patchwork skin grafts
I drew these little parrot skulls using a felt tip pen and added color with watercolor and a paintbrush. I’m working on a screen print of Carolina parakeets after a colored print by John James Audubon.
Audubon’s epic print folio “The Birds of America” in book form was the first artist monograph book I checked out at the public library. I was in grade school and had read most of the bird books in the kids section. I remember very clearly discovering the the bird section in the adult part of the library and how excited I was by the overwhelming amount of books loaded with pictures and information.
I started a Facebook page for my art. May I suggest you ‘like it?’ Many thanks Internet.
https://www.facebook.com/RyanMcJunkinArt
Here’s a few pics of my drawings from Saturday. I’ve been drawing a little larger on the 5 and 10 minute poses and standing a little closer so I can see a little more. I’m trying to vary my line width as much as possible and simplify my initial sketch, which is most visible in the first drawing of this gallery. I’ve been trying not to sketch at all and go straight into the darker line drawing, but it’s difficult to keep the proportions under control without laying a simple plan first.
I had a good day on Saturday at the Faultline Life Drawing session and did a bunch of drawings in the morning that turned out well. In the afternoon I thought I would experiment a little and try drawing directly on the screen and print them later, The screen’s smooth surface made it a little tricky to draw on, but it was still pretty easy. I used Caran D’ache water soluble crayons and compressed charcoal to draw on the silk screens. I used some screen filler to block the ink on a couple of the screens as well. Printing was pretty straight forward, I used a transparent base without any pigment on a couple of the charcoal drawings and they look pretty good. I mixed some bright red on some of the other prints. They didn’t turn out perfect, but I would call it a success. I’m more interested in mixing this technique with some others, rather than using it by itself. It has some exciting potential for sure.
The drawings are 5 minutes in length and under. I find there are a lot of little surprises in the quick ones, and the models can push the poses a lot more. I’ve been tearing out little blank sheets of paper from larger crappy drawings and doing drawings about a minute in length on them. I’ve been bagging them up and have them available in my studio. Most of the small ones are under $10. I’ll have a ton for Faultline’s Open Studios on November 10th which is coinciding with a building wide sale at High Street Lofts.
It’s been great hosting life drawing at my studio. Getting four solid hours of figure drawing in every week is really helping my ability to understand and draw the figure. This week we had one of my favorite models from the Bay Area Models Guild, Jenny. She’s the closest thing to a pretzel they have. She always seems to have one more twist or kink in all her poses than the other models. Here a few of my favorite short poses.
The Gallery Girls are an awesome little group from LA and are up to the Bay Area to host a couple of drawing events. The first was at Tr!ckster, and the second is going on right now. I’d apparently rather sit on my ass in front of a computer than sit on my ass in traffic so I’m skipping the San Francisco event. I went to one last year and it was pretty impressive. I think one of the challenges to drawing events is to make them fun, and the girls do a great job, music and booze helps tremendously. They also do a great job on the costumes, and the models are all fabulous. The extra effort they put into making it special is well worth it and puts it apart from other figure drawing events.
The theme to the event at Tr!ckster was ‘The Dominatrix,’ which I thought was a bit bold for the first event at a new venue. As you can see from the drawings, it was a lot tamer than it might sound. I was disappointed and relieved at the same time.
