I used to do more of these. [...]]]> This is not a perfect likeness of the subject, but it is still a doodle, and you’re supposed to draw everyday, right? It’s too f***ing hot, for the fifth night in a row, to contemplate anything like digging into that long-overdue Bargue plate I’m supposed to be working on.

I used to do more of these. Mostly when I didn’t have a better sense of the harder-core things I should be studying to actually learn things that will accelerate me quicker. But they’re fun, and we should never lose sight of the fun of it all. The list of things I should be doing is a mile long. I still jump around too much. But so goes the process of being human, and trying to hack one’s way through a jungle that is still far too dense to see more than a pace or two ahead in.

Not only autographed by him: autographed by him to his daughter. This book was in the family. I’m no autograph hound, but I think this [...]]]> I picked up a copy of George Bridgman’s Life Drawing at a used bookstore a little while ago, for cheap. 7th printing hardcover, 1951. Look what was on the inside page!

Not only autographed by him: autographed by him to his daughter. This book was in the family. I’m no autograph hound, but I think this one is rather special. Hanging onto it.

Graydon Parrish is doing a drawing workshop in Missouri on Columbus Day Weekend, 2010. I’m going. You should too… if, you know, studying with a living master is your kind of thing. There are a couple of spots still open, but don’t expect that to last.

Here’s the flyer.

I’m pretty happy with the rendering of this structure, now, and switching to cubes makes the rendering MUCH faster than spheres. And they look pretty cool once they’re rotated correctly. Found and fixed a few data glitches. Next up: a matrix of layers, and getting to that through code.

A few [...]]]> I’m not dead. Here’s some candy.

I’m pretty happy with the rendering of this structure, now, and switching to cubes makes the rendering MUCH faster than spheres. And they look pretty cool once they’re rotated correctly. Found and fixed a few data glitches. Next up: a matrix of layers, and getting to that through code.

A few other irons in the fire at the moment, but nothing ready to show just yet.

This took a lot more of today than I wanted it to, and it’s now up to needing about two hours to render. I wasted half the day trying to figure out why half of the goddamn spheres were gray and half were white, or whatever color I set them to. It’s because some [...]]]> That’s better.

This took a lot more of today than I wanted it to, and it’s now up to needing about two hours to render. I wasted half the day trying to figure out why half of the goddamn spheres were gray and half were white, or whatever color I set them to. It’s because some of them are randomly created inside-out via the “followme” method, and every time I generated them, a different random set were inside-out. Sketchup’s “followme” algorithm appears to flip a coin about which side is up and which is down when extruding a circle into a sphere, and if there’s a readable property that tells which way it’s facing, I couldn’t find it in a couple of hours of googling and frustrating discovery of the lack of standard Ruby libraries and basic debugging tools within Sketchup. In the end I just had to apply the color to both sides of the circle before extruding, and even figuring out how to do THAT took a couple of hours. Documentation on the API is sparse. Pain in the rear.

Anyway, after sorting out some number-to-string conversion problems that were screwing up Ruby’s ability to retrieve from a nested hash, I finally got it to do this. There are a few glitches still, but it sure is pretty. Next up is the hard work of putting these things into layers and persistent data structures that can be manipulated, and then some 3d vertex geometry to hang points in space and find enclosures. And build an interface to it.

But now that the day is over, I can get started on what I PLANNED to spend the day doing: redrawing my IMC piece at full-size and preparing for another go at it.

Be very afraid. This is going to be hella.

When the paints dry (in a month or two), I’ll haul out the colormunki [...]]]> I was planning to spend today painting a small pepper study, then getting started on Bargue plate 14, but those boxes of paint I bought on ebay were nagging me, so I ended up spending the day cataloging them and producing this:

When the paints dry (in a month or two), I’ll haul out the colormunki and get Munsell HVC color notations for all of them. I do them in gradients, from opaque to transparent, in order to be able to read the true (or “mixing”) chroma of the very dark colors like the blues and purples. The scanner can’t read them straight from the tube, but thin them down in opacity (without diluting them) and you get the tinting strength of the color. For mixing purposes, at least, the highest chroma read along the gradient from solid to opaque is the actual chroma of the color, and the value is its darkest value.

This is a closeup of a gradient: the paint is applied thickly with a palette knife at the left end, scraped sideways towards the right end, and then rubbed in gently with a soft paper towel going back from right to left.

Of course, a sizeable majority of the people in the world would think that the most interesting thing I did tonight was this masterpiece of abstraction…

…when cleaning my palette. I could have signed it “Cy Twombly” and made $5,000,000 at the next Christie’s auction. The wet paper towels are still in my trash if anyone wants to make an offer.

I’ve seen [...]]]> Having been on an ebay paint-buying binge lately, I’ve ended up with several sets of large tubes of W&N Titanium White, Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna. Value mixes of these blue+white and sienna+white can be used to make very low-chroma mixes that can be carefully controlled to be just off gray to either side.

I’ve seen some lovely paintings done in mostly grayscale but with just the tiniest breath of blue and brown tones, and I’d like to experiment with this a bit. The schemes are still basically neutral, but it allows some subtle accents to be made, and it’s an early step toward working in full color that is still essentially a monochrome, but gets you thinking about how to simplify hue and chroma.

I need to double-check a couple of these; the value 3 mix was quite dark, really not far off value 2. Ultramarine can be slightly lightened to value 2, but Burnt Sienna is close to value 2.5 out of the tube, already too light, so that value 2 mix might be more like 2.25, which would make the gap narrower. Still, I like this idea and I’m going to take a few baby steps in it now and then, when not doing Bargues / Anatomy / Life Drawing, all of which will be resuming with a vengeance this week.

Next session will start in mid-August. I feel better about this one than the first two, and hopefully they’ll continue to [...]]]> Tonight was our last live session with Mayra. I’ve got a little more touching up to do on this one, but it’s close to done. About 9″ x 18″, charcoal and pastel on gray paper.

Next session will start in mid-August. I feel better about this one than the first two, and hopefully they’ll continue to improve as we do more of them.