June 4th, 2010
A selection of sketches from my morning practice sessions. I’m trying to do a full hour of sketching every day now, trying to escape from what I felt until just recently had become an unwelcome plateau in my level of skill. I spend 15 minutes doing exercises from Andrew Loomis’s Drawing the Head and Hands, 15 minutes on his Figure Drawing for All Its Worth, and a good half-hour on a study of a drawing made by one of the masters.
My current inspiration in this regard is John Singer Sargent (check out this great database of his works at Harvard), whose drawings are full of energy and vigor yet do not lose control of themselves. They’re tremendously fun to copy, and result in satisfyingly realistic pictures. The three sketches in the top row of the gallery above are all based on Sargents.
I’m particularly keen on the two women in robes, who remind me simultaneously of medieval nuns and acolytes of the Bene Gesserit.
Tags: Bene Gesserit, John Singer Sargent, practice
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May 30th, 2010
A little something I worked up today with a camera and the ever-handy GIMP photo editor. I had some ambitions to push colour saturations in each picture to create a kind of gradient across the piece, but decided to stick with realistic colour instead. It was such a gorgeous Sunday — why try to improve it?
Tags: Geoffrey Chaucer, summer
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May 18th, 2010
The nice thing about doing figure work but not doing portraits is that when your drawing goes south on you, there’s no one to look over your shoulder and say “Um, thanks Ian, but that doesn’t really look at all like me.” Having a reference is one thing, but a live person with a sense of identity can play havoc with your artistic morale.
The above picture started out as an exercise in reproducing a compelling self-portrait done by the great fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, who died last week. As I worked on it, I realized the eyes were too big, the mouth too pursed, the neck too thin. But since Frank has far cooler things to do now than look over my shoulder, I’m free to reassure myself that the drawing at least looks like someone might — perhaps a Christopher Walken-esque movie villain from the mid-1960s, the kind of character who works at a country gas station, speaks quietly, and has murder on his mind.
Tags: Frank Frazetta, portraits
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May 11th, 2010
In a burst of twenty-first-century technological enthusiasm, I managed this evening to install AddThis “share” buttons on Archipelagoes. “It’s about time, too,” readers of a social networking bent will say. Other readers may say simply, “You added what?”
A quick explanation then. “Share” buttons appear at the bottom of each post (including this one — look down); when you sweep your mouse over one, a menu will pop-up, allowing you to easily share the post with your friends by email or by importing a snippet of the post into a social networking service like Facebook or MySpace (assuming you have an account on one of them, of course).
It’s really pretty simple. So go ahead: pick your favorite recent post (not this post, I hope; if this post is your favorite then I’m in deep trouble) and press that Share button. Your friends will thank you.
Probably.
Tags: AddThis, Facebook, MySpace
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May 9th, 2010
In Jean de Brunhoff’s 1931 children’s book, The Story of Babar, a young African elephant sees his mother shot by a hunter; he runs off, not deeper into the jungle, but (somehow) to Paris. There, he is taken in by a kindly and rich old woman, and learns the pleasures and virtues of urban civilization before eventually becoming homesick and returning to Africa, where he becomes King of the Elephants and helps his subjects adopt an improved lifestyle based largely on human ways. It is a delightful and amusingly surreal story that can be read to children as often as they like. They will learn the horrible truth soon enough.
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Tags: elephants, poaching, PTSD, socialization
Posted in Drawings, Environment | No Comments »
How France's most deliberate painter captured its most dynamic subjects
April 27th, 2010
Detail from "The Rehearsal" (c. 1873-78), by Edgar Degas
It is a strange yet common tendency of the beginner artist to think that the use of a reference object or image — a live model, for example, or a photograph — is somehow cheating. The beginner thinks, as I have thought at times, that a true artist is able to generate beautiful pictures directly from his or her imagination, without having to “copy” from something in front of them. Of course, this idea is both accurate and completely misleading. Many artists, through rigorous training and ongoing practice, have internalized the makeup and proportions of the human body (to take a common subject) and can render it at will — this being more than adequate a skill for artists employed in the fields of, say, fashion design or advertising. But many other artists regularly use live models or photographs as reference points, either because they are trying to capture the look of a specific person (rather than an imaginary one), or because they are trying to understand more perfectly the human form itself. Some, of course, are trying to do both.
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Tags: dancers, Edgar Degas, horses, movement
Posted in Art & literature, History | No Comments »
April 13th, 2010
Photographs of ballet dancers, I discovered this evening, are an excellent reference point for learning how to draw the human figure. What’s more, there’s something about sketching dancers that feels both dynamic and essential — forms built without adornment as simple vectors and curves, yet filled with energy and direction.
Unexpectedly but thrillingly, drawing has rarely felt this natural.
Tags: Ballet dancers, sketching
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April 9th, 2010
We’ve seen this in the movies dozens of times: highly-trained Western special forces burst suddenly into a target building, their weapons at shoulder height. Moving rapidly from room to room, they identify each potential target within a second, unhesitatingly shooting the bad guys while keeping safe the unarmed and innocent. When it is over, the audience breathes a sigh of mixed relief and admiration.
Being the movies, this cannot really depict reality — and in fact, it doesn’t. It turns out that when special forces burst into a house, they keep their eyes closed.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, raids, special forces
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March 23rd, 2010
It won. This narrow, simplistic, disappointing little film won the Oscar.
No, I’m not shocked. Nor am I disappointed with the Academy — though it has been on an admirably strong run in this century (No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire), this is also the group that elevated both Shakespeare in Love and Titanic to the pantheon. But I am annoyed that such a flawed movie has managed to achieve this amount of acclaim, and that The Hurt Locker is, even more gratingly, regarded now as an “important” film. It is not important – not in the way, at least, that great works of art (cinema included) are capable of being.
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Tags: Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow, The Deer Hunter, The Hurt Locker, Vietnam
Posted in Film & TV, Foreign Affairs, Myth | No Comments »
