The difficulty is ramping up quick. A lot of detail in the beard of the face on the right; a lot of points to coordinate. A couple of hours in and still at a very rough stage.

I'm working on two at once now, going back and forth to keep my eye fresh. One other thing I've realized about the early plates is that you can just enlarge and print the specific element you're working on, and even position it right over the drawing surface, since you're not trying to copy the existing 18''x24'' page, just the elements on it.

I've put together this handy questionnaire to help you decide whether to buy a cool retro video game cabinet for your living room or basement.

Are you an electrical engineer?

If yes, go for it, have a blast.

If no, don't bother.

I suppose the "no" answer could be reconsidered if you have access to an electrical engineer. I, myself, don't. I don't have time to become one, I don't know any locally, and I can't afford to pay one anyway.

I put my beloved Defender back together after it sat idle for over a year following its last repair. To my surprise and joy, when I reassembled and reconnected all the boards in the back, it worked! Perfectly. Just amazing. I closed up the back, wheeled it back into place, turned it on again, and got this.

Again.

Buzzkill.

What's wrong with it? I have no fucking idea! Did a video RAM chip pop or something after being on for 45 seconds? I pulled it back out to look and see if there was anything obviously wrong, like a wire on fire or something. Nope. Everything looks exactly the same to me as it did before, but obviously there's an electron out of place somewhere. That's that. I can't fix it, and now I have a dead machine... again.

So: if you're thinking of buying one: don't. Unless you have the skill needed to diagnose and fix problems like this.

And here's a new year's resolution for you, fellow sysadmins: compress your goddamn logfiles. Hunt them down like a fox and get them compressing, regularly. I just got back almost 20% of my server's space, just by compressing a year's worth of Apache logfiles for my vhosts.

I am also resolved that 18 months is the limit for storing raw logfiles on my boxen. Nobody cares how many hits your site got in 2004.

I've learned the folly of new year's resolutions, but this one I'm serious about: 2009 will be The Year of Anatomy. This fellow to the left is going to be an integral part of that.

I took the artistic anatomy course in my MFA program at AAU, which was a perfectly fine introduction to the subject, but it was fairly superficial in many ways and I don't remember a whole lot of it. One of the things I lacked was a really good reference model that would help me relate the endless diagrams on the page to 3-dimensional space. This will nip that in the bud, but good.

I'm going to put myself through the course again, using its progression as a rough guide, but at a rate of one month per module instead of one week. By the end of the year, I will be able to draw this figure, well, from memory. Ideally, from any angle and in any position. I have half a dozen good anatomy reference books, and I will use all of them, plus master drawings, plus photographs of bodybuilders, working and learning each muscle group and area until I know it backwards and forwards.

Enough is enough. It's been five years since I took up the pencils again and I still can't draw a decent, realistic figure out of my head. 2009 will be the last of those years. By this time next year, that problem will be in the past - not that I can't spend the rest of my life continuing to improve it, but I want the mental handcuffs off, and all the gaps in my knowledge of human anatomy filled.

I will post a celebratory figure, drawn from imagination, on December 31, 2009. Put it in your calendar now.

Someone on a messageboard I frequent suggested, during a methodological discussion of working on the early Bargue plates, that it might be helpful if I documented my procedure so other people could compare. So, today I did one of the faces from plate 1,2, and took photos along the way. Comments, crits and suggestions welcome.

Please note: I am a student of this. I am not a teacher. I do not claim that anything I do here is right, and I'm willing to bet that at least some of it is wrong. Take with a grain of salt anything you adopt from here; I'm sure I'll be adapting this process myself as time passes and I do more of these. I haven't even done 20 of these yet.

That said, onward.

Elucidate...

First job, now that I have my neutrals tubed: re-do my value scale. And as you can see, I made a few extras... while I'm at it, it's not much more work to make a few more. Paul Foxton inspired the holes with his dog tags; being able to hold these things up and look through them helps to quickly find the approximate value of whatever you're looking at. Very, very useful.

Scales, reference chips, tubes.

I also repainted my spheres. I'm a lot more confident in them now.

Back to Bargue while we wait for them to dry!

This picture probably only means anything to about 0.00001% of Earth's population, but I'm very excited about it.

It means I've mixed and tubed all nine of my Munsell neutrals, each one mixed from the appropriate amount of ivory black, burnt umber, and titanium white (except the darkest value, 1, which was just black and umber). These were all done by eye against the glossy value scale. None of them are completely perfect, but they're a whole lot better than my first effort, and having whole tubes of each is going to be massively, massively useful, even outside of the exercises we're about to embark on. If I have a value X color and I want to drop its chroma (a common task) without altering its hue, just pick the neutral of value X and mix it in. The hue shift will be minimal, if any, and I can just carry right on instead of trying to warm the black (which is really blue) or cool the umber (which is really orange).

Just believe me. It's winnage. Tomorrow I finish up my value scales and spheres, which are a little over half done, and should be a breeze to complete now. Just paint by numbers from the tubes.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand one down. Seven to go on this page. And a few hundred plates to go in the book. Yeah.

This one was a bit of a procedural anomaly, but I decided to go ahead with it for the first one. After erroneously copying the schema in the book (not shown below; my copy of it is second from left, after the original master), I then produced my own next to it, refined it to curves (third from the left), used transfer paper to move it over, and finished it on the right in charcoal pencil.

The other seven I will do without the intervening stages. I was hoping I'd get this one done by tomorrow night, but that looks iffy now. These things take a long time... I'd guess this first one took a good six hours. That's atypical because of all the process/learning I had to do, but I would still be surprised if I could do a good one of these in less than 1½-2 hours.

(also tubed up my values 1 and 2, and verified that 8 and 9 were good, so I just have 3, 4, and 5 to do, and then my value scales. That should definitely be doable by tomorrow night.

One of the many artistic plates I need to keep spinning is my Bargue studies. In fact, I need to really crank up the heat on these. I took a couple of leisurely months on the first one. This second one, I need to finish this weekend, at the latest. More on why later.

For the first one or two, I'll copy both the mockup layout (below) and the finished drawing; then I will probably focus just on the finishes. Part of the goal here is to understand the significance of the setup lines, and what M. Bargue is trying to teach with each setup. On this one, he seems to be emphasizing the notion that the corner of the mouth is vertically halfway between the top of the lower lip at its highest point, and the frontmost edge of the lower lip as it protrudes. One small fact. Good to know.

There are literally hundreds of plates in this book, and this is 1/16 of one of the simplest of them. There's a lifetime of teaching in them. I need to keep them going. Picasso and Van Gogh, among countless other artists, have copied these plates. I should always have (at least) one in progress.

OK, now the semester is really over. I made a last effort to improve one of the paintings, which was supposed to be a "show the focal point" exercise rather than a "render with precision" exercise. I didn't understand that at first and I don't think the composition I did was one that could be easily reworked in that direction, but I did the best I could with it. I don't know what the final grade on it was, it was turned in right at the end of the class. It started here:

...and ended up here:

It hurt to go in and obliterate so much of the detail like that, and I literally painted gray oil-tinted medium over the whole thing twice to increase the blurriness and decrease the value and chroma of most of the piece. I think it's fairly clear where the focus is now, but I have no sense of how the overall piece works or doesn't anymore.

Final grade for the semster: B-. That's the lowest final grade I've gotten at AAU so far; presuming an A in my renaissance history class (which I think is pretty safe), that's a B-, B, B, A-, A, and A. I was hoping to do better than the B-, but it probably isn't unrealistic given that this was the first time I used oils, and a B- is a notch up the "good" scale. The work I did towards the end of the class was definitely stronger as I got the hang of them more, and give me another 20 years or so and I should have a good handle on them.

Meanwhile, back to Munsell exercises, and drawing, which I really have missed. I pulled out Antoine tonight too and made a couple of small tweaks, and I think she's done. I'll do another one of these in a month or so, but I've got a few projects I need to get finished before then. More NSFW artistic nudity inside, which I've already posted, and the tweaks are so small you probably won't see them.

Elucidate...