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Am I back in the saddle after vacation? Partially. I’m going a little slowly on art right now because I have additional demands on my evenings, but it’s still important to keep at it. This set of faces I started while on one of the long flights, and just wrapped up. These are mostly not…
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I am back from the best vacation of my life. I had an unbelievable time. I flew out to visit my friend Beylka in New York for a few days. Then we went together to Rapa Nui for four days, and Santiago, Chile for five. All incredible. We packed our time. We saw shows, did…
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I had a confidence setback recently in my art skills, and wanted to salve that hurt by going back to some drawings of my favorite subject, Aftyn Rose. These are five figure studies rendered as nudes from a variety of non-nude sources. The bottom two drawings, sourced from one of my favorite videos, I did…
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This month the Love Life Drawing study group focus is on shapes. Simplifying shapes into CSI curves. Making them feel organic. Some guidelines included making them asymmetric in form and using more obtuse than acute angles. The first exercise was in the three parts. Part one asked us to just make a bunch of shapes…
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I finally finished and posted the whole Aftyn Center story. It’s been a real journey! When I started drawing as a teenager, comic books were my guiding light. It was a dream to draw my own stories. Obviously in this case I didn’t do anything as bold as drawing it as a comic, but putting…
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If you are the regular reader of this site, you may have noticed some cosmetic changes. The most noticeable parts are the new banner and logo images in the header. To keep a consistent theme going, I have changed up most of the site colors as well. Gone is the old blue scene, in with…
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The ghost girl rushes from room to room, looking in panic for a way to stop what’s going on. She no longer has lungs, but still her breath comes in ragged gasps. “What can I do?” she cries. “They’ll kill him! Or worse!” She passes through walls like they were curtains.
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Concluding the Love Life Drawing study group’s “Figure 5 ways” month, we have a series of figure drawings that attempt to synthesize all the lessons. I built these figures in phases, using simple forms, gesture, values, and anatomy to piece together a final rendering. Marek drove a fair amount of this month, and he brought…
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Marek, critiquing my effort from the first week suggested my value study would be improved by focusing on the light shapes instead of the shadow shapes. To achieve that, I started with a darker background and just draw light blobs and tried to scrub them into the right shapes. I did that once before to…
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Our multi-discipline figure drawing month continues. Last week we did a survey of all 5 approaches to figure drawing — simple forms, gesture, anatomy, values, full figure drawing. This week we’re focusing just on the first two of those, with some review instructional materials examining those skills in detail. Simple forms drawing breaks anatomical elements…
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Monochrome drawing of Aftyn Rose showing off for her bathroom mirror before a shower. This is a return to an earlier piece I never thought was quite good enough. Because I have been using Aftyn drawings as a way to exercise my anatomical knowledge, I have also opted to remove her shirt. (And, you know,…
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I was a little disappointed by the quality of my faces in the study group heads month concentration. The structural foundation is solid, and I’m sure it will help with gesture drawing, but in terms of building to portraits, most of my drawings were unrecognizable, except for the Aftyn ones. I decided to keep practicing…
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It’s a new month and a new topic for the Love Life Drawing study group. The new topic: drawing the figure with five different approaches. We have practiced each of these, so this acts as a review, a kind of synthesis, and a way of highlighting if any of the stages needs more work. We…
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“All right, girls, listen up!” The room full of young demons snaps to attention, facing their leader, a rather Dangerous looking succubus with blue hair, long, coiled horns, and full, bat-like wings. “We have a level two situation developing top-side. The humans have hired a priest to drive us from our home.”
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This week’s study group exercise instructions went in two very different directions. We could either do last week’s rendered heads again, including lessons learned, or if we wanted to elaborate and abstract things, Kenzo included links to some challenging videos about 2d shape design and composition theory. I watched those and thought “this seems like…
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This week we continue our study of head and neck anatomy by adding in shadow shapes guided by our simplified head shape model. I’m using different references this time around, to keep things fresh. There are a couple celebrities and one Aftyn reference. This was a fun exercise! However, I found it hard to stay…
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A couple years ago, I wrote a little short story inspired by the idea of an ACU — Aftyn cinematic universe. What if all her characters existed in the same world? Fan fiction, really. It’s light and fun, although I should warn it’s a little not safe for work. Once written, I didn’t know what to…
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My feedback on last week’s head drawings was humbling. My proportions were bad, my Loomis shapes were off. Advice basically came down to the idea that I’m not really ready to freehand sketch from reference for this stuff, and I should be doing a tracing stage in between. I’ve done that before. Draw your ideal…
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Introducing a new subject here on the site. Please welcome Tara Âû Jean, a friend here in Chicago. She is primarily a photographer, with a strong eye for composition, and also a beautiful woman. She got excited when she saw my Color notes piece, and has given me a bunch of reference photos to use.…
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