Cellophane Nights

I've been in an art rut recently, and just now seem to be getting out of it. This is today's duel. I'm gonna focus a lot more on lines and values for the next couple of duels, because those are the things that make a picture. Colour is sort of like icing, and a cheap way of making something read. Or, I guess, in really complicated scenes you need colour to tell things apart, but I'm not old enough to do big complicated paintings anyway.

Or am I? There's a new personal piece in the works, and it's gonna negate everything I've done up to this point.

Dude

The most valuable things in life are positive changes. Even if you are in a really nice place for a while, you will get sick of it eventually.

Cats and Barks

Things have gone astray. All I have to say is that people who say money can't buy you happiness are missing the point.

All the words you hear, like values, edges, temperature etc take at least a month to learn to be aware of. Certain ones, (like form) take years. Mastery comes after a lifetime.

I'm staying at this kid's house in Colorado for two weeks, and we're gonna paint ourselves to death. I will come out of this with a nice portfolio piece showing what I've learned over the last two months (if anything), and many many life studies.

These are my last Bargues because I let my lady borrow the book. Finally, here are the much coveted casts that I've been doing for the past two weeks. I've learned so much from them, and if I had another month perhaps I would actually learn form. But maybe I'll buy one of my own and study it to death instead.

I've got some life drawing too, but I'll post that later along with the awesome duels I'll be doing here. PEACE.

Where Do the Boys Go?

God I hate the discrepancies between the colours on my monitors. I draw my plein air and movie studies on my laptop monitor, so they come out with a poop filter applied. Good thing the Spyder3Elite fixes the problem! not..

Rainy Day

So yeah I started updating with regularity but then girlfriend happened again. Anyway here are some leftovers for you. Mostly studies for duels. Movie stills are from Terry Jones' Barbarians documentary.

If you want to succeed, you should always be behind schedule until the deadline.

Just Around the Riverbend

If people said things the way they were, there would be no humour. That's not only because we can very rarely (if ever) be honest with ourselves and other, but also because it's impossible to view things outside of your own bias. So the best you can hope for is staying as true to yourself as you can. Of course, how you define yourself changes every day, and there's no way your brain can actually formulate a wholesome definition of yourself (partially because it's not smart enough, partially because you're fickle and random).

There should really be a holiday where people only tell you the truth about you or about themselves, and you're not allowed to judge, criticize or get upset at them. Maybe I should make a short about it...

2 hr portrait + process + 20 min portrait + whole foods impression + duels.

Hope is Lost as the Worlds Collide

If someone is being an asshole to you, you should be a bigger asshole to them, because that will make them feel better about it. It's really the kind thing to do.

Tried to do a long pose today, and was disappointed because the model kept moving. I don't know how they do it at the Academy. Overall, abour 30 mins.

Run Your Sword Through the Enemy.

Bobby Chiu is right. It's all about how much information you're putting down with each stroke. The more cartoony your style is, the less information you have to think about. Since cartoons are a simplification of reality.

The more you "see" before you put the stroke down, the more efficiently you can paint, and your ability to "see" comes from studies.

Painting is a reflection of your thought process and as such it doesn't matter how many strokes you can put down in a minute. You can't make your brain think any faster.

Finally got back to life drawing today. Monsieur Bargue, I salute you for teaching me the way to draw. Learning fundamentals is like collecting a jigsaw puzzle, and I just got another piece. JENGA!!

Guess which ones are from imagination. If you guess right, I will draw you. For serial.

And then some duels!

Growl.

Back to regular updates. Sorry everyone for lack of Bargue. I'm still working on managing my time to squeeze in as many hours of drawing a day as I can. Maybe once I completely cut myself off from society... Until then, a man can dream.

Also, if you haven't found him yet, visit Ryan Yee's blog. Met him at IlluxCon. That dude is a baller.

Sorry that the colours looks like poo. I realized once I was done that the entire time I was doing my studies, my monitor was turned down to half way brightness. Super lame, but you can still guess that movie.