…mostly

I think this one is about done. Finished the brush blending and overall tone balancing, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. There remains the issue of the large open spaces of the quadriceps area and the peroneus/extensors area of the lower leg, and if I have a wave of bravery, maybe I’ll lay down a little light hatching to try to fill some of that space. This is a large drawing, about 12″x24″.

Next up: hands.

Kind of sad how the last picture you take with your old camera is a picture of your new camera.

So today I got my new Nikon D5000, and retired the Canon PowerShot IS3, which served me faithfully for about 4 years. I think. Seems like every new camera costs about $1000 by the time you get your accessories sorted out, and it’s a huge leap over the previous one. This is my first DSLR, which I got because it can shoot HD video (well, 720p) (and, uh, only about 5 minutes at a time, but that’s enough for my purposes), and because it’s 12 megapixels instead of 6 and should take better pictures in low light than the point-n-shoot. I have two main needs for my camera: (1) shoot pictures of people, especially fast-moving kids, in low light, and (2) take better pictures of my artwork.

Well, I expected the images to be better, but I didn’t think they’d be THIS much better. This is a view of the difference. Both of these images were shot under the same light, with basically default settings. The d5000 is on the left, obviously, and it’s not even a high-quality image; just standard quality, auto everything. The difference is staggering.

It can do neat tricks like rattle off up to 999 pictures at regular intervals, keep an moving object as the focal point even if it moves within the field of view, and tons of things I haven’t discovered yet. I probably know 1% of what this camera can do. Already, I’m amazed by it.

The one downer is that I discovered tonight that it has a “hot pixel” which is red just off the center. Although this dot is too small to see under normal conditions, and is trivially fixed with a single click of a spot-heal brush in Photoshop or Lightroom (really, it’s effortless, just one oink and it’s gone), I know it’s there, so it’s like a splinter on my glorious new device. However, it seems like this is a very common issue with DSLRs; they just have so many pixels that one is bound to go bad, and one out of 12,000,000 is not something to worry about. In fact, you could argue that about every fifth pixel on the other camera was bad. Look closely at all the red junk in there. When only one is wrong, it stands out. Apparently it can be quickly fixed by Nikon, in software, but many people don’t even bother to do that. I haven’t decided yet. If it means shipping my camera off for a few weeks, it’s probably not worth it. We’ll see.

I think of the 1280×720 video mode as a 24-frames-per-second continuous shooting that can go on for 5 minutes, by the way, out of which you can select stills for drawing from. It’s too bad they’re limited to 5 minutes because of file size (2gb), and I expect this will not be a limitation on my next $1000 camera in 2014 or so. We’ll see. For now, it’ll do me fine.

(…for now)

This one was supposed to be a quick study, but it took on a bit of a life of its own. It’s not what I’m planning for the larger piece, but I do like it. Black and white charcoal on blue paper, 13″ x 10″.

I’m planning a few more of these studies, working out some issues and getting used to these materials (pencils and brushes), and then a full-sized composition.

I remembered my white pencil tonight. Still burning through the Strathmore velvet gray paper left over from Head Drawing at AAU.

All on one sheet: a few gestures, a 10, a 30, and a 45. Should be pretty obvious which is which. I got a little too ambitious with the 45 and couldn’t finish it – what else is new? I was supposed to be focusing on legs tonight, but the truth is I had a hard time seeing her leg muscles in most of the poses. The other is the final 45, which I probably should have done bigger… when the fingers are about the width of the tooth of the paper, hands are going to be even harder than they usually are.

I used to think that people who said you had to see paintings in person to really get them were just snobs who wanted to flaunt their glamorous travel stories.

Maybe some are, but after seeing the Waterhouse exhibit in Montreal, I get it. Twelve hours of frequently harrowing driving for six hours of viewing time, and worth every second.

You’ve seen images of Miriamne, I assume. But you don’t realize that this painting is almost nine feet tall. You don’t see the nuance of barely-visible greens and pinks in her dress that set it apart from the stairs, or the blush of flesh at her thigh. You don’t see the brilliance of the gold decorations on the stone lions, or her own headdress. And most of all, you don’t see her eyes; her look that is full of defiance, and pain. Stand before this painting and it will knock you to your fucking knees.

Go to museums. Seek out the great works. See them in person. Please. It’s important.

Work in progress, a drawing of my favorite model. This is actually a procedural study for a larger piece; I like this blue paper and the black and white charcoal, and I’m trying out the concept of using a bristle brush to smooth the initial charcoal layers for tone, and then going back over with hatching and lines. I want it to look like a drawing, not a photograph, but I do like the smoothness of tone that you can get with brushing. Thinking Prud’hon and Greuze here. Got a ways to go on this one still, obviously, but the broad strokes are in, and now there’s a lot of modeling of form to do.

Firmly into study of the whole leg now, from the pelvis down. Tonight’s model happened to be a young lady with an athletic build, which is always a nice bonus when looking for specific anatomical features. You can’t see the ilio-tibial band on just anybody.

I think the legs might have been the most successful drawing of the night. The drawing from the back isn’t actually a bad likeness, and I got distracted by her triceps, which I haven’t studied yet, so I couldn’t get as nuanced about the shading. Overall, the lines in her face are too dark. I have to get that under control. For the last one, I was trying to think more about a constructionist approach with cylinders and so forth and trying to get the shape of the abdomen nice and round; didn’t have enough time to do extremities or a likeness. Any of these poses could have been done a lot nicer if we had had 3 or 6 hours (or 30) instead of 40 minutes, but we know that already.

13″x10″, black and white charcoal on blue Canson mi-tintes paper.

Trying something new on this plate: rather than blending with a stump or a chamois, I’m using a hogshair brush to blend the strokes of charcoal. It’s a gentler process and it’s a bit easier to control than a chamois and less destructive than a stump, but it does take immense patience. It takes a LOT of brushing to smooth strokes out. This close-up shows the before-and-after of the process.

Doing this does seem to darken the overall value somehow, so I’m having to backtrack and do some light erasing afterwards. A chamois cut to a diamond tip seems to be a better way to do this than an eraser, which is also quite destructive to the tooth and surface of the paper.

After going over the whole drawing this way – which is going to take a while, especially at the foot where there’s a lot of tone – I’ll need to go back and make overall value adjustments, and then add some hatching lines back in over it in key places to emphasize anatomy and make sure it still looks like a drawing at the end. Got a ways still to go here.

Today was a rough day. But we had a decent life drawing session, at least.

Just did legs during the gestures, posting some notes I need to get back to (like how far above the knee do the vastus lateralus and the iliotibial band separate?). Then a 10-minute pose which I felt was one of my better ones, then a 30, and then two 40s. The head study drew some nice comments. I forgot my white pencil tonight, so I had to keep it simple.