Squeeze My Lemon

Just when you think you're progressing, you try drawing a lemon and it all goes to hell. I'm still directing all my attention to studying tonal values which is why I've moved to these small charcoal studies. These drawings are about 4"x3", part of me thinks this might actually be too big as I still catch myself getting bogged down in the details; even though I know not to do this. To be fair I'm a lot better at this than I used to be , I at least have some sort of approach now and I know what I'm looking for.

The first lemon is quite honestly a complete crime against humanity, moving to the second I had started to feel that maybe my paper was too dark. I had to add chalk to lighten the ground to the correct value and I'd prefer not to do this as the more chalk you add the greater the risk of everything getting mushy. On the 3rd try I moved to white paper; much better but I think I got the local value of the lemon too dark.

Below is a step by step of how I'm handling these sketches. Step 1 is the basic line drawing and shadow block in, Step 2 develops these shadows slightly and adds the objects local colour values and Step 3 is where I introduce black pastel to really bring out the darks. My Step 2 is a bit overworked and I'm overblending the final product a bit but because I'm mostly concerned with tonal value at the moment I'm not too worried about this. I'm sticking to willow charcoal for the time being though I'm finding it wipes off too easilly, so when it comes to placing the darkest darks I use pastel or conte crayon so that it stays whilst I work on the rest of the picture. Not too pleased with these but I am happy with how I'm starting to see all the different tonal values- this is improving and I think it has clicked.

Masterworks Tone Study Thumbnails

This week's update is a couple of small thumbnail studies from 2 of the Masters of painting; Rembrandt and Vermeer. These are only a few inches accross and are really designed as quick studies in how the Masters structured tone in their paintings. As I am mainly concerning myself with the study of tonal values at the moment it seemed liked a good idea (that and my teacher suggested it). I'm not sure how many of these I'll do, maybe just a couple more and then onto still lives. What's interesting is that not only do you have tone to contend with in the object you are painting but also in the picture as a whole. Both of these pictures have lost edges and sharp edges if you notice and this is something I will be using in my own paintings.

Boring Old Spheres?

Well no, what you are looking at here is the palette system for skin tones (previous post) put into pratice. You can attempt to paint a portrait without any kind of system but it helps a lot to pre mix the palette like this because it tells you exactly what value should be placed on any given plane of the head.
I felt that I had painted the first sphere too yellow with too high a saturation/ chroma. So I decided to go and look at some paintings both in a gallery and online. Now I'm not saying online portraits have accurate colours, they don't but as an exercise I felt it was quite useful- just to get an idea. I picked portraits from a few different artists and analysed the colours and values. I am sure some of the values on these are wrong but it did show me that I was closer than I thought, especially on the Sargent painting.
Sphere 3 is meant to to be closer to the De Laszlo portrait colours. I did this one slightly differently by painting an underlayer in white first. I wasn't really trying to do a Grisaille, I had found with the first sphere it was difficult to paint the lighter value colors without the dark canvas showing through.

Half way through painting I struggled to get close to his choice of colours which tells me that he might be using a different red and maybe yellow- I couldn't get the bright orange you can see just before the face goes into shadow. There's a lost edge on this sphere too as it goes into shadow, which I think really helps it look three dimensional. Next up is some rough small portrait copies I think.

Colour Palette

Not a great picture I'm afraid but shown below is the current colour palette that I am using to paint with. It is split up into 9 rows of 3; earth colours, reds and greys. My palette here is slightly incorrect because the earth colours should be at the top, one or two of my values jump a bit too far as well but essentially, this is what it looks like.

I changed this slightly from the version that I was taught by mixing Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine for the grey strain, this gives a blue/gray rather than the more neutral grey you get from mixing Ivory black and Raw Umber.

Where did it go Wrong?

Recently I have been putting some thought into why things went so wrong to result in me effectively giving up drawing and painting completely. When I was small I was always the artistic one in the class, I used to sit on my Nana’s ice cream fridge in her Belfast shop and draw- she would give me brand new pencils, pentel pens, special green paper pads and comics and I loved it, life didn’t get better than that. This artistic interest lasted through Grammar school and then started to ironically go downhill at art college.

I chose to study animation and it is probably here where I got it wrong, for a number of reasons. Number one to my mind is that there was very little tutoring and it was badly directed. The crucial thing that they did not develop was our drawing skills, understanding of painting and colour, form, lighting and to this day, 9 years later, you can still tell that no one has been taught how to draw. Trying to animate without being able to draw is impossible. We did draw of course, we had reviews but no one actually taught us any drawing technique, it was all mostly about self discovery. Whilst we spent no money on proper teaching and support, we did seem to be able to buy lots of Apple imacs to impress visitors as they walked around the studio.

I found Art College pretty traumatic, when it ended I wasn’t sure what I had achieved and I felt that I hadn’t managed to live up to my potential. I didn’t get a graduation photo, my parents didn’t understand this but it was because I didn’t think there was much reason to be celebrating. I kicked myself for many years about this, blaming my lack of ability and it was only recently that I discovered lack of teaching traditional skills is very common in art colleges.

When I started working in Video Games I put all my energy into genuinely trying to be good at my job, in the beginning it was exciting to be working, earning a living and at that point there was a lot of optimism. What I didn’t do was keep in touch with the traditional skills I wanted to have. This has changed recently as games are becoming increasingly technical they have drove me seek out those traditional skills again and I actually think there is some advantage to facing that wall as I have a lot more focus than I did when I went to college

Astrofunk Issue 2

A friend of mine , the very talented Ross Burt, asked a few of us to contribute a page for his up-comming comic Astrofunk. Seen below are the pencils and inks from my offering.

Things like this are good to do because it pushes you into areas of discomfort. In my case I'd literally never attempted a composition like this and really my drawing is not quite up to speed just yet. My inks should be a lot better but I was literally doing this piece by the seat of my pants. That and I was figuring it all out as I went along and I only had time to go with the first draft. I put his ear in the wrong place too if you look closely, schoolboy error.

Sketchclub- Knight

Alright, so....

Cheating slightly with the theme this week but who doesn't love a bit of Gladiator? I even made the costume once for halloween, it took weeks of bending cardboard into plated armor and in the end I was beaten by a guy dressed as the tin man who just covered himself in tin foil- but hey, I'm not bitter...

Here is this week's sketch club entry (see link on bottom right of blog). First off I was trying various things with this drawing, I'm not particularly good at doing tight comic style line so I was using conte crayon and a smudging stick on this. I don't even know what I'm doing half the time so it's all about experimenting and having fun at the moment. I might do a second draft of it, strengthen various things, the form isn't so good, or the lighting and the pose could have a bit more life to it. But there you go, comments welcome as always and don't forget to check out the Uncanny Sketchmen blog for all the good stuff that's missing from your life.