Ego is Skeleton #2

Ego Is Skeleton 2

Well, my second paiting is almost done.  Who knows, maybe it is done.  I don't quite feel it yet. Maybe I want to do something with that tree?  Maybe I do want to add something that resembles cobble stones on the red path?  Maybe I just want to touch up the parts where the canvas still comes through.

Oddly enough, I like it much better when I see it in the smaller size.  It is much closer to the vision I have in my head.

In this version, I like the road side much better and I like the arch much better.  I also like the figure much better. I felt I got the effect of a wraith-like being while giving it some substance and a little more character.

I am going to post my pictures from my last blogpost just so that people who want to see all of the pictures together will have a one-stop.

Ego is Skeleton 1

Original source photograph

Original Self-Portrait #11

Self Portrait Number 17

Well, it has been months since I have produced a self-portrait.  Over the summer I had a greater interest in drinking a beer while reading from my Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars Battleworld Box Set after work, but as the end-of-day sunshine became impossible to capture and the  weather worsened I have taken refuge in my drawing table once more.

This picture is from a video I made back in October. I had been looking for another project to work with my water color pencils and this screen capture had the rays of sunlight at my head making it fun to try and capture.

After Self Portrait 16, I was anxious to work with color again but every attempt I made was unsatisfying.  I began to get frustrated with nearly everything I was trying to produce and eventually just took to doing the occasional practice drawing.

After the long summer break, I had enough time between drawings that I went back to using the drawing upside down technique for this project.  Much of the anxiety that presented itself after Self Portrait 16 had receded and I just started drawing as if I had never taken a break.

I think Self Portrait 17  took at least two months from start to finish which points out to me the need to record the start date just so I know my own progress.

I did get some wonderful new tools for my drawing for Christmas, a brand new drawing table.  A nice LED light that stretches across the table, some flesh tone pencils, a male form drawing manikin and a male hand manikin. So since Christmas I have been practicing action shots with the manikin.

Now that I am at the end of the year and have produced 17 self-portraits and a variety of practice sketches, I am very glad I started on this last year.  I still need a lot of practice but I have drawings that I have drawn.  The idea that I cannot draw has been vanquished, it is only to figure out how to sketch certain things or control the ratios and perspective of what I am attempting to draw.  I look at the world differently now.  When I look at a person or an object, my mind starts breaking the basic shapes down and I am constantly asking myself, 'How can I draw this? How can I bring out the color in this?" so that this has been one of the most successful New Years Resolution-type things I've ever attempted.

Self Portrait 16

I'm still behind in getting out one self portrait per week but I am learning a lot. Mixing colors, watching YouTube videos, patience, and when to stop for the night.

Here I think I did a pretty good job. Maybe even a very good job. I might go back and see about adding a visual representation of the stands and maybe to touch up anything I notice later but essentially SP 16 is in the books. And only 7 days after the last one which happened to be on Walpurgisnacht.

Today, all I know about was the British elections, and within a week of the last one.

Well, don't have too much to say tonight. Brain is ready for rest.

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

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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.

Self Portrait Number 12

Another week with very little time to draw. When I was about to sit down on Friday night, suddenly there was a plumbing problem to attend to. Saturday we celebrated my 50th birthday and other than getting some art supplies and arraigning my pencils, there was no time to draw.

Sunday, I finally sat down and I chose a still image from a movie a friend took with my phone while I was at my birthday cake. But Sunday I couldn't make a go of it. I started five or six times and abandoned each time.

Yesterday, Monday, March 30th I had some success:

I am very satisfied in how this one turned out even though I have more of a bubble head and the shadow looks more like some sort of ancient helmet.  What I like about it is the glasses.

Ultimately, this was a very challenging portrait. It is the first time I tried to draw a profile and at the same time there was so much shadow and shading to contend with. One part I really struggled with was getting the glasses right and in the end I think I got the nose and the glasses pretty well.

I do wish I had started the portrait more to the right side of the page but after so many false starts I decided to concentrate on the face and so I ran out of room for the corner of the birthday cake and the candles.  Oh well. It is only number 12.

Bonus features: For the party, I decided to hang all of the drawings I felt were complete. It is nice to see so many considering I only started on January 7 when there may have been a sacred geometry drawing or two but nothing more:

Self Portrait Number Eleven

This week I had no time at all to draw until Friday night and I wasn't particularly enthused with my choices.

I had this picture in the middle of winter as a fun way to acknowledge Chillpack Hollywood Hour's 400th episode which ended with a rare technical glitch: The theme song ended before allotted time and one of the guys could be heard saying, "We ran out of theme song."

But when I considered this one in the past as possible subject for a self-portrait I rejected it because my face is so covered.

On Friday, I just decided to draw for the sake of drawing, I wasn't intending to make this anything but an exercise in noticing shapes, which is why everything is so rough but when I looked at it the next morning, it reminded me of The Scream by Edvard Munch so I decided to add colors, not aping the original scream but evoking it.

Unfortunately, I did not have paints, only some felt-tip markers that were marketed as "brushes" but respond nothing like brushes and many were already dried out even though I only bought them three weeks ago.

Oh well, I only bought them on a whim and so I added waters to the dry markers and proceed.

Even though this drawing looks no better than something I might have been forced to draw in grade school, I find I like it very much. Somehow the way I chose to add color makes it pop and look very 3D.

I could not fit everything into the placard I was holding in the original picture so I chose to abbreviate it as "Ego is Skel."

I think this is the most artistic thing I have drawn so far and that it evoked The Scream to me simply fit in with my mood this weekend.

On Thursday and into most of the day Friday, I was on a very high good feeling place after having some people over to my house on Thursday night. But I feel I have been falling since then and even though I had no conscious intention of expressing this in my drawing, it is there nonetheless.

I will have to get some paints soon, maybe I will recreate this on on a canvas and it will be my first canvas? I don't know.

Here are the images:

Bonus! Bonus! Bonus! Man Screams At Yellow Paint!