Graffiti Face

The above painting, which I am calling Graffiti Face, is another painting I made from leftover paint on my brushes at the end of my painting sessions. There's actually nothing I don't like about this painting. The muted, dirty colors, the accidental nature, the patchwork-y deposits of color, the fact that to me, it's a face painted on a concrete wall.

I want to paint more like this, but whether I could do it again to my own satisfaction, I mean, whether I could reproduce this particular style and make not look contrived is questionable.

I also painted two limes tonight (see below). The very minor challenge was to paint them and retain the appearance that they were in a bowl, without painting the edges of the bowl. I'm pleased with the way it turned out. I bought these limes from my avacado man. I love limes. I love their thin skins and they way they fit in my hand. Unfortunately, I don't usually eat limes. I use them in drinks and in guac from time to time. I guess I'll have to use these in a beer.



I also painted the avocados I bought from my avocado man. They were delicious when the painting was done.

life drawing session #2, frantic lines in pen and ink

So this week I used pen and ink. As it would turn out, my black ink is almost gone and the replacement I bought was actually white ink (not useful in this case!), so I used the brown ink I had on hand. I liked the sepia look so much that I think I'll try it again.

I'm a little rusty with pen and ink, but I think there were a lot of neat little things happening in most of the drawings.



I think this was the most successful of all the pieces:



like the figure on the left more than the figure on the right, and am annoyed that one of them is proportionally larger than the other:



This was a neat little moment, part of a larger image that had little else good about it:




I dislike the shortest poses, but this piece below was a nice little procession of gesture poses across the page. Torsos elongated.



wish she had held this one longer:



Her longest pose:

sad discovery

I haven't painted in a few days because I'm organizing my apartment, which means I'm doing a lot of sorting and some throwing away, etc. I came up on some illustrations I made years and years ago. I have always been really attached to these illustrations, but I've discovered that they've been water damaged. Somewhere in the move between here and there, or sometime in their storage folded up in old newsprint paper, they were exposed to something that has dried brown. This is very sad--I can still see the images more or less just fine, the paper is now warped a little stained, and not in an attractive way. I guess I always had this coming, because I never did much to protect them--never really knew what to do with them--so they sat in storage and I pulled them out once per move while packing, and looked at them, touched the paper, and put them away.

These scans aren't the best--the paper won't lay flat on the scanner now, and the images are much larger than the scanner will hold.

This is an illustration of a poem by Robert Browning. It's a bit weird.

Life Drawing Session 1

I went to a life drawing session tonight--the first one in about 8 years. I was a bit nervous, during the drive to the studio. It's been a long time, and I knew I wouldn't know anyone there.

The studio was in a scary neighborhood. Maybe not scary, like,...lots of gang activity and crime, but the sort of scary that made me think, if there is a serial killer in the city where I live, this is where he skulks. It's where he dumps the bodies. There were no houses, no businesses--only brick warehouses and semi trucks. The roads were in terrible condition. I arrived at dusk, and it was just spooky.

The session was totally cool. I was instantly comfortable. I started at a table but moved to the floor so I could bend over the drawing pad. I had a beer.

We started with gesture drawings.





Then we moved to longer poses.





The model pulled a gun for one pose. (it was a prop...I assume)



They switched to shorter poses at the end. Too bad because I had switched to a larger format, and that was working out nicely for me. But because of the shorter time for each pose, these last drawings remain unfinished.






These are all 18x24. I need to spray them with fixative, but what I remember of fixative, it sort of changes the image...makes it darker in places, less fuzzy. Does this happen to anyone else? How can I prevent it? Is there anything better to preserve the image?

Oh yes, by the way, I got completely filthy.

Edit, 7/19/10:

I've been wondering the last few days, looking at these drawings from time to time, why I don't draw the model's mouth. And well, I do sometimes, but not usually. It's possible I'm like a child who draws people without arms and hands because he subconsciously feels a lack of control. It's also possible this is an aesthetic choice. That I secretly believe a mouth would look wrong if I drew one. I can't decide.