Monday, May 31, 2010

brushy lines

Just another quick one before I have to draw some more commercial stuff. Just some quick indication of drapery of clothes.
I'm using Photoshop again with a speckle brush with the shape and other dynamics turned on.
I'm using Photoshop CS4 here but I just ordered Photoshop CS5 and I really want to play around with the brush tools now. They are getting closer to Painter
with their brushes now.
Can't wait to see.
-Larry

Sunday, May 30, 2010

quick elf

Just drawing anything again just to put something out there.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Either flying or lying

This is a typical "start drawing a head and see where that takes you" sketch.
This ended up looking like the pencil work for a comic book inker. It has that classic Comic Book
drawing look. Well that is where I started to learn to draw... from comics. It's probably obvious.
Seems like with this style you need to be a little more careful to keep the lines clean because you end up handing over to an inker who has to follow your lines. I don't like that idea. I used to have to do that at Disney. But most times I'd want to ink it myself. I was told that if you do a scribble on the side of the page that the inker would ink that too. They were very literal.
Maybe I'll start to ink this even though it's on ruff paper. Hot pressed bristol is the way to go on inking.
This was drawn in my 9 X 12 aquabee Sketch book.
-Larry

Running

Just pencil on paper. 9x12 sketchbook .

Little Sketchbook
















This is not current but I like it. It was done at the Neue Museum in Manhattan. Drawn with pencil and brush pen in one of my little Moleskine 5X8 books. This was at the restaurant that had mostly German food. Nice and heavy so people didn't move around so much.
If you try and draw people at malls they eat too fast and just move around too much.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Violent figures


I just came back from looking at Leonardo da Vinci's horse drawings that are being displayed at the J. Paul Getty Center in L.A.
It takes me back to when I really wanted to become an artist- when I was about 13 and was able to get to the Central Library in downtown San Diego. They had a much better collection of Art books than at my local area library. I was able to borrow books on Leonardo and Michelangelo
and copy their drawings and learn from them .
At the exhibition of Leonardo's drawings I was amazed to see how tiny his drawings were, even though I've seen them before. He must have been working in direct sunlight to be able to see such tiny detail.
I'm not comparing my drawing to any of the old masters it's just that I like to see drawings where the artist is figuring things out and creating from his mind. That's where a lot of the fun in drawing is.
This is just a group of figures. When do you see a group of male nudes in various poses in art if it's not in some classical scene from history of mythology? That's why this turned out like this.
I used Painter 11 using Conte tool followed by Acrylic brush.
Nothing new in technique, just drawing.
-Larry

Friday, May 14, 2010

Still influenced by Frazetta

Well, back from Tokyo and my biological clock is
back to normal. I haven't done a lot of interesting drawings while I was there just that last one on the plane and some scribbles in Harajuku.
When I got back I needed to draw something so I relied on the influence of Frank Frazetta.
Although influenced by I don't want to "do a Frazetta". I started doodling this drawing on
Sunday night around midnight. The next morning
I discovered that Frank Frazetta had passed away.
So over the next few days , here and there I kept playing with this drawing ( or painting as it turns out).
I need to mention something about the figure inspiration right here. If think you've seen her in previous drawing of mine then you are not mistaken. Her name is Pauline Nordin. She's a world class fitness trainer and fitness model and has appeared in many publications and television. She is the owner and creator of Fighter Diet and trains and works in Venice California. www.fighterdiet.com
I met her at Gold's Gym in Venice, Ca. and have subsequently trained under her guidance. --But only a few times so far. Before I met her I've seen her and thought -"Now she'd be a great model. Why couldn't we have models like that in art school? We had to draw flabby fat people". I always want to draw bone and muscle.much more interesting to me. I realize I always have a muse for my drawing at one point or another. I'm more inclined to do figure drawing so who better. But I don't want to completely create from
nothing and I don't really want to copy from a photo. Okay on this one I did refer to a photo for the face because likenesses are so hard to do from memory. It may be because when you remember someone you don't remember a flat two dimensional image but a live three dimensional person that is moving and changing all the time.
Like trying to hit a moving target while sitting on a bucking bronco.
Okay now for the specs:
I started to sketch this out in Painter 11. I like to work in very high resolution since I can go in and do some detail work . This started out as 19 inches across by 300dpi. I find that Painter gets memory pains at this resolution and especially when I star adding layers . So I save it in .PSD format and quit Painter 11.
Once It's opened again in Photoshop CS4 Extended everything is better. I can work in high resolution and have many layers. What I find is that it's much more efficient to ruff thinks out in photoshop because you can move much faster . Yon apply fast gradations, adjustment layers and even import other elements from other documents just by dragging.
Once things are where I "think" I want them I save a flattened version and open that up in Painter 11. I did this because I want to play around with brush tools. Since I was thinking in terms of a Frazetta painting I wanted to have some of that rough painterly look. You can sort of do it in Photoshop but for all of it's in conveniences Painter really can create that look of wet oil paint.
I'm slowly giving Painter it's run throughs. What I find for myself is that the oil brushes are
harder for me to control . I know it takes a lot of tweaking but I don't want to do that most of the time. The Acrylic brush however seem to work better for me. It feels much more pressure sensitive that the oils. With the oils I seem to get an "all or nothing
" sort of application.
I know some will tell me it that getting better will come with time.
Another thing to mention is that Painter seems to work SO MUCH smoother when you only work in a one layer document. That is not my usual way of working. It's okay for this kind of thing but would be impossible in my normal work.
Here's a detail of the figure at right.
Well if you click on the first pic it will show up better.
I should work on this more. I sometimes don't know how far I'll take something . I just go along and see where that takes me.

-Larry