The Bath : Painting & Progress Shots
I finished a new painting this weekend! The Bath is probably my best piece to date! A special thanks to DigiDrew and his model at DeviantArt for the source material! Its 30×40″, done in oil. Click the painting to open up a high resolution photo.
Below are the sequential shots of the paintings progress after each of the nine painting session.
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- The Bath
Oil on Canvas
30x40
How Technology Changed the Way I Make Art
When I first started painting twelve years ago, my process was very traditional. A photograph of my subject was taken and scaled up to fit to a sheet of paper. The image was then put on a light table and using tracing paper I would attempt to draw out all the edges and major changes of value. The traced version was then folder width and length wise multiple times to create a grid of lines. The canvas was then divided into a comparable grid. At that point, the gridded “value lines” image from the tracing paper would be drawn onto the canvas. (The grid is used to make sure proportions are correct by visually comparing how much of a piece of the image is in a specific grid square.)
Thanks to new technologies, this entire process has been simplified and digitized. Instead of needing to trace, grid and find the contrasting highlights and shadows of an image with bare eyes, Photoshop can do it almost all for me. I used to print out dozens of images, but thanks to compact tablets I don’t print any! Saving me tons of time, ink, paper and ultimately money.
Now, each painting session, I plug in my tablet, set it to not auto-off, cover the screen in disposable plastic wrap to protect it from paint-covered fingers and begin! With just a flick, I can zoom in on a particular section of the image, switch to the grid view, high contrast or black & white. My last painting of whiskey bottles, which took almost a year to complete, would have normally taken dozens of printed photos for each section of detail. This time, I didn’t have to print one!
Not only has the my tablet device done wonders for my process of traditional canvas painting, I’ve started using it as a replacement drawing pad thanks to Autodesks’ SketchBook Pro. I’m a huge fan of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School. There are branches all over the country, and I’m thankful to have one here in Minneapolis. The premise is pretty simple: A figure drawing class, at a bar, with burlesque dancers as models. The dancers do a quick show, then stop and strike poses for the art students to draw. Themes are given each session and you can win prizes for drawing the best representation of the days themes. (I actually won a t-shirt my first visit for drawing the model in a post apocalyptic setting.)
I stopped bringing my paper sketch book about a year ago in favor of just my tablet device. The breadth of artist tools that the tablet allows me to mimic at a moments notice makes for an incredible drawing experience. As you can see from my images below, I can go from air brushes, crayon, pencils or fountain pens quickly and easily. Did I make a mistake? No problem, I can quickly erase it, or select specific areas to rotate or resize. The inclusion of layers and blend modes allows me to quickly experiment and revert back changes if I don’t like them.
The only real challenge with the current available tablets is a lack of pressure sensitivity, but after a few hours of practice, I learned to quickly adjust the value with my left hand while drawing with a stylus in my right. I am ecstatic to hear that Samsung is prototyping true pressure sensitive stylus tablets and I cannot wait to get my hands on one!
Posing for an Art Class
Figuring drawing has been a staple of any fine arts programs since man began drawing on cave walls. If you have ever taken traditional fine arts class, odds are you have sat staring at some poor soul in their skivvies, or more likely, nude. Having been the student in this situation many times, I’ve always wondered what it feels like to be on the other side of the easel. Thus the reasoning behind bucket-list item #23, Pose nude/semi-nude for an art class. Last night I finally marked it complete.
A friend of mine is a professor at a local art school and needed some extra models for his classes. He told me that it wasn’t an all nude class, but I should bring form fitting clothings – like bike shorts or jammers. Having swam competitively for nearly 10 years, I still had some old drag suits handy, and I figured standing around in front of people in one wouldn’t be all that awkward.
When I arrived last night though, I felt different. I showed up to a smallish class room, with 15 students, all working in digital. Most of the students had Wacom Tablets and did all their drawing within Photoshop. My friend directed me to the backroom to change into my suit and robe. Walking around in a drag suit with a bunch of other swimmers, not awkward… walking around in a drag suit by yourself in front of a bunch of random people… awkward. I was immediately glad I opted against ‘fully-nude’ when it came time to complete this personal challenge.
We did ten two minute poses, three eight minute, one twenty minute and finished the class with a forty minute pose. The two minute poses were kind of fun, because I didn’t need to worry about holding it for very long, and could strike some more interesting poses. I did a few with a baseball bat, standing around, holding a staff like a sword and ended with the Hulk Hogan pose I used to do before getting on the racing blocks at swim meets.
To the surprise of most new artists and those possibly to those reading this, the teacher doesn’t direct the model during these sessions. When the timer goes off the model has to just move into the next pose. I thought it would be a challenge to think of a new pose each time, but you have at least two very slow minutes to think of the next pose. I was however amazed at how quickly I relaxed and didn’t feel super awkward up on stage with thirty some eyes analyzing my every detail.
A few things I realized during this personal challenge:
- Attempting to hold perfectly still for even two minutes is a challenge. As soon as you strike your pose, some part of your face or body will begin to itch. Its like trying to hold back a cough or sneeze in at Church.
- Being aware of pressure points is important. I did an 8 minute pose with a staff across my shoulders and my arms draped over it. After about 4 minutes into this pose I began I to lose feeling in my left hand.
- The longer the pose, the more balanced it needs to be. I made the mistake of putting almost all of my weight on one leg for a few of the poses and my calves and thighs began locking up on me. I even had this problem in some of the sitting positions.
- The forty minute pose was broken into two 20 minute sessions. I did this one sitting for obvious reasons. After the first 20 minutes, they taped off where my feet were and I could take a break for a few minutes, after which I got back into position… When I sat back down, I thought I was in the exact same pose, but after about 5 minutes it became very apparent something was off. My back started to ache horribly! I wanted to appear professional though, and fought through it. I kept thinking of this story a teacher read to us in elementary school about a Roman soldier who was standing in file with a fox under his shirt – he was starving and planned to eat it later. The fox began to eat at his belly, but he didn’t flinch or break rank… it eventually killed me. I was luckier and survived my torturous pose.
It was an interesting experience. I doubt I’ll do it again unless my buddy is desperate for models one week. I certainly have a lot more respect for the models who do this regularly! It takes a lot more skill and endurance than I expected. I’ve asked him if I could see some of the drawings that came from the session – if any of the students give permission, I’ll post a few here.
3 CommentsNot so fresh pepper.
It doesn’t take you more than five minutes to breeze through an museum, book or gallery to realize that “fine art” often times means “fruit art.” Maybe that’s why so many artists are starving – they would rather paint their food than eat it.
I’ve never been a fan of doing still life art. I did a few drawings in high school, but avoided the subject completely until after college. My first real still life was in 2006. It was a present for my mom, and included: 1 teddy bear, 1 bottle of wine, 3 books, 1 glass of wine, vines with fruit and and a red velvet blanket. Needless to say this was filled with bad decisions for a budding still life painter! Fuzzy fur, flowing fabric, foliage, clear glass, shiny glass, liquid… The painting still turned out pretty well, but I realized then why artists tend to stick to simple bowls of fruit!
A year later I decided to try my hand at fruits and took a few shots of peppers (Fun fact: Peppers are both a fruit and vegetable!). I sat down took a series of shots of peppers, cut up, on the board, in sun light, spot lights, with the knife in shot etc… I finally decided I liked the image above best and started working… and stopped.
Fast forward 3 years and its finally done! Painting these peppers was so boring, and the knife so challenging that I couldn’t take it. I would pick it up, work on it a few weeks, get bored, get frustrated, and away it went! After being inspired by the latest Jeffrey Larson exhibit at the Galleria, I decided I would finish it this month! It didn’t need to be fantastic, it just needed to be done!
A few tips I have discovered while doing still life paintings:
- Don’t just see the peppers as one color. Its very tempting to pull out all the orange and yellow tubes in your drawer. I wish I had earlier shots of the painting, but the very first coat of paint I put down for those peppers was red. There are lots of subtle colors in any object – use them all – sometimes use ones that aren’t even there! Its painting after all.
- Avoid black. Unless you are in perfect darkness, shadows don’t make things black or gray. I try to avoid taking out the black tube of paint until the very end and use it very sparingly in specific, extremely dark spots. Otherwise, I’m mixing blues, purples and greens to create my shadows and dark areas.
The cell phone and mirror are your friends. Seriously. Take pictures of the painting a long the way, or stand in front of the mirror with it. I learned this trick from my high school art teachers and found it invaluable! The the different angle that the mirror gives and the shrinking blur effect the cell phone camera will help you see errors, but also see what your painting probably looks like to other people. Sometimes you will see things like I did in the image to the right, sometimes you will see an area you thought looked horrible, actually looks great.- You will always notice more errors than anyone else! Don’t point out your errors to others. Maybe its the only thing you see in your painting, but there is a good chance no one else will notice it. In my opinion, some of those should be left in anyway – that’s why this is a painting and not a photograph! One of the most challenging aspects of being an artist, is learning how to say “DONE!” I could probably work on this painting for another 3 years if I wanted to, but I feel its at a point where it can be hung.
"My God… Its full of stars!"
Have I mentioned how much I like the BitmapData class? Had a request pass by desk last week asking me to create a little app to be used in a presentation. They wanted it so that when a user clicked on a button in the middle, a star would fly across the screen to a random location, twinkling while it moved, then stay on the screen until the user clicked clear. They wanted somewhere between 30 and 100 stars on the screen.
While I think flash could have handled having that many MovieClips on screen pretty easily on its own, I wanted to see if I could make it more efficient. The solution I came up with was to use two BitmapData layers, one for moving the stars on the screen and creating the ‘twinkling trails’ and the other for housing all the stars in their final resting place.
The two layers of BitmapData (trailsCanvasBmp, and finalBallCanvasBmp) and a ParticleManager class to track the movement of the stars and slowly fades out the trailsCanvasBmp to give the twinkling effect while its moving. A star is created in the center of the screen, then shoots off to its random location. When the tween is complete the star is drawn to the top finalBallCanvasBmp class which is never cleared.
On each frame a random pixel is chosen from the finalBallCanvasBmp and if that pixel is NOT black (0×000000), then it attaches an mcTwinkle MovieClip which destroys itself upon finishing its animation.
The effect is really quite cool! You get the sense that each star is operating under its own principles, but its actually just two BitmapData objects interacting with the ParticleManager.
You will notice some major performance hits if you tell it to make too many stars at one time, or if the screen gets literally filled with stars, their may be more twinkling than your computer can handle. We’re on some beefy machines here at work, and I have had over 20,000 stars and haven’t noticed a performance hit. So your movies can truly be “Full of Stars”. ($1 to who ever can name the movie reference*)
There are a few other things going on here that I can elaborate on if requested. The background is generated using Perlin noise (so really there are 3 Bitmaps). Each star is colored using my Pallet class I can upload if desired. Full code for this project can be uploaded.
2 CommentsWeb Spinner Revealed
As promised, you can now download the code used for my web spinning projects. There is one fla, and four classes.
I made some modifications to Grant Skinner’s grid based proximity manager to take advantage of an IProximityDetectable interface. For a full explanation on how grid based proximity management works, check out Grant’s original post on the subject. The IProximityDetectable interface has only two methods:
interface IProximityDetectable { public function getPosX():Number; public function getPosY():Number; }
As might be assumed, they retrieve the ‘x’ and ‘y’ position of an object. Why implement this? Well, the original ProximityManager used the _x and _y values of a MovieClip, but my spider web particles don’t actually have any MovieClips. Its just adjusting x and y values of an object in memory, and drawing lines to the new distance. The ProximityManager is used for drawing the lines between particles based on how close they are to each other.
So how do the particles move? Each onEnterFrame the ParticleManager calls the tick function for each particle.
public function tick():Void { canvas.moveTo(x,y); x += xVel; y += yVel; xVel *= drag; yVel *= drag; yVel += yGravity; xVel += xGravity; var f:Number = Math.abs(xVel) + Math.abs(yVel); alpha -= f/__lifeSpan; canvas.lineStyle(2, rgb, alpha); canvas.lineTo(x,y); if(alpha <= 0){ manager.removeSpark(this); } var n:Array = pm.getNeighbours(this); var l:Number = n.length; for(var i:Number = 0; i < l; i++){ canvas.lineStyle(1, rgb, alpha); canvas.moveTo(x, y); canvas.lineTo(n[i].getPosX(), n[i].getPosY()); } }
Each particle starts out with random velocities for x and y. These velocities are added to the x and y position of the particle. Drag is applied to the velocities to slow them down. The drag is set to such a small value in this particular instance that it really doesn’t have much of an effect. Gravity along the x and y axis is then applied to the particle The gravity values are generated randomly when the particle is first created and unlike the velocities, has no baring on its parents value (in the instance of a branched particle). Since gravity is random, it may pull particles up, down, left or right. After all moving is done, the particle uses asks who its neighbors are and draws lines to them.
Speaking of branching, the ParticleManager does a probability calculation for each particle during the onEnterFrame which determines if a particle will branch. Each particle has a chance to branch, so growth can occur exponentially. To keep particles from branching too much, this calculation is ignored if the maximum number of particles has been reached (default to 40).
Once each particle has been moved and had its connections drawn, the entire image is drawn to a Bitmap and color/alpha adjusted to fade away slowly. All and all a pretty neat little effect.
I’d like to move this to AS3 eventually to see if I get crazy speed increases! I’ve put one last experiment below which allows you some control over different variables in the spider webs. Be careful when making adjustments… You can easily give your computer a heart attack.
No CommentsWeb Spinning Goodness II
Made a few small technical changes… May not be noticeable to most. In the previous example, each particle received a random Y axis based gravity. When gravity was negative, it forced the particle up, and positive gravity made it go down. I’ve also added an X axis based gravity to this example, increasing the curvature and randomness of the webs.
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Anatomy of a Portrait
I’ve been rather neglectful of this blog. I’ve been putting my coding on hold for a bit while I painted a portrait of my father for my mothers birthday and as a mothers day gift. This is only the third portrait I’ve done, and my first in color. It was much more difficult than I thought it was going to be, artistically and emotionally. For those of you didn’t know, my father passed away last July after a four and a half year battle with mantel cell lymphoma.
It was really quite therapeutic in a way. Before doing this painting, when I thought of my father it was difficult to not to see him, even in happy memories long before he was ill, in the frail and sick state he was in when he passed. After studying a portrait of him for some 30+ hours, I think I’ve finally overcome those memories and can see him again as the happy healthy man he was for his life leading up to those final few months.
The application I wrote to display the images reads in an XML file that contains paths to the separate images in the sequence. It then has the “set percent” function to display the images and fade them in between.
3 CommentsAnything Can Be Learned
I have argued for years now that anyone can learn anything, and practice makes perfect. While I believe that certain people are naturally gifted to learn a certain skills easier and faster, I don’t believe that it would be impossible for people to reach high levels of performance in any skill with the right amount of determination.
A few days ago at work we were discussing whether or not we needed another team member on our team. My company has an IS department of over 300 people, and my team is a mere 4 members. We handle all corporate communication technology, e-Learning, public affairs technology and learning technology. A pretty daunting task for our humble team.
My coworker argued that we needed another teammate with a background in graphic design, and that the he (or she) could learn the technical skills as needed along the way. He felt that artistic and creative ability was something you either had or didn’t, while programming and computer skills are learned. My coworker looked across the aisle at the anime posters in my cube and said he could never learn how to do that. I explained to him that it was a skill like any other. I look at some web applications and would have no idea how it works, yet he could easily look at it and probably break it up in his head how it was put together. Its the same thing when it comes to drawing and art! I can look at a person or object and break it up into simple shapes which are easier to draw and fill in details after.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at these two examples from my own life. Take the drawing I did in 2001 on the left. Now I thought that was pretty good, and was happy with it. Four years later and about a dozen sketch books filled with absolutely terrible drawings, I’m creating illustrations like the one on the right.
As another example, take my first cartoon sophomore year of college and compare it to my last cartoon senior year.
You won’t become a better illustrator, programmer, musician, mathematician or anything through osmosis. To be an illustrator you need to study anatomy, shapes, depth, perspective and practice, practice, practice. Look at your finished drawings and make notes about what looks right, and more importantly, what looks wrong. To be a better programmer you need to do the same thing, except with your code.
My point is, its about practice and actually trying to learn, not just going through the motions, not just doing. There is a difference.
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