Francis Oneil's May 30th

I needed to post this and move on because I am overworking this image.  It was 1.5 hours in class, then 3 hours cleanup, at which point Alan pointed out that I had destroyed my edges and made it look less painterly.  I went back to the work from class, and the started again trying to preserve the original feel while fixing drawing mistakes and avoiding the soft round brush in photoshop.  So it is 3 hours in total with a 3 hour detour.

Francis Oneil's May 24th

I tried something a bit different on this one, starting directly in colour after my block in.  This technique exactly mirrors how I handle oil paint instead of digital paint.

I think it largely worked out. 1.5 hours + 3 hours cleanup

Francis Oneil's May 16th

I thought I would try a profile this time.  The background made this a bit more challenging.  1.5 hours in class plus about 2 - 3 hours clean up.  The cloth is main from imagination because I didn't have the folds down during class.

Francis Oneil's May 9th

1.5 hours in class and then about 3 hours of cleanup.  This is more from memory because the early stages weren't going that well.

Famous Artists Course

I just found an online collection of an old illustration book. Like most illustration books from the 1950s it seems to be full of good advice.


http://www.raggedclaws.com/home/2008/10/03/download-famous-artists-course/

This is a landscape done from the combination of two trees I saw yesterday at the Harcourt Arboritum (http://www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk/Harcourt/obg-harcourt-intro.html).  The pink tree is based on the following photo I took on my iPhone.  I didn't actually consult this photo too often since it was on my phone and hard to see.  The leaves were made with a custom brush that I created manually.  The tree in the background is based on a pencil sketch I did yesterday.  

10 art books to read

http://www.noahbradley.com/blog/2011/10-books-every-artist-must-read/ This list seems great - Seeing as how I have already own Alla Prima, Colour and Light, Figure Drawing for What its Worth, and Imaginative Realism the list seems pretty accurate. I will pick up the rest of the books he recommends.

Cool online comic

http://www.delilahdirk.com/

Drawing Folds

Naomi from work just sent me a few cool links about drawing folds that I need to read later:

http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/2008/02/famous-artists-course-folds-part-one.html

http://sevencamels.blogspot.com/2008/03/famous-artists-course-folds-part-2.html

John William Waterhouse

This image is famous but for some reason I never knew the name of the artist.

Gustave Doré

Another artist worth knowing

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

I just learned about an artist called Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Alma-Tadema

Howard McWilliam

http://www.mcbill.plus.com/

Luke mentioned an excellent illustrator who transitioned into art while doing a full time job.

Francis Oneil's Feb 15th 2012

3 speed paintings

I'm trying to learn how to paint environments. These aren't great, but they are fairly quick (the longest is maybe 1.5 hours). The desert scene took the longest despite being a weaker composition than the other two. I guess you can't improve a bad idea with time.

Hungover Reflections

I did this comic with Emily Watson last year (start of 2011). It was published in 9th art magazine and brings back a lot of good memories.

A few sketchbook images

Francis Oneil's Feb 2nd

Same model as last week. 1.5 hours plus 45 minutes cleanup

Thoughts from Lavender Hill

A lot more good advice was given at class on Tuesday:

- A good drawing should work at every stage.

- Stand back to evaluate your work. If you get close to a Sargent or Rembrandt they can almost look abstract close up. This makes perfect sense - you have to stand back, so you expect it be in focus where it will be observed, not where the paint happens to be applied.

- Observe, think about what you need to change and then walk up to the canvas to make the change

- Work very big occasionally. Working at one scale constantly will lock you to that scale.

- Spend the most time on defining the shadow shapes. Refining these shapes will naturally lead to softness where it is required.

- Don't forget your mid-tones. In my case while focusing on shadow shapes I blocked out the light of a leg and the torso to be the same. The torso was actually a lot brighter than the leg.

More gesture drawing resources

http://www.pixelovely.com/gesture/figuredrawing.php

Francis Oneil's jan 25th

2 hours, 30 minutes cleanup

A repost from Gurney

I was reading Gurney's blog today and came across this article:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html

I'm not sure what to think. I don't buy the implicit prejudice that the original work these Chinese painters produce would be of dubious quality simply because they are not living in France or Amsterdam in 1890. In one image they also insultingly refer to original portraits as Kitsch - I guess the art academics from 1920 have truly won in their effort to convince everyone that avant garde art is the only thing of any value.

It is definitely scary that so many artists work for so little.

A quick link

While browsing the web I just found the following:

http://www.posemaniacs.com/

I need to download the iphone app later

A few tips

I ran into John yesterday at W.H. Smith while browsing through the magazines looking for Imagine FX. We ended up talking about atmospheric effects and colour shifting.

John made a good observations about colour temperature and how to increase the intensity of a light using hue and saturation shifts.

The basic idea is that as things get hotter you should shift hue towards yellow. For instance, a hot red would start as 100% saturation dark red. Then decrease the saturation a bit, increase the value a little and shift the hue towards yellow for a mid orange. At the hottest point it would be a much lower saturation but very high value yellow. We grabbed a coffee and ended up comparing the techniques while doing quick digital sketches of a green neon sign - the results are fairly dramatic and proved the point.

John also talked about the effect of "white balance" on our eyes. Our brain is colour correcting for the environment around us, which explains why shops appear to use coloured lights when viewed from the street but the light looks white when you go inside.

The blue highlights in the hair in my image below is the same thing. I wondered at the time where the blue was coming from because the model was in a white room without a significant blue bounce source (white walls, incandescent lights). The light was most likely white but colour correcting for the yellow light source shifted this to blue.

When doing a digital portrait consider the colour of the shirt the person is wearing. This should be a bounce light colour.

Francis Oneil's Jan 4th

with 2 hours clean up

1 hour - no clean up

A few more links

http://drsketchylondon.co.uk/events.html


http://tarosan.wordpress.com/