Day 14/15!

Well, I do remember posting about 'daily updates, barring extraordinary circumstances' - yesterday, Deviantart was in "read-only mode" for maintaniance, blocking me from uploading anything. Instead of waiting whatever random time that might be, I'm claiming 'out-of-my-control' for that one.

Rather than posting twice in a day, I'll use the reserve to start a backlog, so in another case of my being prevented from updating via regular means, or if something happens and I'm unable to draw for awhile, I'll stuff have stuff ready to post.

Tommorrow: More paintings! Recent acrylics have just been excercises so I haven't bothered to post them, but that'll change soon.

53) ClothPile



Pile of cloth I had a fun time deliniating the edges and masses of. I'll do more like this, though I likely won't upload many of them. Great for working out your shading and tones.

54) Pose2



Buying expensive Starbucks coffee is only worth it if you can sit in an unobtrusive spot and draw what's going on inside and out. Here I took the opportunity to sketch up a few random people, more of a gesture sort of thing than conture or structural.

55) Pose3



Buying expensive Starbucks coffee is only worth it if you can sit in an unobtrusive spot and draw what's going on inside and out. Here I took the opportunity to sketch up a few random people, more of a gesture sort of thing than conture or structural.

56) Fanart



Yeah, fanart. I figured, since I'm on da, the home of random fanart, I might as well toss one more on the pile. If you ever want to practice your patience, try drawing Lisa's hair accuratly. I tell you, it isn't as easy as it looks. Marge was easier, and Bart's head is really just a tin can with eyes.

Hope they're recognizable for first attempts, drawing stuff without a reference still feels weird in my head. I like it, but it's just a different way of doing things, going by memory and construction instead of observation.

Let me know if you've got any fanart requests, I'll welcome the opportunity to practice on new shapes.

Day 14 of 4 New Pics a Day!

Two weeks already! Wow.

Unfortunately, as of right now, deviantart is "Currently in Read-Only Mode for Maintenance.", so I'm locked out until whatever maintenance is going in is finished. Because that could be hours from now, instead of staring at the clock and refreshing the screen for an unknowable amount of time, I'm going to claim this as extraordinary circumstances, and make up for it with a double update tomorrow.

Day 13 of 4 New Pics a Day

More experiments with abstraction - it's interesting, but I'm going to pull back from it. It's interesting like candy, and a diet of candy is neither healthy nor satisfying. Delicious in moderation, but I'm going to balance it out with some more serious explorations.

49) AnimalLines



Random page out of the sketchbook. I thought the effect of the equalization on this image was interesting, so I kept it as it is. The sketch themselves are attempts to begin to simplify a random assortment of animal shapes, inching towards a more foundational set of fewest possible yet still recognizable lines.

50) Faceoff



More abstract rarndomness, two of faces here, experiments with different lines, shapes, masses and textures than the ordinary.

51) HandSketch



Equilaziation kept because of the interesting effect. It's been awhile since I've drawn my own hand. The practice is a valuable one. Barring extrordianry circumstances, you should always have two hands with you - one to draw, the other to hold the mark making tool. Hands are endlessly poseable, and able to hold their own prop. Handy thing, that.

52) Spheres



Similar to Cylinders: http://lbassett.deviantart.com/art/CylinderBaseAndLight-83253325 I've been playing around with the concept of a lit sphere on a square stand, and some different ways that such a simple object can be newly interpreted.

Day 12 of Posting 4 New Pics a Day!

Day 12! That's almost 2 weeks! How did this happen so fast?

Interesting how my own perceptions are changing - much as I percieive the bulk of lazy abstract painting to be, well, lazy, I am delving deeply into the foundations of it's more successful examples, and extracting some fascinating methods of control over the visual image. So far almost entirely with line, shape, mass, and texture - I'm holding off in introducing hue, tone, and chroma to this way of thinking until I've better established my mind in its domain.

45) Cat



Figuring out how to draw a cat that doesn't look like every single cat ever drawn, but still have it look like a cat, isn't easy. The face and forelimbs need to be better tightened into the body, but otherwise I'm satisfied with the style.

46) BlindContourBase



Something else I've been playing with. Since I'm doing so much blind contour drawing as it is, I've had the idea to use them as the foundation for other things, either abstract, or more representational. The blind countour 'look' is difficult to achieve without doing actual blind contour drawing, and I'm learning that there is potential in it for very interesting visual images.

47) CylinderBaseAndLight



This was fun! Reality is boring, isn't it? Take one of the most boring 3d basic objects you can get - the cylinder, here resting on a square cubical base, with light coming from the right.

Look at it in different ways.

What if your eyeball was in the shape of a cube, what would a cylinder look like then? What if you could only see in 4d space, what would a 3d cylinder look like?

What if you turned a cylinder inside-out, and what is its most basic form if you look at it in a non-euclidean space?

Everybody knows what regular geometry looks like. Create a new geometry! Then put the cylinder into it, and see what it looks like.

Isn't the cylinder much more interesting now?

48)



Another really fun piece to create! Learning some very interesting things about different ways of representing observed reality, dominant and subordinant relationships between line, shape, mass, texture, angular, curvilinear forms, then adding representations of basic light, tone, depth with hatching and pointilist techniques and deliberatly applying some of the techniques useful to creating the illusion of depth such as density, surface, overlap, contour, foreshortening...

It is somehow like a feast, this kind of drawing.

Day 11 of Posting 4 New Pics a Day!

You know, I never before now realized how terribly the automatic anti-redeye feature of most modern cameras can mangle a painting that has a alot of, y'know, red.

41) AbstractJaws



Working on practicing and implementing some of those deliberate controls of the emotional impact of design, I've been doing dozens of little almost motifs, abstract pieces like this. Random one here, I might post others later, or find some way to bunch them all together if there's interest.

42) CurvedFigure



Another abstract piece, trying to sense the masses of the form while ignoring pure anatomy for the moment, the large planes, rounded depth of form without resorting to much shading - I like the style, there's potential here for some more interesting figure drawings, as well as paintings.

43) Gesture4



Another random page from about an hour or so of gesture drawing the human figure - I'm getting better.

44) RedLand



Ack, this hellish piece. The failed paintings in a row I just kept painting over them. Eventually I decided that there must be something wrong with me, so I limited myself to a strict three color palatte, and forced out this nightmarish alien landscape of dead bone trees partially lit by the last nuclear gasp of a cold and dying star.

Day 10 of 4 New Pics a Day!

It's my tenthdayversary! To reward myself, I'm going to go to bed early tonight. Maybe going to do four paintings tommorrow and no drawings... think that'd be fun for you guys?

As always, this is also posted over at http://lbassett.livejournal.com/ for your convenience.

37) Cubes



Just working out some plans and angles, cubes and cylinders, foreshortening and depth, lighting and things. This sort of practice will get more interesting, but it's neccessary to get these sorts of foundations in place first.

38) SketchingPoses



After all this gesture drawing, it's time to start working stuff out of my head - I'm getting better at this. Sorry for the weird contrast issues here, I don't have access to Photoshop on this comp, so about the best I can do is 'equalize' the image, which does weirdness like this - that, and I'll use a darker pencil next time. In the original image the lines were almost invisible, which why I had to force it like this. Ah well.

39) SashimiAndPlant



Piece delicious salmon Sashime (raw salmon), and some plant flower I just invented. Little sketch, but fun.

40) MountainLake



More playing around with light, depth, scale, foreground->midground->background, non-blue skies, and different sorts of water. Sort of a cold, wintry feel to thtis one, despite the green bits of field. I really should start signing these.

Day 9 of my 4x a Day Challenge

Day 9! How did that happen so fast?

Well, next challenge I suppose is to see if I can keep it up for a month, until May 7th. That'll be a solid month of daily updates, and if I can do a month, I can do two months, a quarter year, half a year - a full year?

Step by step, that's my intention.


33) ToonProps



I'm good at drawing anything I see with full accuracy, given enough time - but drawing stuff out of your head, with no reference, is a different skill entirely than pure representational drawing. I'm not very good at it yet, so because it's a weakness of mine I've been putting a lot of work into figuring out perspective, lighting, volume, mass and form of 3d objects on the 2d plane, entirely made up out of my head. In other words, no references - I can feel that it's using a different, more active part of my brain than the usual right-hemisphere dominance of representational drawing. Drawing like this is a much more active use of the brain, combining the rational critical deliberation of the left along with the more creative right hemisphere in a much more cooperative way than simply translating the optical nerves signals to the arm with as little intererence as possible. The signals for something like this, rather than originating at the eye, originate from the interior brain. The optical perception of drawing purely from imagination seems to be secondary in relation to the drawn image, rather than as in representational drawing, where every motion of the mark-making tool is governed primarly and purely by the reflex of the perception of the optic nerve as translated through the angle of the eye and the contraction of the cornea.

Or a different analogy - drawing from imagination is like writing from imagination, whereas 'drawing-what-you-see' much more akin to summarizing a pre-existing written work. Not transcribing - that would be a photograph.

Regardless, this is too long already, but I hope my point is clear; for me it is revelatory, and something I will be paying greatly active attention to in the future.

34) Gesture3



Some more random gesture drawing samples - I've realized that doing an hour or so of pure contour drawing before these, to get my head in the right space (beta or theta wave, whichever one is just below full concious awareness) would greatly improve these.

35) ColourDifference



My daily painting! This one I wanted to point out how different using flash (the main part of the image) or not using flash (the bottom-left inset) can really change the feel of an image. I'm very keenly becoming aware of just how extrordinarily different peoples perceptions of color can be - for example, try doing that dark room experiment of Newton's, where he took a prism, allowed a pinhole of white light to refract from it into a full-spectrum rainbow. Do that, and mark of either side of the limits of the colors you see. Then have someone else mark off the limits of their color perception - you'll find they vary quite a bit; for example, I'm certain I see at least a full color into the ultraviolet past indigo, and I know of others who can see further both into the ultraviolet and the infrared.

Back to this particular painting, neither one of the combined images here what I see when I turn my head to look at the painting sitting on my desk. Interesting stuff, this ocular perception.

36) DesignControls



Because the preview image is so small, I reccoment you click the image to arrive at my deviantart page, then click it a second time for the full version. This works for all the images I'm posting here, but is particularly useful for this one, where the detail is difficult to discern at this resolution.

Briefly, this is a couple random pages of an exploration I'm making into very specific, deliberate controls of design that can be used to intentionally affect the emotional response of the viewer.

Here, for example, I think they may all be shown, but in this image are examples of Nine seperate controls that can be applied to image creation. They are:

1) Overlapping Planes
2) Counterchange (alternation of hue, value and/or chrome in a controlled alternating fashiono)
3) Line over Mass (most of these are exactly what they sound like)
4) Implied Line
5) Interlocking Rhythm
6) Open Colour/Offset Conture (basically, coloring outside the lines, deliberatly and for intentional effect)
7) Transparency/Translucency
8) Forced Edge (emphasis of a particular edge greater than others in the image)
9) The Dynamic Trellis (useful for handling dynamic linear forces - it provides the maximum linear opposition within an ordered design. Lines are limited to six directions: balancing diagonals, perpendiculars to each of these diagonals, and optional verticals and horizontals)

Once you've memorized that, and begun to apply these very deliberate and specific controls with intentional effect, you'll very quickly achieve the ability to more intentionally create the images you desire, with control over the emotional response and guidance of the eyes over the page.