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