Sumi-Cereus

This was based off of a lovely photograph of my favorite flower, the Night-Blooming Cereus. The flower itself is difficult to draw due to its complex geometry, so I hoped to learn a bit about the flower, a bit about sumi ink, and overall lighting effects in the process. I think the result turned out well.






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Sumi Tigers

While on vacation, I had the opportunity to buy real sumi inks and brushes finally. Sumi actually goes by several names, Ink and Wash or Shui-mo Hua are included.

It is an interesting style. The ink makes it more difficult than other mediums while the brushes make life a lot easier. Sumi ink is harshly unforgiving, not so much because it's permanent-- that much you can say about "ink" in general-- but the ability to wash it down, which is encouraged by the style, means that you can work in gradients. If your washes are the wrong shape, or if you've gone too dark, or if you didn't properly blend your gradients, it will leave a noticeable mistake. The brushes on the other hand are wonderful. Longer, coarser, and more full at the base, they leave room to hold a lot of ink at once and to make long, graceful lines and shapes.

I just played around a bit today to get a feel for things. As usual I have taken a loose, wistful style of art and make it a bit too realistic, but I had fun in the process and I like the results. Tigers were an appropriate and practical subject, as you must use bold lines, thin lines, gradients, and motion all at once. I only wish I hadn't used sketchbook paper for this, as it clearly buckled quite a bit from all the liquid.

I. Sumi Tigers






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Back to Painting, Part8

Getting close to the end at this point, probably have a few more afternoons worth of painting to do before it's done.






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(Back to) Back to Painting, Part7

Update! I'm on vacation at home, a.k.a. what other Arlingtonians call a "staycation". Just hanging out and doing art for a couple weeks, much needed. I'm taking the opportunity to revisit my color study painting. I've had to give up on the idea of doing it at work since answering the phone and other projects have dominated my time, which makes for poor concentration.

I'm adding the more melon and vermilion influenced hues in now, and also I jumped ahead and started putting the final accent colors in. Overall, the colors in this piece do have a sort of gradient going on, but instead of working completely from the bottom up I'm putting the brightest colors in so I can measure what the extremes of color are. After, I will add the rest of the middle colors in whatever order seems best.

Latest version:






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More comic-style people

I now have access to Illustrator, which means I can finally get those crisp, near-perfect line I've always wanted. Ultimately this means I spend less time obsessing over inking perfectly curved or straight lines at the pixel level, and more time on things like composition and color.

I have been playing around with comic styles a bit, ranging from the silly to the serious. I think a few of these turned out well, even if the inside jokes don't translate here they're still good for showcasing the styles. I'll post these in the order I made them.

Justin's is of course my favorite. Ashley is great too, but only if you know the chick and her ukulele thing.


I. Amanda

II. Claire


III. Justin



IV. Ashley







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For the New Apartment

We moved, and it's time to decorate. We now have large wall space to work with, so why not work on a large piece? I have some ideas in the works, all of which I want to be large, dark, and very quiet about color. The most prominent of designs I've come up with is an abstract of a girl reading a book.

It is not black and white, but more like a dark slate with a burnt cream. It's extremely subtle, but the lips are the only accent color. I have liked working on this a lot, and I imagine doing this on an actual canvas would be pretty fun.

I. Abstract of a Girl Reading











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Pretending it's real/ Using styles

I'm working on brushes and effects just to play with some more styles in Photoshop. Here are a couple quickies that I've churned out this week.
The first is a snow leopard, a little cartoony, drawn up with a layered graphic marker effect.
Next I tried to get a shui-mo hua effect, which is an east asian washed ink style, and with the right color effects I managed to get a look that's reminiscent of gold paint. Also a snow leopard.

Lastly, I'm playing with a new technique I'm developing that takes 2 fundamentals into play: 1) you can make something beautiful/refined out of scribbles so long as your composition is sound, and 2) the colors of the paint spectrum (not light) are all comprised of red/yellow/blue with varying shades of brightness (black/white. I outlined the process in a couple pieces below. Start with a cool blue base layer, add a layer of muted-tone shadows on top, add a third layer of warm yellows & reds on top. Merge all 3 layers, apply Photoshop's Cutout filter. Lastly, play with tones until the color is balanced.


I. Snow Leopard (graphic marker effect)


II. Snow Leopard II (shui-mo hua style)


III. Pygmy Jerboa (RYB layered)


IV. Phoenix (RYB layered)




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Justin

Did a picture of my boy since he makes for such nice material. This is technically for his mom, since she doesn't have any modern pictures of him. I wanted to do something that captured the anomaly of him being both scruffy and tattooed, but also a refined reader and surprisingly polite and intelligent.
This is what I have so far, this was done entirely in Photoshop, no sketches, pencils, or paper this time. Having the tablet is getting to be fun.


I. Sketch

II. Blocking stage



III. (Mostly) Finished







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Delays..

Oh man, I didn't realize it's been almost 3 months since I last updated. I'm taking a break from the painting, which I do love working on, until the summer semester kicks in gear. Acrylic paint by nature dries very quickly, and a single phone call is enough to interrupt a delicate gradient in progress. It gets frustrating and I don't want to be bitter at the person calling me or at my job in general. So I need to wait till things slow down in the summer.

In the meantime, I can promise that I have not forgotten the arts, and in fact I have been working on something really really cool, something I haven't tried before. I'll wait till it's closer to being finished before putting anything up, but I will say it involves epoxy, hardware, a firing gun, linoleum, hematite beads, and probably an airbrush. What the hell, indeed.

Here's a little sketch I did a while back just to prove I haven't been totally slacking. It's a simple drawing based off of a ring-tailed snake. These are tiny little snakes that display a brightly colored underbelly when started instead of biting or rattling. Neat things.



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Back to Painting, Part6

More color is slowly creeping in. Lack of updates due to vacation, but I'm working more on this than ever. This is yesterday's work, I may have another post up later today.





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Back to Painting, Part5

It's coming along well, but thank god I have the ability to paint over parts. I think I painted over the new bottom-middle sections 3 times until I got the hues I wanted.

I am learning a lot about color and perception of color along the way on this one. What I initially thought was brown, then purple, turns out to be a very gray-orange. Also, I'm finding out that acrylics thinned with enough water not only become lighter but start to take on a yellowish hue. This had also thrown me off course. But I like where it's going now that I understand the palette better.

Back to Painting, Part4

Back to Painting, Part3

Back to Painting, Part2

Can you spot the differences?






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Back to Painting, Part1

With all the digital art I've been immersed in, I've been missing out on some of the foundations arts. Some months ago I came across an image I particularly loved of some terraced rice paddies during sunset. I tweaked it and played with angles and color until it looked like an entirely different beast, and I liked the results so much I began working on a canvas. Trouble is it is complicated enough that just doing the canvas drawing took "weeks", and since I only worked on it ever couple of days, that really has been months.

Now I'm finally getting to the actual painting in acrylic, and it's going surprisingly well considering how long it's been since I last painted. The only hitch is I'm painting at work, so I need to work quickly and efficiently between the phone calls. Acrylic dries FAST so this works out well anyway.

I wanted to keep a collection of the step-by-step photos for once (in fact I'm mad at myself for not taking a pic of just the drawing), so I'll post them here along the way.





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