Finally completed, and it was as much of a battle creating him as he looks like he’s a veteran of. I used lots of new techniques which I’ve learned from professional illustrators, and incorporated into my own arsenal of digital and painting techniques. This is as far as I could take the image with my…
Read More
#21 – Dr. Cataract #21 is the twenty-fifth portrait in a series of 31 self-portraits as other versions of myself in different lives. This one took a sci-fi direction. The result is a unique, surrealist, sci-fi, mutrant man, perhaps a victim of his own medical or scientific experiments gone awry. I made this one shortly…
Read More
More thoughts after days of ruminating on this topic, and various challenges to my arguments on my blog and elsewhere. Note that if you disagree with me, or have in the past, that’s perfectly fine. I’m more interested in understanding reality than I am in being right. If I were to suddenly switch my pro-free…
Read More
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 —…
Read More
#22 – The End Came Swiftly A sci-fi digital impasto painting reinterpreting the end of The War of the Worlds, when the Martian ships fall because of exposure to the bacteria in the Earth’s atmosphere. The image falls between representation, traditional oil painting, and abstraction. The atmosphere, textures, composition, and feel are more important…
Read More
In the continued creation of a hyper-realistic monster, I reached the stage where one overlays textures onto the body. For my fellow Photoshop nerds, you take a picture of a texture, put it on its own layer, lower the opacity to around 30%, and tweak out the exposure so the texture looks like it’s on…
Read More
It’s over 10 days since my last update on this piece in progress, and it might not look like it’s that different, but I logged in over 20 hours of work on small changes. The deal is that I’m improving my skills at realism while executing this, so there are areas I keep working over…
Read More
What is postmodernism, what are its shortcomings, and how has it negatively impacted the art world and contemporary culture? [repost with updates] Every student of art needs to grapple with Postmodernism at some point, either climb aboard, reject it, or integrate it. In order to come to terms with it, one needs to be able…
Read More
Here he is again, and more rounded out. The initial line drawing (see below) has completely disappeared, and now all the shapes are defined via shading. I made his flesh more uniformly grey green, and I’m liking the deeper orange for the irises (the eyes are definitely not done). I’m NOT done with shading, highlights,…
Read More
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…
Read More
[I wote this yesterday morning when the power was out. My info on the Wuhan-flu is thus a little behind in numbers, but otherwise still relevant.] Within a minute of waking up this morning the power went out. Turns out something happened to a power cable by the superstore around the corner. That might have…
Read More
Broad Outlines This is intended as a useful device for a very general categorization of visual-based art. The idea is to simplify something that is already hopelessly convoluted. There are inevitably grotesque omissions, outstanding hybrids, uncategorizable outliers, and genres I don’t address (such as folk art, outsider art, and comics…). But it’s worth thinking about…
Read More
If you know how to use brushes in Photoshop, this one’s ready to go. It’s just something I stumbled on while experimenting with all the different options and capacities of Photoshop’s extremely powerful brush machine. Making custom brushes is now part of my arsenal of available techniques, and it’s phenomenal what you can do with…
Read More
On this day in 1888, which is 130 years ago, Vincent Van Gogh cut of a piece of his right ear in a bout of anguish brought on by his fight with Paul Gauguin, who was leaving Arles and their shared yellow house. Earlier in the evening Gauguin had threatened Vincent with a saber, and…
Read More
“The paintings I created were intended for my eyes only. I felt I couldn’t exhibit them because they were so visceral, horrifying, and disturbing. I knew that I would be stigmatized.” ~ Suzzan Blac. A Savage Painting “During my teens, teachers would berate me for my ‘dark’ drawings and persuade me to draw ‘pretty’ things.”…
Read More
Apparently I’m the first person to ask this question, or type it up and publish it online. At least a Google search turns up nothing. What everyone asks is, and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard it, “Can you like the art without liking the artist”? And by “without liking” they mean hating, or shunning, or…
Read More
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…
Read More
I watched a mini-documentary “Beauty: Explained” on Netflix, and a few pieces fell into place regarding how art is considered today. Before I connect the dots and introduce what the new science suggests, I will need to review what the dots are, and what they signify. If you already know your contemporary art history, you…
Read More
I reached into the archives to retrieve these horrible classics (not for the little kiddies, though). Feel free to share, print, decorate, worship, & whatever: The Human Fly: Alien Autopsy: Awakening Upon Death of the Bride of the Creature: The Agony and the Extraterrestrial: Golgolon: Monster Maiden #1 Monster Maiden #2 The Giant’s Den: Now…
Read More
Some of you know I’ve been doing a lot of study over the last several months, and now it’s paying off. I’m working on portrait #32 in my SFAU series, and I decided to put in an earring from a photo. [Decided to do another portrait to practice some of the techniques I’ve learned.] There…
Read More
THEY’RE HERE! Prints of my original fine art digital paintings are now available. I’m using INPRNT as my printing service for several solid reasons. Prices are fixed, fair, and a bargain. They use archival papers and inks. Creators keep half the profits. Artists have to be approved. The interface is streamlined. It looks like this:…
Read More
The Salvator Mundi, a portrait of Christ attributed to da Vince and sold to the highest bidder as such, is in the news again, now because it hasn’t arrived for a blockbuster da Vinci show scheduled to open in about a week. I’m more perturbed that people take this painting seriously. “for me the most…
Read More
Renoir is an object of hatred and scorn, but the criticism is myopic. When I said to reconsider Renoir, it’s from the last critical update, at which point, if you don’t already know, his status was solidified as a horrible painter and sexist pig-man. And while there are some cringeworthy bather paintings, if we were…
Read More
Artists can make whatever kind of art they want, and it’s totally legit. I’m all for it. It mostly just comes to good or bad examples of the kind of art in question. People might think that because I am pro-visual art, and because I criticize certain conceptual works, that I am against conceptual art…
Read More
When I was a little kiddie and went to Sunday school we glued pasta to empty tomato-sauce cans and spray-painted them gold (or was it silver?). Maybe they were supposed to be chalices or something. I forget the religious import. True, the world’s richest artist is using better materials — dead butterflies no less —…
Read More
#23 – Bare Knuckle Brawl A bloody outdoor boxing match without gloves or fanfare. This is one of the rare images where I used references [stills from a YouTube video] and ordinary people to create a tableaux. Why I chose it: It has a traditional painterly feel reminiscent of Hopper, and the subject matter and…
Read More
Hope you all like the new design and layout. Above is the snappy new logo I designed. Because my theme keeps the header at the top at all times, I needed a logo that would be easily visible against any background, but unobtrusive. I got the idea of using that old tape that you could…
Read More
The only artist I’m aware of who has received any recognition for digital painting in the contemporary fine art world is David Hockney, and that’s just because anything and everything he creates is automatically reviewed. Gerhardt Richter has the same kind of status, and some of his threadbare digital art is taken seriously, but it’s…
Read More
