another 20 min

20 min

...ah, what the hell

...here's the whole goddamn lot of 'em!

I love the way they sort of wiggle into place around the page, as if somehow they struggled to find elbow room and finally came to rest comfortably, each in their own territory. It always amuses me to find what composition one automatically creates while scrambling for white space and black ink, one 40 seconds drawing after another. That's a "right brain" exercise if I ever found one, since all of the conscious mind is busy enough trying to interfere and mess up the actual task of drawing each figure, and therefore the unacknowledged task of composition is truly automatic and should be a good diagnostic of how much "art" has really sunk into your subconscious.

...and a few more

more brush

chinese brush (2)

It was my first experience with a really wet chinese brush. To look at that deep black ink as something that can be erased, washed, pushed and pulled across the page, then built upon, layer upon layer, in such a forgiving, dynamic way, was amazing fun. Then class stopped momentarily for tea and cookies, a revered ritual there, and as I sipped at my cup it came to me to play with a dry brush. I loved the way it refuses to hold a point, it was even more my kind of disaster than the fluidity of a wet brush (isn't it amazing in how many way something can slip out of your control?). First you realize that a thin precise line is impossible. Then you stop desiring it altogether. Every stroke creates random masses of semi-parallel lines, in which your intention, speed, and boldness of action - or timidity - are apparent. Nothing counts as much in such a stream of furious lines beyond the sincerity of the charge. I found myself swinging and singing under my breath, and marvelling as the shape started fading in, each pencil of lines defined not a and not by a shape of a bone or muscle, but by its "motion", or by my motion as I stroked it mentally in passing. A body defined by the physical memory of the way you slapped it admiringly with your moving hand and brush. It was my favorite drawing of the day, by far...(you can see it two posts below this one)

male nude in chinese brush

Figure Drawing - Male Nude in dry brush

Stalking her shadow...

...with those voracious little eyes...I am sure she caught it in the end.

or, in Portuguese:

"A minha sombra fofa e' mesmo igual a mim
para onde quer que eu vá ela vai atras de mim
E quando eu faço assim
Ou quando eu faço assim
Ou quando eu quero tentar fugir, fugir, fugir, fugir, fugir,
fugir, fugir, fugir, fugir...
Ela foge tambem!"

-Rua Sesamo

(Thanks, R., Sesame Street Specialist)

Excuse me

...while I concentrate on my serious Art.

Caught under the charcoal rain

Bruna

male nude (1)

Lately I've been taking figure drawing classes. Since this blog has been a bit dead lately, I decided to start posting some of the results. Here is a quick drawing in charcoal. Mostly drawn with the eraser over a dark charcoal layer. I wish I had more time to work on this exercise, it was really fun.

Felt like being a serious artist, for once

Mortality

Having a bad day. Spilled Cola on my laptop, unplugged it immediately, turned over to let it spill, left it to dry...and 20 minutes later realized that the damned battery was still in. Poor thing...now I'll wait 24 hours to see if it will manage to survive or if I shorted it to death.
Next, went to check on my backup, an external Western Digital...and it's dead! Bloody hell! It was working just last week!
I have years of work on those two drives, and lots of drawings. And pictures, memories, some not backed up anywhere else.

Yet, what is strange is this...somehow... I am feeling very cool about it. I know years ago I'd be out of my mind. Not now.

Is it possible that I am finally accepting mortality?

now jump

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Shiver me bones

I really really must get myself a proper skeleton model. a hundred anatomy books cannot substitute for a 3D model that one can actually touch and see from a continuum of angles(damn, is this an indictment of drawing??).

I can't resist saying it. Browsing this shop gives me a boner. :)

Forensics

"the only good way to clean the bones was to simmer them in a covered steam vat for the better part of the day, then scrub off the softened tissue with a toothbrush (not my own personal one, mind you)...Needless to say, [my wife] wasn't thrilled when she arrived home to the stench of cooking flesh and found a decaying human skull and femur simmering in her eight-quart kettle." (link)

No, it wasn't CSI that got me to nose around the field of forensics (though I was thrilled to learn of its exitence through a friend). From a love of the living body comes a curiosity for the dead, and a penchant for science leads to the need to pin down reality by measurement and classification. So drawing leads to anatomy and anatomy leads to forensics. And then you start roaming around life with X-ray eyes, enunciating insertion points and bony processes where once mere fleshy lumps used to lie.

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Vanitas

Brush on moleskine, vainly a little bit cleaned up on photoshop.

3 asian heads

In spite of different positioning, the pattern is clear. After scaling to align height of top of eyebrow and bottom of chin (let's call that "face") one finds facial features size (both height and width, though not shape) to be mostly similar: eyes, nose, mouth, mostly take up the same real estate on the face. What makes or breaks the portrait is skull proportions, which differ wildly: how high is the widest point of the cheekbones? On one example it happens just below the eye, on another just above the nostril. What is the shape of the skull's outline? How many eyes would fit between the outside of the eye and the outside of the skull? On one of them, about one eye, on another there is almost no space. The first thing to get on a portrait is the gesture of the whole skull, not facial details.

airborne indiscretion

Brush Pen 6

at the airport

Brush Pen 4...and 5

The quasipronti guy as he prepared my fusilli.



...and a random civilian with gorgeous hair.