Have been going to a virtual plein air quick painting group.
Trying to get in the habit of roughing in accurate landscapes in short (10-20 min) sessions.
Virtual Plein Air Hangouts
Trees
Just starting the next month of the Magic Box
here’s a first quick image for the Trees assignment
Gestures Galore
Still at it. Wow, it’s amazing how much of a difference repeated practice makes. Just in the pure eye to hand motion of being able to capture things in the right size / position.
Additionally I’m making excellent progress on the thirtydays.club website. The whole thing is coming together and I hope to have it ready for a late October launch.
On the downside.. the 3TB drive went belly up and a bunch of not essential but useful stuff went byebye.. All the really important things were of course backed up.. but there were a couple huge folders of painting videos that I’m going to miss having around. (the backup stopped working in June when I had to re-install the OS)..
Gestures – the halfway mark updates 9 and 10
And to wrap up the second week, updates 9 and 10.
Still working on getting the badges system put into the whole thirtydays.club sit, and defining the suggested ‘rules’ But essentially I’m leaning towards enforcing it to a minimum of 5 updates per 7 day period (ie work days only) so that will allow for weekends off or vacation etc. Also you’ll be able to post images for the current 7 day period all at once, that discourages cheating and encourages returning to the site regularly. Still need to look into scheduled emails, or a 1 click create a calendar entry to import to your ical or google calender, to help keep the user focused on the task.
Looking back to day 1, I can clearly see that the basic 1 minute gestures are feeling much more confident.
Gestures days 6-8
So I’m giving myself weekends off, so 5 exercises a week for 4 weeks.
I’ve started building out the thirtydays.club a website for letting artists do this same thing and share the results and earn badges for completing a challenge. I’ve got a good 7 or 8 different challenges already planned out and the core guts (forum, social integration) is pretty much there already.
I hope to have the core platform up and running by some time in October.
Anyway here’s the next 3 studies. Continue reading Gestures days 6-8
What’s Next- 30 days of drawing
So I discovered that the focus of having a real imaginary (??!) deadline helped keep me focused even when the epic skies image was wearing me down. So I made a list of all the things that I know I really need to work on and came up with a list. Then I organized that list based on a. how fundamental it is, and b. how much improvement I think i can get froma month’s worth of focused study.
And so it came to be that the next 30 days will be spend doing 1,2 and 5 minute life drawing gestures (using a wonderful Youtube channel called the Croquis Cafe)
Epic Skies – Song of the Storm.
Day 21 – Song of the Storm
Still just plugging along. But it’s getting to where the end is in sight.
Cloud cover
Plugging ahead and working on the next Magic Box assignement.. Epic Skies.. This little scibble…
is gradually turning into this:
I’ve been attempting to get up extra early and get an hour or two of painting time in before work, and it has been….mixed results. Some days things have been great and some days, the lil 5yold seems to have adjusted his schedule as well…
Ah that post painting funk
Ok after a little breather It’s time to get back to working on things that are fun. Finishing a painting is both exhilarating and exhausting and I find myself having to take a couple days and recoup my creative energy or I’ll find the need to go back and fix, and tweak and tweak irrisistable. But taking a bit of time away lets me just be proud of what I’ve done and let it be.
After a couple days I had a little fun playing with skin rendering and trying to get a sense of translucency. One of the many attempts actually turned out to become this guy, which has a nice tone to it that I like.
Followed by a couple silly monsters following my son’s obsession with pokemon all of a sudden.
And then this thing.. .. this might become a thing.. it’s still rough, but it’s speaking to me. It started out as a perspective homework.. then became an epic skies homework.. and now it might be something else altogether..
On an art related note, I cracked some oil paints open for the first time in 7 years (it was a disaster then) and … holy cow…I’m loving them..
Something about the transparency and the need to go slow really just works for me.. maybe it’s because I’m getting older and not in as much of a hurry. Not sure exactly what it is, but I’m doing some test pieces and maybe finishing/reworking the initial disastrous attempt and who knows maybe they’ll be worthy of showing on the inter-tron some day.
The Littlest Knight
Missed a few
Ok missed a few updates like updates 24-32.. they’re there, just not gotten around to posting them
However on sketch 32 this little guy popped out.
and then I decided he needed a chance to get a world to live in. And by 37 it was looking like this:
Then pulled in some rough textures and and blocked things in a bit more.
By update 40 the trees were looking flat and the overall color was beginning to be a bit washed out.
And that puts us here at update 41, time spent pushing back the stone some and final rendering of the character and more minor details.
Still need to touch up the bear, abird and pants, but we’re 99% there.
More Make-a-thing days end of m1
OK so i lost a few days to kids, illness and a mini-vacation to PAX South (which was awesome!)
But none the less, scribbles were made, but i’m having a hard time ‘finishing’ even these things. So I’ve been making myself to more and more thumbnails to just start being able to see the composition before starting on the actual drawing. And i feel that it’s been improving my sense of wholeness of each thing, if that makes any sense. That and watching The Hair lessons on the Magic Box there was a total ‘ah-ha’ moment, where talking about visual rest and the need to NOT render something felt like it clicked. ( see the goblin girl’s hair below)
But finally I’ve watched a bunch of other artist talks and one struck me as particularly poignant, essentailly you should be able to describe your painting in 5 values. Which I did below and a couple of them are fairly successful. Now I used the full range and the same 5 values across the board instead of selecting high key / low key values specific to each thumbnail which was probably a mistake, but I’m actually pretty happy with the graphic result.
Other misc thing a days, that were more of a mental check out rather than focused on actually learning something.
Ok Failing to grasp cloud structure was kinda fun.
Other than the overworked face and broken neck structure.. this was actually much nicer looking 45 min earlier. 
More thing a day, week 2.
More art and stuff playing around. Trying to make a conscious effort to design shapes that works as a whole instead of just pieces that fit together.
Start a new Year with a thing-a-day
Start of a new year.
But it’s time to get some practice, so in an attempt to do a ‘thing a day’ here’s the first 8 days worth of things, Even the ugly stuff, even the unfinished stuff. Lots of it is just technique practice or late nite scribbles (or both).
