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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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. 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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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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My Early Work is Saved There are many reasons being an artist is rough, or as we artists might say to ourselves at times “sucks”. 90% of art majors do not continue on to art careers (according to an article in The Atlantic), and I would guess that among visual artists that number is even…
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The new technique, as you can plainly see above, is how to go from a rough B&W image into a painterly, color one, without losing the roughness or drama of the original. I won’t go into the details of how it’s done, which is kinda’ a secret anyway, but it uses a combo of Photoshop…
Read MoreHere are my generous and perspicacious supporters through Patreon or Paypal (who also choose to be listed). They help make it possible for me to continue making challenging new fine art images and writing art criticism and other articles. If you’d like to contribute (for as little as $1 a month), in which case I…
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If you are thinking something along the lines of, “Why the hell would anyone draw THAT in 2017?”, than I think you’ve answered your own question. Precisely. Why do something anyone else would do? And no I’m not religious or anti-religious. Please notice: The alien and its hand on the woman’s head. The whole snake.…
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