Ambition: Fueler of Dreams or Dream Killer (SP 15)

My ambition to produce one self portrait a week has gotten side-tracked by my ambition to work with color.

After Self Portrait 14 and the fun of doing a mostly landscape color portrait, I picked a picture with quite a bit of blue in it and I spent two weeks just working on getting the drawing part as good as I could and finally I decided I needed to move forward on the color.


The drawing I had intended to be SP 15 is still a work in progress but while trying to figure out how to blend color I finally saw that I had bitten off way too big a chunk so last night I made a mini drawing of my face and tried to find something with the colors I have that approximate skin tone.

Dougie Anime

d

Oh! Wait! No eyebrows! Here we are with the signed version:

I really needed those headlines too! And you can see the lighting difference too, when I drew this one I used a LED bulb but when I touched it up today I used an awful old earth-killing CFL.

Onto the ambition part, the lesson I learned from working on the more ambitious project is that finally, I am ambitious about something, maybe for the first time in my life, and I like to encourage my ambition but this time I may have over-indulged in it and threatened my new livelihood, not livelihood in terms of making a living at it but livelihood in that it makes me feel alive to dig these things out of me and share them.

And that is the Master Run-On Sentence! Take that, Grammar!

Anyway, I will have to decide if I should continue work on the intended SP15 or shelve it until I learn more. I'm included to simply work on it and do my best.

Here is the color worksheet that SP15 appears on:

Self Portrait 14: Back on Schedule

As I reported in the Self Portrait 13 update, that my drawing has been much more of a flow since I have been listening to Gary Numan from his Replicas and other Metal Period albums. This week, the idea came to me that the reason for this is because when I was 15 and 16, however old I was when I first listened to Gary Numan, I was at the height of my potential.  Or something like it.  And instead of using Gary Numan to relive my so-called glory days, I am using Gary Numan to tap into the limitless potential I had when I was that age.

I do not wish to be that age again. I like the age I am now.  It feels like the perfect age for me.  But I do want that potential I had back then. I want the thrill of discovery like I had when I first discovered Philip K. Dick and Gary Numan with my friends. But I do not just want that thrill of newness and discovery just for the sake the thrill of the newness and discovery, I want to channel it.

The other thought that struck me is how pure an act of true magic it is to exercise my will and recreate a photograph into something coherent on the paper.  To work my will and create something that did not previously exist in the world and that it is something that only I could bring forth.  And when I put all my effort into a drawing and I feel that tiredness that feels good.  That feels like I have done some real work today. That is sheer joy.

And I then the third dominant thought I have this week is how my friends in podcasting, Phil Leirness and Dean Haglund of the Chillpak Hollywood Hour and how I would not be doing any of this now if I had not listened to their show in January that inspired me to do my best. To draw and put it out there no matter how bad or good I might think it is, because it is the act of drawing and struggling to improve that is the important part, not the fear that I may not be good enough or that I may never draw for anybody but a very small audience. But that is enough.  Thank you Dean and Phil for getting me started allowing me a visit every week. It has been a blast so far.

And thank you to all my friends who see my drawings and encourage me.

This week, I really wanted to experiment with color once again.  About two weeks ago, I bought some water soluble colored pencils so I had to find something colorful to draw and I settled upon this picture of me playing my flute from March 9, 2014 at sunrise on the Sanibel Island beach:

I am very happy with how my first use of these colored pencils turned out.  First I I worked on the drawing and blending the colors. And I really liked just the pencil but it was rather streaky and the beach had very little beach-like feeling to it so I continued by making the beach darker.  I even tried to draw in that sea slinky that is just to the left of me in the picture but that definitely didn't look good.  I tackled the beach first using my broadest brush and working the light as best I could.

Next I worked on the sky starting with the cloud, then the sun, then the rosy dawn and then I worked on the central figure and decided to just make him grey against all the color except for a little brown for my flute's pouch.

I also purposefully decided not to draw feet since they are cut off in the photo in order to make it feel like the figure, who is me,  is some sort of spirit coming out of the sand.

Thank you for reading.

Self Portrait Number 13:The "Replicas Word Salad" Edition

In the last two weeks I feel I have achieved a breakthrough in my drawing. It started when I started working on Self Portrait Number 12 and I put on Gary Numan's Replicas album.

Me and my friend, Jay, discovered Numan, I think in 1981 shortly after we had started reading Philip K. Dick. I'm not too sure of the timeline but we discovered Philip K. Dick shortly before he died in 1982.

We were drawn to Numan's music in part because his early albums have a science fiction theme. The self-titled Tubeway Army, the first full album by Numan and his band starts off, "Flow my tears, the new police song.." which is an obvious reference to Dick's 'Flow My Tears,' the Policeman Said.

The second album, Replicas, takes place in a future where humanity and technology are alternately at war with each other and loving each other and certain characters on the album are either humans attempting to become machines or machines emulating human traits.

While all science fiction is really a reflection and commentary on the era in which it was written, it is very interesting to compare Gary Numan's vision of Machmen, 'Friends,' the police, and humans and see how it compares to today.

In Numan's dystopia, there are electronic robots known as 'Friends' that seem to exist for humans to love, they have different faces but they are all programmed the same and at times, while listening to the album one is never sure if the character narrating the song is a 'Friend' or a human. Or if it is the opposite of what it claims to be and is simply confused in its thinking.

In the Machmen, the protagonist appears to be a human trying to fit in with machine culture, he starts out eager to please whoever or whatever he is singing the song:

"I'd give it all up for you, even become a number just for you. The strangest living boy you could ever wish to see. That's me."

But he cannot quite seem to be able to quit his humaness, first he grows to resent himself:

"then my mind turned on me with a vengeance I had never known, my own."

And later he turns on his new culture:

"I saw you behind the wall, I even heard you laugh at me, you disgust me tonight with your answer to something new, that's you."

Today we have our own version of 'Friends' we call smart phones and while I don't feel I have any level of intimacy with my smart phone, I will not share my phone with anybody who I do not have a level of intimacy with. If a stranger asks to borrow my phone, I cannot lend it to him and I even feel violated that he has asked.  Yet if it is someone I have a level of intimacy with, I don't even think twice about lend them my phone.

Very often, I wonder who I am when I look in the mirror.

I actually took the picture as an interesting self portrait to draw because of the weird way we have mirrors in our bathroom.  First of all, it is not easy to find a place in the bathroom where one can stand and have two faces reflected in both mirrors, so that was the first challenged.

Then, of course, starting the drawing process. I actually tried to start on this drawing a few weeks ago but only ended up making some rough sketches.  I am very satisfied in how this one eventually turned out.

It took me three or four drawing sessions to complete. I had almost completed it by the time it would have been due, which was Wednesday but I ended up finishing it up on Friday, not having any time or energy to work on Thursday. Overall, I like it.  Seeing them side by side for the first time, I do see where improvements could be made. Right now, I am adverse to even using a straight edge as I train my mind to draw what it sees, to the best of my ability.

Dream of Great Dane, Two Lions, and a Tabby Cat in the Morning of the Blood Moon

This morning, 20150404, I woke up around 1:50 AM and watched a little bit of the lunar eclipse through the window and I went back to bed around 3:00 AM. I did not watch the eclipse the whole time and I missed the blood moon part but I did see the shock of moonlight suddenly brighten through the window around 3:00 AM when the eclipse ended.

After going back to bed, I had a dream. I dreamed I was in my mom's basement and there was this huge Great Dane there. Even though I identify where I met the dog as my mom's basement it wasn't her house. When I entered the house it was this great mansion and the basement even wasn't really her basement, it was more like a great dining hall, only after hours or after a party and there was clean up going on.

The dog suddenly appeared and seemed very happy to see me. I was not immediately warm to the dog, I liked it well enough but it was so big, I definitely made a “no dog in the bed” rule but somehow I started talking to the dog and I could understand it. It was like someone I had known a long time ago and I was happy to be reunited and I let the dog sleep in my bed.

In the morning I am upstairs in the mansion and I see what I think is dog waste on the carpet and it disgusts me but I do not want to think ill of the dog. There is a guest registry nearby and when I walk to it I notice that the mess is just an item of some kind that fell on the floor.  Probably a dog toy but in my memory it looks a bit like a fishing bobber.

The mansion aspect of the house is both very elegant and yet somehow stuffy and not very bright. No natural sunlight is getting in.

I go outside to get some air and sun and it was once again my mom's house and I am in the back yard looking at one side of the house where I see a tabby cat at the border of the property. It is very small and cute and with a greenish tint to its stripes and as it moves closer to the house it gets bigger and bigger. I am approaching it to see if it is friendly when I realize that it is a mountain lion, a female one. I freak out because I do not understand how I could so thoroughly misidentify a tabby cat.

As I look on I see the Great Dane trotting out in the front of the house when it sees me it has this look of curiosity and fear on its face. I yell to the Great Dane to stay where it is as a full maned male lion suddenly appears next to the female mountain lion.

I start trying to get to the back door of the house but I have that horrible dream thing where perspective is skewed and I am both impossibly far from the door and I am very heavy and can barely move.

I wake up and it is 5:00 AM on the dot. I am having a mild gas attack but it makes me wonder if I am going to die? Was the dog Anubis? Was I embracing my own death when I embraced the Great Dane?

Later I thought that perhaps the lions represented some solar configuration, like a sun dog, I had seen a sun dog once, years and years ago driving back to Madison from Milwaukee and the two suns were very close to each other in the sky and it reminded me of how the maned lion appeared next to the mountain lion. Kind of close together, maybe 4 or 5 degrees separating them and both sort of blobs, not circles. Or maybe one was a circle and the other looked just as bright was more of a blob.