Spider-man Silver on Black

Okay, not that almost everything isn't a first for me at this point but this is a first on several levels.

Last week when I visited the art store and was going through their clearance paint, I came across a tube of silver and suddenly mind mind was awash in visions of silver on black paintings.

I think the first vision I had was for Daredevil sort of three images with Daredevil facing in three different directions.

Also Spider-Man was another idea.

After I painted the painting paper black, I got stuck in what to do.  Other than the superhero idea, I thought maybe just having a partial skyline like that I observed in Chicago.  So I painted it black on Tuesday night and then let it sit to dry but then I got stuck on what to attempt.

Luckily, I was reading a comic book series at the time called Secret War from my Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars Battleworld Box Set and this particular series had different heroes set against a mostly black background.  I pretty much had decided on either Daredevil or Spider-Man and in the end, the Spider-Man seemed like the best one to go with.

So this is also the first action scene I have drawn or painted.  In some ways, I'm happy with this painting.  I guess for my skill level, it is recognizable and the silver paint ended up being harder to work with than I anticipated.  It was a bit thicker than the other colors I had worked with, but since I was going with a simple design, I could paint over lines or too thick of lines with the black.

Here's the cover art that was the basis for this painting:

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

My First Painting!

Ego Is Skeleton #1

The seed has been growing in me for a while.

My Self-Portrait 11 had been placed on a wall where I saw it more and my eye kept getting drawn to it.

An inner voice urged me to try something with the same image.  And then I went to see the Van Gogh's Bedrooms exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute last Wednesday and Thursday (March 9th & 10th 2016). And finally the breakthrough to try paints overcame me.

Yesterday, March 12, I stopped in the local Hobby Lobby while running the weekly errands and bought an acrylic paint set and some paper for painting.

I took the kit apart. Examined the paints. Watched a little bit of an introductory video and then just jumped in. I decided not to sketch out the design and as a result, it is lacking the otherworldly distortion I would have liked to capture more of.  I also would have liked to create more texture on either side of the path.  Other parts I am quite happy with.  Even though this is originally based on a photo and then on a drawing, I think it evokes something in my imagination that created a feedback loop.

Here are the original photo and drawing:

Basis for original drawing from March 2015

Self-Portrait 11 from March 2015

Figure It Out! A Great Drawing Book for the Fledgling Artist

Well, it's been several months since I have updated.  It has been a very hard few months as I had a protracted cold and work has been very hard in throwing up those petty little annoyances that make getting any meaningful work done.  I only did one or two drawings in the meantime, usually based on videos from a very good YouTube site called My Drawing Tutorial which has a variety of tutorials.

I also received a human figure manikin and a hand manikin for Christmas and I spent quite a few pages just drawing the figures in different poses just to let my mind build new neural pathways.  But I was not finding satisfaction in my progress.

It finally occurred to me to see what kind of drawing books our local Hobby Lobby has (I don't know why it takes so long to think of these things) and I found a great variety of books including one called Figure It Out! The Beginner's Guide to Drawing People  which is the opening photo for this essay.

One of the reasons I decided to get this book and another one called Draw 50 Famous Cartoons: The Step-by-Step Way to Draw Your Favorite Classic Cartoon Characters is so that when I felt like drawing but didn't have a major project of my own to satisfy my urge, I could have some ready suggestions at hand.

So, starting Sunday, which was March 6, 2016, I drew my first drawing from Figure It Out! which was a male human face:

And I thought it turned out pretty well.  Yesterday, Monday, I had a full day off of work and no other chores to do so  I was able to devote several hours to drawing and drew these:

One of the main lessons I am learning from this experience of teaching myself to draw is the expectation of perfectionism.  Now intellectually, I know I shouldn't be able to draw perfectly right out of the bat, to kill a metaphor, but emotionally it is much harder because as an American who went through the public school system, we are psychologically damaged so that we are constantly measuring ourselves against our classmates and this causes us to devalue both ourselves and the work we can produce.  I think this kills our imagination and puts us into a low-self-esteem mode that makes us more manageable to government bureaucracies that enjoy managing our lives.  And we've been taught through experience that we aren't very valuable anyway, so why not let some controlling sociopath control our lives for us?

The other thing I've learned is that drawing can be very hard on the beginner, even though I spent probably 5 hours at the drawing table yesterday, most of the time is spent on the initial step of getting the oval shape of the head right.  But I have decided this is okay as you see, I drew the same image twice, once where I couldn't get the shape of the head right, or at least, to my satisfaction, but I decided I would draw it once to completion and then draw it again and I was very pleased with how the second attempt turned out.

This morning I was having the same problem trying to draw a head facing to the left and in that case I left my misshapen oval and decided to do a blog post.

So there's the update!

Me, as an Artist

As I continue on my journey, teaching myself to draw and use color, I have come to realize what a true study and discipline art actually is and is meant to be. I am constantly thinking back to art class in grade school and how the discipline of art wasn't really emphasized. It was giving kids colors and a task but either you could draw or you couldn't. You were either good at art or you simply had to tolerate it until you could go on to study real subjects in high school.

I remember in the second or third grade we had an art teacher who went off on a rant at the end of a class when were were tasked with drawing Santa Clause. The teacher may have emphasized that she wanted action in the drawing but didn't really explain what she wanted very well. The thing I remember most about trying to draw this Santa Clause is being stuck on the nose.

Drawing a nose was a big issue for me in my early years of school. Whenever I had to draw a face I would feel my nose and I felt my nostrils and nose formed a sort of soft letter “m” but when ever I tried to represent this, the nose always ended up looking like a pig nose. This was so frustrating to me and I didn't understand I was attempting to represent the most 3-D part of the face on a 2-D plane, and I understood nothing about shading, I doubt I ever heard the word and if I did I certainly didn't understand it.

So, when the teacher was going off on her rant about how all of the Santas were looking static, I was still stuck on the disappointment of having drawn yet another pig nose when the teacher stopped at my desk and held my drawing up as an example of, at least, an attempt to put some action into the drawing because my Santa looked like he was taking a step forward.

Well, this was because I also had trouble drawing symmetrically and I drew one boot in black marker that was smaller than the other boot so it looked like was taking a step forward to my teacher, whereas to me, it just looked like I couldn't draw two sides of a human body that looked the same and I actually felt worse because I was being praised for something I didn't intend to do. And plus, my Santa had a pig nose!

But the good thing about this incident is it had enough of an emotional implication that the memory has stuck with me and while I was reflecting upon this memory, that as incompetent as my drawings at that age were, I was attempting real art. I was attempting to represent a human nose as it was. I studied my own nose and I looked at the noses of my classmate and even though I couldn't not competently reproduce what I was seeing, I was striving.

Had an adult been able to explain this much to me and cleared up some other misconceptions I had picked up on kindergarten (the teacher had said that people had skeletons and we had to draw them not as Popsicle people but we had to include the skeleton, I thought I had to start drawing by drawing a skeleton first, then I drew the skin and then I drew the cloths and while it sounds funny now, I was very stressed out over this as it didn't make any sense to me) then maybe I could have gotten over that hurdle and started drawing a long time ago.

But these are the things we go through in this live. I don't think they are to be regretted. Yes, I would love if I could have been drawing sooner but I recognize that this is life and we are all going at our own pace and if it took me to 50 to make it past this block, well, at least I made it past that block in this lifetime. What else is there to do in life? Nearly everything, and perhaps everything that the culture or society or that very small group that festers within governments and universities that decide for us that which is important as you mastering yourself, overcoming those hurdles and pains that the culture makers have laid inside you in order to make you a more easily controllable citizen.

As you exercise your own discipline to study what you are in this life to study, as you become more of an artist in and of your self, the threat of would-be culture creators diminishes and you become more you without the drawbacks of egotism and narcissism, which are traps laid by the culture creators to keep us more keepable.

When I first started drawing, I was loath to label myself as an artist but through the process of observation, disciplined study, and self-discipline, I have earned that title. I am an artist. Regardless of the scale or skill level, what I produce is art.  If it touches other people, that would be awesome, if I am the only audience that can appreciate my art right now, that just as valuable.  We don't all start out equally nor do we all finish equally but we all have an equal chance of making something that is unique to who we are.  And that is the only equality there can be.

Dream of Art Fair and Balloon Ride

20151024 Dream

Me and my fiance are going to some sort of neighborhood art walk of some kind. Driving there is weird and the sequence repeats at least once. I'm driving and looking for parking, we come to a place where the road is blocked off for the art fair. I make a left turn up this hill that describes an arc around a big grassy knoll. We park and my fiance has to go and talk to someone else right away and so leaves me on my own. The parking sequence then repeats only this time there was rain and as I try to drive up the hill around the knoll the car slides to the bottom of the hill and gravity is off, the car is like a bumper car in a reduced gravity environment.

So I am on my own and I am walking toward an info table and the lady tells me there is an unannounced group that is about to perform just across the street. Well, I am the only person in this area, other than the information woman, and she is talking to someone on the phone trying to let them know where the performance is going to be. She ends up putting a Richard Nixon mask on the street the nose pointing the way.

I walk across the street and there is an alleyway where a bleachers has been erected. I see some props on the stage, one is a highly stylized vampire coffin and I can see an actor inside preparing and there are other props like this with people getting ready.

I ascend the bleachers and head for the middle of middle of the bleachers and I see two women who are performers walking down from the top row of seats. I'm a little worried they are going to bore me by talking about social justice stuff, I get this impression from the stage props although now I do not know what triggered this, and one woman asks me my name and then asks me about my brother.

I start telling everything about my self and how my brother's death affected me and I feel weird doing it, like I am giving too much information. She asks me about money and I explain I inherited some money and bought a house with it. The other woman seems judgmental about it, like “how can you have money and a house when there are so many problems in the world” while the other woman is not judgmental at all.

My fiance arrives and I ask her if it isn't incredible that this is going on, how we lucked into seeing this performance but she goes on a tear about how, in announcing the show, the organizers where splattering all over everybody. I don't see it that way, but I do wonder if they sent out a psychic message and because I was already close to the stage there was no need to hit me with it.

My fiance ascends from my lower left to above my right shoulder as the actors take the stage and the bleachers are transformed into a basket for a hot air balloon as we start to rise up into the air.

As we are flying were are not very high up yet and I can see houses in a neighborhood. We are gaining height but there was on roof that is scraped by the bottom of the basket. As I look down, I think I am looking at the roof to my house which is later confirmed because there are a pair of shoes in the back yard and the dream fills me in I was doing something to freshen the shoes and I had changed my shoes before coming to the art fair. There is a man sitting on my right and I exclaim to him that we have just gone over my house and I would have tidied up the back yard a bit if I knew we would be flying over. He says something to to effect that I shouldn't worry about it.

The balloon describes an arc and we are in an open field at the edge of the neighborhood. The man on my right directs my attention to an evergreen tree at the edge of a field and a road and there is a man standing inside the tree poking his hand out waving at us. It is a very white hand and then other actors appear on either side of the tree and start singing a song but we are too high up to hear them properly and I think about how amateurish the show is but, on the other hand, I am getting a free balloon ride.

Then I begin to wonder how they turned the bleachers into a balloon basket and how, since I was sitting in the middle of the middle of the bleachers, I ended up with such a good view at the edge of the basket. I feel bad for the people in the row behind me because I don't think they can see anything and they might not even be aware we are in a hot air balloon.

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.

My Vision of May 4, 2015

Isabelle Tuchband's studio looks something remotely like my vision

Parts of this actually came to me on May 3, 2015 but it wasn't until I sat down to draw tonight that I thought I should write it down:

In the not-to-distant future, I know this because I look much the same as I do now.  I have a very large art studio, most likely a converted barn, I see sunlight streaming in from the skylight and art and materials piled everywhere and a loft and a ladder leading up to the loft. And there is welding equipment because even though I am very satisfied with drawing right now, it is not enough, and I get satisfaction out of drawing down what I am going to make in whatever material.

I am wearing clothing unfamiliar to me, black shirt where the sleeves come down to about my elbow, and shorts that come about down to my knees.  And I am wearing black shoes and black socks of some kind. I am wearing glasses but they are black rimmed and I have a welding shield on my head.

I am smiling as I walk to my current project. My beard is longer too. I feel like I am made up of cones. my beard is a cone blending into my chin, my arms are cones blending into my shirt sleeves and my legs are cones blending into my knees and when I have my welding mask one my head looks like on giant cone with a big black Cylon eye.  I am also slimmer and more, how you say...sinewy.

Gary Numan is blasting throughout the studio as I am walking to my latest project.

Some friends are outside but they hear the music and they say, "No, it is Gary Numan Telekon, he just started working. We'll let him go for a while. We'll let him listen to all of Telekon and all of Replicas and if he starts The Pleasure Principle we know it is a good time to visit him."

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!

Interlude: Between Self-portraits

Teaching myself to draw is one of the most rewarding things I have done in a very long time.

After my last self-portrait, which is available as the previous post on this blog. I felt I wanted to draw something else. Really, I wanted to draw a flower but I didn't feel comfortable with my level of skill in making a flower "pop" from graphite and paper, so I found this photograph from Olbrich Gardens with some flowers in it:

Even though I am not happy with how this eventually turned out, it was fun to attempt and more importantly, I learned a very important lesson.  If you see the subject's shoulder is exagerated. This is because at first the face was too wide so I made it a little narrower but I didn't alter the body which was was already drawn.  Again, like in my last self-portrait, number 5, I drew this and the remaining images upside down and I didn't really noticed this distortion until I turned the picture right-side up.  But the idea that I could erase a part of the face I had already drawn so much around was a revelation to me

Here is the photo:

Here is a second drawing I did. I found this one very interesting because of the light play. Also, I did not quite know what to do with the arms since they are cut off, that has been an issue in other drawings too where only a portion of something being drawn appears in the photo. The difficulty is I am not focused on creativity at this point but working on getting a likeness and yet sometimes.

Also the shading was interesting. I think I went a little overboard with the darkness for the shading but at the same time, I discovered I had a tool that lets me blend the graphite. It is like a little white pencil and I am sure it has a name but I do not know what is and, I obviously haven't mastered its use at this point. I find the likeness I achieved in both these instances interesting and yet still wanting.

And yet, I am starting to imagine being creative though no definite vision has yet presented itself.a

Finally, and perhaps because of my thoughts of eventual creativity, I was inspired to recreated somebody else's creativity. I recently bought this book, AMERICAN GROTESQUE The Life and Art of William Mortensen as a present for a friend and while I haven't given the book over yet, I used  the cover as an inspiration to draw a more complex drawing.

I used the actual book itself and it was a little dark where I was working so it was very hard for me to determine some of the detail but overall, I am quite pleased with how my reproduction turned out.  It is really the first time I have attempted a full body drawing and here there are two full bodies and they are even intertwined to an extent.

You can get American Grotesque here at Feral House and other places where fine art books are sold, I am sure