Spatterings

Iggy Pop, Now in Full Color!

This is more like it, I think! Same old sketchbook drawing as seen below, but colored with Dr. P.H. Martin's Concentrated Watercolor dyes. I bought this stuff a long time ago, and let it sit in a dark corner. Which is appropriate, because the problem with this stuff is that the color isn't light-fast, which means if it doesn't sit in the dark, it fades.

Still, I really got a kick out of using it. Coloring on the computer can give similar brilliance, but applying colors with the Wacom palette is surprisingly tedious, because the pen tool is no where near as responsive as a good sable watercolor brush. (This is the real reason that computer art has yet to replace "real" art. It's harder to simulate old fashioned techniques on the computer than to do it by hand in the first place.) Coloring with traditional watercolor requires a rigid surface (either a piece of board,  a stretched piece of paper or paper on a block) because the many washes required to get similarly vibrant color warp a loose sheet of paper.

So I'm going to keep experimenting. Dr. Martin also makes a light-fast line of inks called Bombay Inks, and I just bought some of those. I'll experiment with them tonight and see how I like it.

Mid-week sketchbook blogging/The first ten minutes

Despite all, my sketchbook has been getting a pretty good workout, as usual. Still, most of the pictures I've done haven't been that memorable, to me at least. There's a pretty good Sonny Rollins, and a nice Sinatra, both of which I might post later. But it's this one obviously very loose image of Lucian Freud that I like the best.

There are artists who can very carefully, meticulous compose an image, line by line, section by section. I'm not one of those artists. For me, the first ten minutes of any given drawing tells me  whether its going to succeed or flop. I bang things out in a frenzy and then look up to see if they're thriving and kicking along with me or if I've just mangled a corpse.

When I find myself struggling at the beginning stages drawing and redrawing, rendering and re-rendering it usually means I have either a lousy idea of a lousy composition and I should just start from scratch.

But when the first ten minutes go right, I can do anything. With this picture, for instance, I could go in gently and tighten in up, or I could erase it lightly and distort it even more. Who's to say? For now though, I'm leaving it as is, one sharp little quick one in a sketchbook that's filling up nicely.

Post-holiday catch-up

Sorry for the lack of new posts, but the last couple of weeks have been a blur. I'll try to keep posting more regularly from now on.

Design work has been the culprit. The Studio did a flyer/poster design for a conference in Italy, turned it into an HTML mailer (and let me take a short aside to detail how much I hate HTML. I hate HTML a lot), plus a newsletter and white paper both filled with juicy, detailed information graphics. So illustration has been overshadowed.

But not abandoned! I've got two finished pieces that I need to post, including the "Stewart and Colbert Contemplating a Bust of Murrow" whose sketch can be seen below. The scan came out terribly, though, so I'm going to take my hand at taking a digital photograph. This is new territory to me -- I've never been much of a photographer -- but I think that my more painterly pieces suffer when scanned, so I've no choice in the long run.