Skull - concept to finished piece

Oh my goodness!  I spent so much time watching art videos from Artist Network TV that I got nothing else done this weekend!!  I learned a LOT!  I was planning to apply some of my newfound knowledge in painting watercolour today, but I found that I was incredibly exhausted.  I know from past experience (and I've been instructed this way by Gordon MacKenzie) that if you are tired you shouldn't paint.  These two things just don't go well together!

So I took Mr. MacKenzie's advice and had a nap instead.  Since there is no progress to report today, I thought I might show some pics of the progress of the skull.  I don't think that I included any of the conceptual images in my previous posts.

So here's the original concept design:

Not much to look at is he?  But I think you can clearly see that I was trying to get the name to fit into the skull.  I had originally thought of adding a flame around the skull, but later discarded it.

This is a human skull image that I drew of an image I got off the net.  This is almost a medical drawing, but since I have never drawn a skull before, and I wanted it to be at least based on realism, I had t start somewhere.

You can see from these two images how I modified the original skull (traced it onto tracing paper then put a piece of paper on top to make a copy with modifications) and started to fill in the shapes.

This of course is the finished piece.  He came a long way from the concept image.  And I have to say that I had no idea how he would ultimately come out.  After I made my modifications, I mostly let the drawing decide what it wanted/needed to be complete.  I think this made it a better drawing because I had no real expectations.

Now if only I could do the same thing with painting!

Storms do not help the creative process

It was another bust of a day.  With the freezing rain storm, I had to get my little girl home after the power had gone out at the school.  I didn't get anything done that I wanted to.  Admittedly I didn't have much planned.  I was hoping to go over Birgit's video from Artistnetworktv.com so I could understand better how to paint the crocus, and at the best, maybe do some trial runs with the watercolours to get a "feel" for the process before I dove right in.

Instead all I got to do was watch the video.  I'm hoping there might be some time this weekend to try it out, but if not there's always Monday!!

Oh and I thought I'd pass along that for those of you interested in video workshops, the Artist's Network is currently having a free trial weekend (from Friday to Sunday inclusive).  You can watch as many videos as you want and it won't cost you anything so long as you cancel before the end of the day Sunday.  Here's the link: http://click.artists-hub.com/?qs=6a60f95c55ebf2157ca27319075f6400f651ffc2c9004802998ddfab4acbdf60

Type in the word ATV4FREE in the coupon section at checkout and you will be ordering the 6 month subscription (until you cancel).  But you will have access to over 200 videos to watch as many times as you can between now and Sunday night!  That's what I did anyway.  Birgit's in there as well as Gordon MacKenzie and there are a whole bunch of other styles and mediums to choose from.  I suggest taking a look at their site regardless to see if they have anything that interests you.

Have a great weekend!

Skull - Finished!

It is very rainy in Kitchener today.  And they’re calling for severe freezing rain with hail – welcome spring!  It’s a day that makes me glad I can lock myself in my studio for a few hours and ignore the world.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you know that I’ve been trying to iron out the shading for the skull.  I tried looking at various skulls online, I made a maquette out of playdough and clay, and I checked out a whole bunch of webpages with how-to’s on skulls (gosh there’s a lot of these!), and none of these ideas really worked for me. 

Yesterday I had what I like to call “a V8 moment”.  A friend of mine has a skull jar.  It’s really nice, covered in celtic markings and relatively realistic in proportion.  I have seen this skull daily for years, but it never occurred to me to take a picture of it until yesterday. 

I positioned it with the light source in the right spot, then took the pic home and did some computer manipulation to grey scale and sharpen as I need it to be.  Amazingly (sarcasm) everything came together for me very quickly with this new reference (shaking head).  There are times when I get too clever for my own good and it stands in the way of my smarts :P

After 2 hours of absolute zen shading, I have a (mostly) finished skull.  It’s about 99% done.  I want to add more texturing in the forehead area, though not too much as the light is directly hitting there, but then I think it’s done.  What do you think?  Can you still see the name?

I love pencil work.  It’s taken me years of practice to get to the point that 2 hours straight work doesn’t completely wear me out, or cause cramped muscles.  Now I really enjoy that time - I find something so calming about repetitively sweeping the pencil across the page to blend or darken an area.  It’s very relaxing and then when I’m done the final piece looks so smooth and textured! 

Here’s a pic of the materials I used to finish the drawing (2H & 4B pencils, pen eraser, electric eraser, kneaded eraser, white eraser, and drafting brush).  You can see that it’s really shiny on the darkest part of the skull in the jaw – that’s how much graphite is in that section.  I may have pressed too hard in my attempt to darken as much as I could, but the real-life image looks really nice.  Now to do the final shading and spray with fixative.

Making a maquette with clay

Had a pretty good weekend, the weather was lovely and I got a rare opportunity to give myself a much needed mani-pedi, no polish this time though.  And was thinking about this skull.

I'm having issue with the back of the skull.  Something about it just doesn't look right.  The face is going well, but it looks like a completely separate piece, not a complete skull.  So, I thought I would try the maquette again.  But because the playdough worked so well last time, this time I went to the local dollar store (Yay Dollarama!!) and bought myself some clay.

And it's GLUTEN FREE!  This really wasn't an issue since I wasn't intending to eat it, and really, why would clay have flour in it anyway?!

I also bought some clay modelling tools ($5 - Michael's - cheaper at Curry's but a MUCH longer drive).  I referenced how to make a skull out of clay - thank you Google, and started work this morning.  As it turns out, I have absolutely NO skill in working with clay.  I thought this would be as simple as playdough, but clay is a much more resistant material.  Don't get me wrong, that's exactly what I wanted, but it tended to dry out much more quickly than I expected.  The tools were awesome though.  I could get the detail and definition I wanted (with my limited skills) with moderately little effort, getting into crevices my fingers couldn't reach.  Here's the result so far.

Looks creepy don't he?!  You can see the partial drawing in the background - I obviously have a LOT of work still to do, but I'm beginning to see what may be going on in the drawing already.

After working with it for about an hour or so I decided it was time to put it away.  It was getting drier by the minute and harder to work with.  I figured I didn't want it to dry completely since I want to come back to it later, so I thought I'd try the old trick of a damp paper towel in a ziplock bag to keep it moist.  We'll see how that works out.

I needed a break, so refreshed with some juice and cleaned my desk of clay.  I pulled out the crocuses again to continue the line drawing (no pic today) for the remainder of the day.

Here are the links I used for how to make a skull out of clay:

• www.ehow.com/how_6223673_make-human-skull-out-clay.html
• http://www.ehow.com/how_7804155_build-human-skull.html

If anyone has any tips on how to work with clay or how to make a skull out of clay, I'd be really interested to hear them!

Life Interference and crocuses

Life interfered with continuing work on the skull today, so I decided I would instead start work on the crocus painting.  I'm not as confident in my painting ability/skill as my drawing, but only practice will solve that (so they say anyway).

In a previous post I mentioned that I had taken some pics of the crocuses blooming in my back garden.  I picked the one I liked the best and I think I will try to imitate Brigit O'Connor.  If you've never seen Brigit's work, here's her webpage: www.birgitoconnor.com

She is a watercolour artist, very realistic, including images of landscapes and uber-close-up botanicals (or as I like to call them, "flower genitalia" - because it's really a close-up of the pistils and anthers).

While I may not be confident in my painting skills, I do at least understand the steps required.  I took my chosen pic and did a bunch of computer manipulation.  Because it's so hard to get the camera right up close to the anthers, I had to do a bunch of cropping.  This took longer than you'd expect because I was also looking for good compositional elements.  I tried to follow the "golden rule", while still keeping the image interesting.  Then I sharpened, increased colour intensity and turned it black and white.

I printed off both the colour and black and white images and moved to the studio.  Before I can even think of painting, I have to do a line drawing of the image.  I chose to do this on a piece of sketching paper (if I worked directly on the watercolour paper I run the risk of damaging the paper with multiple erasing and drawing).   I frequently referred to both the black and white and colour references to do this.  The colour image sometimes blurs lines and sometimes sharpens depending on where the colour is and the same with the black and white, so I've found that using both really helps to keep the lines accurate.

When I was drawing the flower, I kept it loose at first with a 2B pencil.  Nice big shapes and free whole-arm motions (I stood over my paper the whole time).  Then I started with the anthers, detailing the various waves and bumps and lines, using the other shapes to keep the relative position of the pieces.  Then I moved to the petals, repeating the same process.  I have a nice pen eraser that really helps to define the lines when they get too thick and messy.  I use the drafting brush to remove any eraser bits so that I don't smudge the picture with my hand.

I still have some detail work on the lines in the petals, but this step is almost complete.  Next I will transfer the line drawing to watercolour paper using my light table (a.k.a. window) keeping my lines faint, but dark enough to see.

Skull Part II

Today I worked on adding shading to my skull image.  Pencil is a lovely medium for adding shading.  With all the different hardnesses, it's fun to move from a harder pencil to a softer one and vice versa.  That's really the secret to creating depth in a pencil drawing.  No amount of pressing down with one pencil will create the same amount of rich darks as using even a few different pencils.  Darrel Tank uses 5 pencils (5 Pencil Method) to create depth and realism in his portraits.  Lee Hammond uses up to 12.  So far I manage to work through with as few as possible.

For this image today I only used 2 pencils (2B and 4B).  I tend to start with the softer pencils first (4B) to get a good idea of where I ultimately want the darks and lights to be.  Unfortunately you can't stay with just the one pencil without pressing really hard on the paper.  Because 4B is so soft, it tends to stay on the top of the "bumps" of the texture of the paper, leaving all the "valleys" white.  This makes an overall "grey" value.  If you press on the paper, some of the valleys will get darker, but you have now made it impossible to completely remove any of the graphite for highlights or gradation, and it creates a mark that you will see in the finished piece as "wrong".  By switching to a harder pencil (2B) you are better able to fill in the valleys without damaging the paper.

Another important tip is the "tip".  Keep the pencils as sharp as you can.  The sharper the pencil the better it can fill in the valleys.  Gradation is key to making things look 3D in any image and any medium.  To help show the roundness of a shape, it's important to have a gradual tonal shift from dark to purest white.  It's also very important to keep a light touch with the pencil.  Not so light as to leave no mark, but not so heavy as to damage the paper.  You will of course want to "lift" the pencil when grading to white and "drop" the pencil when grading to dark, but if you find you really want to press hard it's probably time to switch to a softer pencil.

You can see that I have a lot of gradation going on in my skull image.  There's also a lot of shading - even in the areas most exposed to direct light.  I find that I need this shading to help show character in the object (small bumps or grooves in the shape), so shading the entire object and then "lifting" tone with a kneaded eraser to create highlights works best for me.

I apologize for the darkened bottom right of the picture - my shadow got in the way of the shading :P, but I think you can see what's happened so far.  I'm going to move down even further in hardness of pencil next time - probably a 2H to further define and sharpen the dark areas.  I haven't decided if I want to add highlights to the eyeballs just yet.  I'm kinda liking how he's looking so far.

Kitty Complete!

I took a vacation day today as my 5 year old was home (PD day).  So I took the extra time to push things further along and finally finished the kitty image.  Well, I think it's done anyway.  I can't come up with any more damage I can do to it - so I declare it DONE!

To finish things off, I worked on the darks and lights of the fur to make it seem silky and shiny.  I was trying for very healthy and luxurious fur.  Then I sprayed the entire drawing with a workable fixative.  This allows me to work on the topmost highlights and whiskers without smudging up the work so far. (Warning about workable fixative - be sure that you are not going to want to do any more erasing on the original work as you can only add to the pic after "fixing" it.  You can erase anything you add, but nothing below that.)

So, I sprayed it thoroughly (it really sucks to think you've "fixed" a picture and then find out otherwise after the fact) and then applied the whiskers and some extra white to some of the highlights.  I haven't done the final spray to protect the image yet, but here's the finished piece:

If you'd like to see the steps it took to get to this final image, check out my past blog postings with "Kitty" titles.

Do you know anyone with a black cat that would like a drawing like this?  Or perhaps someone who really likes black cats?  Send me a message and we can talk ;)

I had some time left over so I thought I'd start tackling the skull image again.  As I said before, I was having trouble with some of the shading aspects.  I've been reading James Gurney's book "Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist" and he said that one of the best ways to deal with this type of problem is to make a maquette.  Essentially this is a model of your subject, usually made from clay or some other sculpting medium.  Since I didn't have any clay, I used some of my kids' play dough (home made):

One of the disadvantages of using play dough is that it's very soft and squishy so it doesn't hold the shape well or for long while you're holding it.  The advantage to doing a maquette, I found, was that I could see how the image should be in 3D.  It helped me make the image more accurate around the eyes and cheek bones.  I still have a bit of work to do on this one, mostly shading, but hopefully not too much more. This is what the drawing looks like now (can you see the name in the skull?):

Spring is definitely in the air in Kitchener!  I took some very nice pics of the crocuses growing in my garden and I may do a painting of one of them next.

James Gurney is the creator/author/illustrator of the Dinotopia books.  I've added Gurney's books to my recommended booklist.  If you're interested in checking out his blog, you can find it here: www.gurneyjourney.blogspot.ca/