pantagruel

Comic-con

As regular readers of my blog have guessed by the sudden decline in posts, it's that wonderful time of year known as Nerd Prom, aka San Diego Comic-Con.

Every year, I battle through a massive anxiety attack to get my work together enough to show and get feedback on. This year's anxiety is compounded by the stress of having had my day job at Saltmine U. be in peril. I have less staff, and slightly more work than I did last year. I've been so busy spending the last few months proving I was useful, that all my spare time (such as it is) was spoken for. That doesn't leave much for doing illustrations. Being an art director has had to be my primary focus; being a student came second; and any socializing, either online or in person, was rare. I worked Faire to fulfill a commitment I'd made to help two good friends, and while I don't regret it, it meant I spent two months with no days off at all.

Not surprisingly, my immune system pitched an armed revolt a month ago, and I succumbed to the plague that's been sweeping the West Side. Only in the last two weeks have I been able to get through an hour without coughing, or had anything resembling energy.

Which is all to say: I'm not as prepared as I'd prefer to be for the major industry event of the year. I've done a lot of good work, and I'm proud of it. I just wish I were further along with my current projects, so that I could show them. But hey, I'll bring them down to Comic-Con!

This year will be my very first as an exhibitor, and I'm beyond thrilled to have this chance. I'm going to be with the studio I'm at every Saturday: Studio 2nd Street. We're booth #5361. I'll be doing painting demos in the booth all four days, and will also be part of this panel:

Thursday, July 23
4:30-5:30 Drawing Upon Reference— Ron Lemen (ImagineFX magazine) and Studio 2nd Street Group will cover the subject of photo reference and how to use it when you have to use it. This lecture will briefly cover the do's and dont's of copying photos for your illustration work and some basic guidelines for drawing an effective image. Room 30CDE

Yeah, guess who's going to be showing you all how not to use photo reference.

As if that weren't enough, I'll also be modeling corsets for Alter Ego while I'm there. Hopefully that will generate a lot of business for Alter Ego. It'll be a challenge to not get upstaged by the corsets, but I think I can manage.

If you're going to be at Comic-Con, please come by and say hello!

Yesterday's painting

Yesterday, Sabrina came to pose; here's the finished underpainting. I had a tiny canvas panel of natural linen I'd been saving for a figure pose, and the pose she took was perfect. The 6x11 panel is being cropped, I suspect, by Typepad's iPhone client -- her feet are actually on the canvas. I was getting worried for a while, as my initial drawing was beating me up and taking my lunch money. Instead of having something decent laid in after the first sitting, I was still wrestling with the charcoal drawing after an hour. My heavy-handedness gets really problematic when using soft charcoal in a small space: a 1/16" line is fine on a large canvas, but on a small one, it gets ugly fast, as proportions get thrown off by a line that's no longer a line, but is becoming a plane, with a volume of its own.

I think I got there in the end, though. Next week, I'll glaze color over this and build up the lighter areas so that they've got volume.

In other news, I have work, and plenty of it. I'd love to have both money and time to take a vacation, but it's going to be a while before I have enough of either. Right now, though, I need coffee, and some lunch.

through a gel darkly

For the last few weeks now in Saturday's color theory classes, we've been painting either still lifes, models, or color wheels. Only, to make it more difficult for me, I have to paint the subject while looking through a color gel.

Like so:

And so:

This isn't nearly as easy as it looks.

look, some art

Jasmine:

Oils; 3 hours. Did this one on Saturday, and it took two sittings (40ish minutes) to get the underlying drawing right. I really must get better at taking photos of my paintings so they don't shine. Sigh.

Technorati Tags: art, studio

lassitude

It's been a busy few weeks at the Art Cave.

Moving preparations, which I'd been putting off, now need to be tackled At Once, as I now have a little over a month to winnow, cull, and pack up all my worldly possessions. This makes me want to take to my bed with the vapors. Tackling it even a little bit at a time is overwhelming. Where are my cabaña boys to handle this all?

---

Work is busy, I suppose, in the sense that there is a lot to do, with no immediate deadline for most of the projects -- just a distant thought about how it really should all get done soonish. So Saltmine U. continues much as it has been.

---

I have a new painting to do, which I'm quite excited about, but want to keep the subject secret until it's finished.

More class work from the man with two silver earrings than I want to think about is in the queue.

---

Comic-con looms.

---

And all this, combined with summer heat, is giving me a severe case of lassitude, and lack of appetite -- sure signs of stress. Some people, when stressed, devour everything that isn't nailed down. I, however, end up picking at food when I get preoccupied, and have to be reminded to eat. Stress exacerbates this. The only thing that sounds appealing at the moment is faffing about, drinking gin & tonic.

Well.

That's not the only thing.

Technorati Tags: art, comic-con, deadlines, painting, studio

sketchbook dump

From the quicksketch class a week-and-a-half ago; marker, 5 minutes each.

I've discovered that five minutes seems to be about the shortest period of time I can successfully manage a drawing in. All the sketches done in three-, two-, and one-minute intervals just do not look nearly as good. Also, I need more practice getting the markers to look smooth and not scratchy.

Technorati Tags: art

sample comic page class assignment

This was the last digital assignment: take a section of a comic script, and do the pencils, inks, and color for the 3-panel page, in three hours.

It's pretty rough, but hey -- three hours.

The pencils and very rough ink stage.

And with color, and lettering.

Why I don't letter anything unless I absolutely have to should be pretty obvious. My handwriting is atrocious bordering on abysmal. And look how much better I am with color and tone than I am with line!

This assignment was the most fun I'd had in the digital class in weeks; maybe even since it started. The page is rough, choppy, and needs a lot of work, but I got it all done in three hours; the only person in the class who managed it. I'm inordinately proud of that.

Technorati Tags: art, artist, studio

tribal bellydancer digital quick sketch

Here's another one of Sabrina, who stayed to pose for the night's digital illustration class. 20 minutes. It's rough, but I like the feel. The little quick sketches are rough for me; I usually need much, much longer to get anything that looks like a form down. If I can just get the form to roll and the values correct in that short time, I consider it a win.

Oh, and I need more coffee. Seriously. Up at 4:30 this morning, to leave the house by 5, to make it into work by 6. When did I get to bed? 2 a.m. If I keep telling myself I love freelance work, maybe I will believe it.

Technorati Tags: art, mornings are hard, painting, studio

tribal bellydancer painting

I can't wait until this painting dries, so I can take a proper picture of it that isn't shiny.

Six hours, from life, over two weeks. I'm very happy with how this one turned out, and Sabrina, the model, liked it too, which was a great compliment. We had fun chatting during the breaks. It's interesting to me how the paintings of models I know and get along with turn out whole orders of magnitude better than the ones where I don't know the model at all. There's something about making that connection that helps me immensely in getting a read on who they are and what they're about, and I think it shows in the resulting work.

Technorati Tags: art, painting

saturday morning

It's Saturday morning, and I'm trying to get myself fully awake. This is difficult to do when you realize halfway through a mug of tea, that you've picked the really tasty rooibos tea with vanilla in it… which has no caffeine. I probably need to just make myself a cabinet with a timer lock, and then put all the decaf stuff in it, and set the timer to only unlock after 5 p.m., so that I can't do this to myself again. This makes mornings really hard.

The Caravaggio study is still drying, and I can't put anymore paint on top of it until that grisaille layer's dried. Not that I'd have learned that the hard way in attempts #1 and #2, or anything. Now to tackle the rest of the drawing homework, before I head to the studio, where I'll paint in the afternoon, and do the digital work at night.

Back to homework.

Technorati Tags: art, mornings are hard, watching paint dry, studio