Woman Figure Study in Charcoal

Perfection 1056 Faber Castell Pencil Eraser

I practiced another figure drawing today using Art Models 3 on CD. I also used  the same Grisaille method as before, but this time with the aid of a Perfection 1056 Faber Castell Pencil Eraser to pull out the small lights.

Grisaille charcoal drawing technique.

Here are a couple of drawings I did at home from photo references, using what I’ll call a Grisaille charcoal drawing technique.

figure drawing class

It was our first day with a model in figure drawing class and we started with some contour drawings without looking at the paper. Practice of this sort of blind drawing, is not meant to produce a work of art, its purpose is for building an eye for observation.

After that we did a series of really fast gesture drawings, really fast meaning 15 seconds, the trick is to capture what the model is doing as quickly as you can.

Finely we went on to a couple ½ hour poses. I found my self struggling as usual and the instructor suggested that I abandon the outlining approach and block in the models gesture with sweeping applications of the vine charcoal and work the basic shapes in with your fingers, adding and subtracting  until the figures basic gesture and tonal values come together. I didn’t immediately  figure it out in class, but I went home and practiced it with better results. 

Im familiar with this type of drawing as its basically the Grisaille technique with charcoal instead of a burnt umber wash.

Life Drawing in Charcoal by Douglas R. Graves

I’ve taken a break from oil painting for a while to brush up on my drawing skills. I’m taking a instructed figure drawing class as well as working through the lessons from a few good books.


This latest book Life Drawing in Charcoal by Douglas R. Graveshas  teaches an alternative approach to drawing that better suits my oil painting mind set.

“Rather than building up a drawing from lines, this innovative method encourages students to begin with tonal masses. Suitable for experts as well as beginners, its step-by-step demonstrations feature over 200 illustrations. Topics include foreshortening, use of modeling to achieve added dimension, facial features, and other aspects of life drawing.”

Rick Steves: The Value of Travel

I am American as my Jeep Cherokee and homemade apple pie !

And to show off my versatility, after working on the Jeep, I made an apple pie from scratch. Lol !! What can I say, I like to build things.                              

2000 Jeep, cracked block

Here's a few pictures of me messing around with my Jeep !!

The Natural Way to Draw, by Kimono Nicoladies

Just a little up date on what I’ve been up to lately,


I’ve been reading a lot about academy art studies lately and the emphasis seems to be on developing good drawing skills. So in an effort to develop better drawing skills, I’m reading a book from a well known Art Student's League teacher, Kimono Nicoladies. The book is titled The Natural Way to Draw and the first assignment is to put a lot of time into drawing without looking at the paper, with the concept being to practice a constructive way to look at people and objects so that you acquire the most knowledge from your efforts. I’ve been doing this using Pose Manicas for my subject mater, drawing contour and gestures.

I’ve also signed up for a series instructed figure drawing classes at the Arts Guild of New Jersey, instructed by Mc Guire.

Other then that it’s been all work and little play lately. Oh yea I finely started working on my Jeep with the cracked engine. I pulled the engine out by myself, just have to order a new rebuilt and put it in. I haven’t really worked on cars in about 15 years, I forgot what a pain in the ass it is.... I would rather be painting.




 

Learning How to Paint Part 1 - Three Secrets to Success

Learning about Oil Paint Mediums with Katie Blackwell

Ten tips to learn how to paint from the Russian Practicum web site

( Google’s Russian to English translation may be a little rough, but the advice is still good.)

1. Sketch


The first and most important point. Do at least 5-6 sketches per day. This rule works like this: the more the better. Use every opportunity to paint at home, at work, on the road. It develops a "hand", the sharpness and speed of perception, the ability to see the proportions and character. It is useful to draw storyboards for the film, comics step by step instructions. They have to control the movement of the characters, watching their recognizability. More

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2. Copies of Old Masters

Surrounded himself with role models, develop the taste. Make a copy of 3 months. It should be solid with good originals Study of the great masters (Michelangelo, Rubens, Holbein, Dürer, Repin, Serov, Feshin and others). Try to maximize how you can get closer to the source, studying not only the techniques of the master, but his biography, the material culture of the time. More

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3. Draw from memory

Even when working from nature, we work from memory. During a lengthy educational setting, in parallel sketches from memory, examining details, draws at home or that element. Developing visual memory, you will become not only a good draw, and write persuasively.

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4. Study and consult with the nature of

Explore nature at least 2 hours per day under the guidance of an experienced mentor. Principle: from simple to complex. For the fruitful development of professional skills necessary to have an individual plan of study or to follow the prescribed curriculum. Work in the studio combine to travel to the Picnic. Do not let yourself confused knock formal experiments. Trust your instincts and always compare theory with practice.

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5. Read the professional literature

All you need to know, has long been written - do not reinvent the wheel. Read a book a month. Technique and technology of materials, art history, anatomy, cromatics, tracts of old masters, artists' biographies, the physics of natural phenomena, the basis of perception, psychology, philosophy - read everything connected with the profession of an artist. Today, the Internet provides a global opportunity to get almost any material. But you can not trust everyone.

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6. Look for a mentor

Constantly look for a mentor, according to their professional growth. You have to completely trust his knowledge, experience and his creative activity should call the universal respect. Often, good artists can not be mentors. For this we need to have a methodical and academic talent. Give advice to small - need to participate in the life of a student, think of the job taking into account the personality and abilities. On the other hand, the teachers on the staff often perform supervisory functions, and have not practiced the art. Their shkolyarnye truth are without this skill and craftsmanship. Sometimes, only one meeting with a true master can change your whole future.

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7. Repeat mistakes

Usually, people are encountering the first obstacle - abandon the job. They are afraid of repeating mistakes. It did not work - start a new one! Do not be afraid to make mistakes - take a look at them closely. Perhaps it "speaks" your identity. Turn their disadvantages into advantages.

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8. Not Draw on photos

The temptation to simplify the work with nature can have irreversible consequences. Amateur painter, not realizing the intricacies of identifying shapes, wittingly or unwittingly falls in relation to view the world through the lens. He feels that this will bring it to nature. Believe me - it's not the case.

The camera can not replace the work your heart and mind to transfer the reality on the plane. And especially do not revise it creatively, which is particularly valuable. Only mustered sufficient experience and become a master can be used to collect material fotoappart and fixation point.

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9. Take breaks

Do not get hung up on one and the same - to know how to switch. Does not work - make a break, go for a walk. Start a fundamentally different picture, change the point of view, change the equipment, try new stuff. It is useful to have several simultaneous work with different tasks, using a new technique. Sometimes you just need to step back to look at ourselves.

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10. Engaged in creative work

Put it in front of a big goal. We must always remember why you decided to learn. Do not shelve plans for their artistic and creative ideas. Begin to implement them right now. Take part in exhibitions, competitions, regardless of the level of training and distance. Be an artist!
 
 
Russian ,Practicum web site

Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in the Desert, a great demonstrations of art’s power to capture light, through the material of oil paint.

An extreme close-up view of Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis painting shows that the oils Bellini used are miraculous at conveying light. Blake Gopnik deconstructs the famous work.

Giovanni Bellini’s “Saint Francis in the Desert,” at the Frick Collection in New York, is one of the greatest works of Christian art. It is also one of the first Italian masterpieces painted in oils. And for the duration of this summer, we’re being invited to view the Frick’s sacred treasure in a skylit space all to itself, near texts and multimedia that highlight a recent scientific study of it. The experts didn’t uncover much, but that doesn’t matter. The chance we now have to peer long and close at the picture (they’ve even placed a sofa in front of it) confirms that it may be more miraculous than anyone has realized.


Bellini’s “Saint Francis” was begun in about 1475, soon after oils were introduced into Italy, and more than most pictures it embraces the paradox of the new medium: That such a material substance, which can be thick as buttercream, can also be the ideal way to convey immaterial light. And here’s why Bellini’s picture gets at that paradoxical essence so peculiarly well: It tells the story of a moment when the immaterial light of divinity descended to earth, leaving its mark on the material body of a Christian saint. The new oil paint, that is, reveals the sacred story of spiritual light imprinting on matter better than ever before. But that sacred story is also the perfect pretext for telling the story of the new paint, and of how its matter reveals light.

The picture’s action is set in 1224 when, after years of devotion to Christ and His poor, the 44-year-old Francesco Bernardone—soon canonized as Saint Francis of Assisi—retired to a mountain in Tuscany. As he fasted and prayed, he was rewarded with a visit by divinity itself, which left the marks of Christ’s wounds on the holy man’s flesh, making him the first person ever favored with the stigmata. Traditionally, paintings of this subject had depicted a six-winged seraph floating in the sky in front of the saint, with magic rays extending out to pierce him. But Bellini leaves all that out. He uses his new medium of oil paint to show light alone doing the holy work of transmitting spirit onto flesh. (People once thought that maybe a seraph had been cut off or erased at the top of the painting, but the new study indicates that none was ever there.)

Saint Francis stares up into vacant space, as though in contemplation not of God in the abstract, or of a visible mystical presence, but of the sun that is streaming down onto him and everything else in the scene, and casting strong shadows behind them. Where a laurel tree gets between this divine illumination and the man it wants to touch, its branches seem bent by the force, while its leaves are so bright—thanks to the oil paint rendering them—that they look close to catching fire. The golden break in the clouds at the top left of the painting, which according to the latest research has received the painting’s thickest dose of oils, is a close echo, even in its shape, of the flaming seraph seen in earlier paintings. Like the rest of Bellini’s picture, that cloud break replaces the supernatural phenomena of the Middle Ages with a Renaissance notion that God is already and always active in the world, in the workings of nature. This painting is as close to pure landscape as it is to sacred storytelling. (Botanists can recognize almost all the plants depicted by Bellini, however obscure.) Take out the figure of the saint, and you still get a pretty coherent work of art, with plenty going on in it, as could never be said of earlier sacred pictures.

Francis’s stigmatization, you could say, isn’t a magical exception to the natural order of things, but, in Bellini’s telling, is part of what goes on in a God-infused natural world. God made that world visible and active by means of the light He created in the first moments of Genesis—and then Giovanni Bellini, something like 45 years old and eager to prove his mastery, captures that world and its light by means of his oils.


You could even say that, at a moment when the Church was encouraging Christians to identify directly with its holiest figures, the oil-wielding, light-creating Bellini is identifying with the divinely favored Saint Francis immersed in his light-filled natural scene. Imagine a painter making a live record of the view depicted in this picture—say working outside at a desk like the one behind the saint, which the scientists now say Bellini took extra pains with—and you’re imagining a figure set in nature and bathed in light just as Saint Francis himself is shown to be, in this very picture. There is almost a sense that Bellini, in 1475, is sanctified by Francis and the light in this scene in the same way that Francis himself was sanctified directly by the light sent down from on high in 1224. The painting, that is, yields a record of the saint’s holiness imprinting on Bellini, as a kind of artistic stigmata, just as Francis’s true stigmata showed divinity imprinting very directly on him. It can’t be an accident that a great painting whose subject is light’s power to sanctify the material world also counts as one of the first great demonstrations of art’s power to capture light, through the new material of oil paint.

In fact, more than in almost any earlier Italian painting, we only know about the natural world Bellini puts before us because of how he captures the light that falls on it. The tiny trill of water coming out of the rocks in front, the blocky massing of the castles in the background and the roundness of the clouds above them, the velvety surfaces of the donkey’s hide and of the saint’s robes and, most especially, the angled folds and crinkled edges in the scrap of paper that bears Bellini’s own signature—all of these only come into their own, as precisely what they are, because of the light that plays across them, or rather that Bellini’s oils make us think we see there.

If Bellini’s paints are responsible for that light, and for the world it reveals, then they are the ultimate source, you could say, of the holiness carried by light in this painting.

Click on the fallowing link for 11 close up pictures of Giovanni Bellini's Saint Francis in the Desert.


Click the following link to launch the Google Art Project and zoom into the Bellini painting in great detail (opens new window).

Art Quote of the day 2012

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.”


-- Edith Lovejoy Pierce