I’m working on developing a bat-person for the next of my more illustrational images, like my Ant Man. Normally, at least up until recently, I’d only do one drawing, and just have at it until I was finished. There’d be tons of editing, tweaking it out, and learning from mistakes, trial and error. But I’d…
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What a difference rim lighting can make in a hyper-realist image. This is the first time I’ve really attempted this technique, and it took a lot of tinkering to get a result I was satisfied with. Rim lighting is a technique illustrators and other artists borrow from cinema. You have your main light source —…
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Some people make their digital paintings in very logical stages. That has tended to not be me, except on some occasion. I’m, or have been, much more the artist that just starts experimenting, sees what happens, and rides the wave in. But, uh, to get to some next level shit, sometimes an artist has to…
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Can you guess which one is my version? Have a look, and you can find out if you were right down below. If you don’t know already, I have a contemporary art / fine art background, and have been making digital art starting around 20 years ago. I’ve given up on the contemporary art world,…
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These are just curiosities for entertainment, folks. You aren’t meant to assess them as serious works. They’re my kid stuff! When I was growing up my favorite things were sci-fi shows I could see on TV, frogs and lizards, and drawing (not to mention girls). Fortunately, I had the foresight to document most my early…
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Above is the final demo in the class, and all credits go to Andrew Hou for the digital painting, which I recreated as part of learning his process. As my regular readers know, I’m a trained “fine artist” working in digital media, and currently learning the industry standard digital painting techniques from illustrators in order…
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Everyone is an artist, and anything and everything is art (except painters and paintings)! Words have come to mean, if not their precise opposite, something quite different from what is or was in the dictionary. Literally now means figuratively (ex., “It was literally raining cats and dogs!”). Random means all sorts of things, like cool,…
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In my last post I boasted that an advantage of digital painting over traditional painting is I could knock out a swarm of bees in 15 minutes, but it could take days and days to do it with physical mediums. I did say it would take hours if I made more custom brushes, and I…
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If you have a good eye, whether or not you ever look at this kind of art, you can tell which one is mine, because it’s the flawed copy. Of course I can’t imitate someone else’s style the first time I try. Don’t fear my familiar followers, I would likely never work in this style…
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Rather than go back and edit my prior post, I decided to write a follow-up to expand on the ideas a bit. I want to give another example of why skill is necessary, but also elaborate on why it’s considered just busy-work and not important in contemporary art. First, I want to give a more…
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I haven’t been writing or sharing anything lately because I’m in one of my training periods. This involves a lot of knuckling down and plowing through tutorials and exercises to fine tune my skills, and that requires a bit of a humble and honest mindset. It’s not fun compared to creating, but it’s essential to…
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[Usually I call these impromptu writings “runaway rants”, but that implies a certain combativeness or railing against something, which is sometimes true. “Reflections” is probably more fair, at least when I’m not objecting to something offensively stupid.] Sometimes something is so goddamned obvious we don’t see it, and I would not think this about myself…
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It’s been more than a year since I’ve updated my New Art page, and it didn’t even include my Selfies From Alternate Universes series. It’s now revised to include all the recent work, with added thumbnail galleries and slideshows. I’ve reproduced it below. And just a quick note. I find it odd and a little…
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The third in the series, and I sat on this one for a long time. There were some technical difficulties towards the end, such as in making the monster’s appendages persuasively symmetrical (working anatomically and compositionally). If I share an earlier version, you’ll understand why. Below you can see I’d drawn in a couple appendages…
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One of the oldest techniques I use to invent imagery is to just make a bunch of marks and see what I see. I sometimes make a bunch of thumbnail sketches, and then choose whichever one inspires me at the moment. I made about a dozen thumbs before making my most recent piece (above right…
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This kind of piece stands on its own, needs no placard, no description, no interpretation, no translation, no perusing a CV, no background or context, and no assaying the significance of the biology of the artist. The only reason to read any further is if you are curious to know more. Sometimes it seems like…
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It’s just a wee bit odd to propose this as the first in a new series, as this is a core example of the type of art I do going back decades, including the technique (though I used to do this in charcoal). Let me just dredge up one of those real quick. The reason…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. With…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. It’s…
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I’ve been picking away at this one for a while, abandoned it a couple times, and finally finished it. It was more difficult than my prior piece for this series (below), and the main difference is just that I used a smoother brush. The smoother brush is more technical and demanding in terms of rendering…
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Skulls are really good practice, and interesting. Even though I got my MFA a quarter century ago, I regularly learn new things (ex., a sculpting program like Zbrush), or hone my skills. In the last two days I knocked out a couple skulls. They took about 60-90 minutes each. There are multiple reasons this is…
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This is a style of B&W drawing I return to again and again. Not only have I done at least 10 using the same approach recently, I used to use the same technique for charcoal drawings 25 years ago. The procedure is super simple and direct, and it relies entirely on my imagination, memory, and…
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If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. Though…
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It’s a bit of a miracle folks. I haven’t added to this series since November 7th, and I haven’t been able to make art for about 2 months. I gave away my monitor when I moved home to America. I couldn’t stay in the U.S. because of some unforeseen circumstances, so moved (back) to Thailand.…
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You can now find this list permanently as a sub-menu of “art criticism”. This will allow readers to find articles which discuss artists they are interested in. I’ll update it as I add new posts. Abramović, Marina Why People Hate Contemporary/Conceptual Art (A section is devoted to her “The Artist is Present” performance.) The Debate…
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Here a new art was thrown open to me, which offered free play for the imaginative expression of every conceivable world of feeling.~ Alfred Kubin (upon seeing prints by Max Klinger). If this work from 1903 doesn’t seem really weird to you, and in a good way, with its bizarre crab fishing babies out of…
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A long meditation on a very difficult period in my life, which ain’t over yet. It will be divided into 7 parts. 1) Bad Luck 2) Bad Actors and Unimaginative Drones 3) The Bitter Pill 4) My Original Sin 5) When I Decided I Needed to Make Art 6) How to Survive 7) A…
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This is the color version of a drawing I finished earlier this month: And this was based on a ball-point sketch I did in a lined pad of paper: I like the color version with its Impressionist colors and treatment, but the B&W I feel is more mesmerizing. Maybe that’s just how I feel at…
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