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/

A few more artists

I am back home in Huntington Wv for Christmas and got a chance to look through a few books an american realism. A few artists are worth looking at later:

Winslow Homer

Eastman Johnson, especially "Cranberry Harvest"

George Caleb Bingham - "Fur Traders"

John Singer Sargent's painting called "The Daughters" looks amazing. I think Madame X is incredible and I might see if I can paint a similar pose one day.

Childe Hassam "Rainy Day" reminds me of Richard Estes but in 1885

Andrew Wyeth "Tenant Farmer"

Norman Rockwell

Charles Bell "Sixteen Candles"

Ralph Goings

Richard Estes "Downtown"

Steve Hawley "Descent from the Cross"

http://www.stevehawley.com/gallery.html

John Nava "2nd of May, Los Angeles"

http://www.johnnava.com/

Gammel, Gurney, and Random Thoughts

Today I read a few interesting things about Gammel and the death of academic painting in the 20th century.

http://www.aristos.org/backissu/gammell.htm

Gammel wrote a book lamenting the loss of technical ability caused by the impressionist war on the french academy.

http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Painting-R-Ives-Gammell/dp/0940160455

Since I study at an Atelier you can probably guess my position ;)

Gurney posted a few more interesting things about forgotten artists

http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2011/12/heinrich-von-zugel.html

Francis Oneil's Dec 8th

The model didn't turn up so Francis ended up modelling himself. As usual this is 1.5 hours, although I spent 10 minutes finishing up the shirt after class

Francis Oneil's on Dec 1st

This is the result of 1.5 hours at class last week - I didn't feel like touching it up after class.

Francis Oneil's again

Another 1.5 hours at Francis Oneils followed by 20 minutes of clean up

Another Francis Oneil sept 22nd

and another bad mouth

Another Francis Oneil

Why can't a draw mouths now?

Lavender Hill Day 1

A few brief notes of things I learned yesterday

When boxing in the form always start with the top and bottom, then draw the left and right lines to get the proportions correct.

Sculpt when dividing the form

Don't go through the figure when sculpting the shape

Hold charcoal on its side and stand back further - clean smooth motions

Use an economy of straight lines when dividing the space. No curves for now

Movement and motion comes from lines off the horizontal and vertical

Another 2 hour sketch from Francis Oneil's. This girl is a squatter who mentioned that she was chased from a squat she just entered by a gang of drug dealers on the previous day.

Ashmolean sketch crawl

Result of a little over an hour (maybe 1.5?) at the Ashmolean today during the sketchcrawl

Francis Oneil's class

This is about 1.5 hours at Francis Oneil's class followed by about 20 minutes cleaning up the background

A few great artists

A few years ago I went to the Musee d'Orsay and photographed all the paintings that I found inspirational. I figured I would post a few images to my blog as a source of inspiration. In the unlikely event that someone else is reading this, I highly recommend checking out these artists!

Henri Regnault

Ernest Herbert

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The results from about 1.5 hours at Francis Oneil's class today. I figured I would post this directly without any cleanup. I might see what I can do with another hour working from memory.