settings, but these are almost there. These are all charcoal and Conte crayon drawings I did from short poses working with a model, and then went back into them later to clean them up and add some darker tones.
