Wet Feet

Anyone in the CT area kows how bastard cold it is at present, but sometimes this doesn't matter, I was about to put my boots on and saw an opportunity. So i'm still barefoot, but feeling vented after some furious painting. This painting took no more than thirty minutes. The faster the better.

Ker-SPLAT!

Well, I tore back into the paint on saturday and fell in love with it all over again. It's funny how I might spent a week working on something, but invariably the paintings I work on for less than an hour are so much better. Must be the energy that goes into it, but I feel like I might even be able to give Lucien Freud a run for his money at times like this. Or maybe Jenny Saville, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here... And please don't tell them that!

Scribbling forth.

Right, I started this new sketchbook about a month ago, so i'll post some of the pics from there in something resembling chronological order.











There's more interesting work in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

The Ether

The title, because it's not really there. That must be one of my main put-offs about digital work, the fact that the work doesn't really exist. That and the infinite leeway when it comes to screwing up in that it doesn't teach you to work around apparent mistakes. But I sound like an old fart who can't keep up and I'm not really. So I'll keep fiddling with both the digital and the analogue and hopefully learn from both.

Wait 'til my next post, I've gone in a whole other direction! But variety is the spice of life. So let's keep it spicy.

From Work

From Work

Bare bones.

Hey. This is just a brief follow-up on yesterday's post, I thought I should add the underlying drawing that lead to the finished product. This is in order to illustrate the actual value of simplicity. When it comes to brief sketches I still prefer pen and paper to a tablet any day, you can always digitise the drawing and work from there. Anyhoo, here it is for you to compare with the one below...

From Work

Dangerous New Weapons.

Well, to my dismay I have just created a pretty nice pic with shocking ease. How? Photoshop of course. This isn't some altered photo, although a photo was used as reference(don't ask about its origins).

Now for anyone who paints realism the hard way(and by this i mean the RIGHT way), you wil know the amount of painful thought that sometimes goes specifically into figuring out the correct colours. This problem is straight out the window when an eyedropper tool and a digital photo is handy and the rest is history. Looking at so much mind-blowing digital work out there, I still can't help but wonder how many of these artists could actually cut the mustard if you gave them a pencil or a brush. Moral high ground perhaps, but being able to pay the rent at the end of the day is what matters, so i suppose the means aren't quite as relevant when you're doing it for a living. But a hundred years down the line, a painting will still be a painting, but we all know transitory digital can be.

PS: And if push comes to shove and the world ends, at least we can burn paintings for heat.

Here's the product:

From Work

And don't worry, most of my work is still old school messy and stinking of turpentine.