This is based on a photograph that I took of Monika; a strikingly pretty woman that I met somewhere in the Chicagogoth scene in the late ’90s. She’s the kind of person who turns heads just about everywhere.
I made a stylized sketch from the photo, photographed that and optimized it in gimp… some warping, the cartoon filter and so on. I printed this back out and, just naturally, had to scribble on it. There’s some watercolor and acrylic washes here as well. They give a sort of vague idea of where to take the drawing and introduce a few more random elements to things. The drawing itself is worked in with watercolor pencils and water-soluble graphite.
This is today’s intended victim. It’s oil on Arches oil paper. It began life as an automatic drawing. Since its birth, it’s gone through several digital changes, been re-printed in grayscale and “colorized” with oil paint.
Given that I do work with several images every day… it’s a little difficult to know exactly how far I’ll get on a given piece. These are fairly complex and do become a little difficult to work with after a bit. The idea here (one of them anyway.) is to show the process on these things. Posting an “after” without a “before” wouldn’t exactly do that. This is the before. The after will come after.
I have added categories to this page so that the progress of individual pieces is a little easier to follow. Please bear with me. This page is still, very much, a work in progress.
Raw Therapee is a “raw editor” that works similarly to Adobe‘s Lightroom, Darktable and so on. Basically, it’s meant to deal with the large amount of information stored in a raw file. This allows you fine control of the photos you’ve taken of your artwork so that you can get better prints. You can make pretty landscape photos featuring full color sunsets, get appropriate skin tones in your portraits and so on as well.
The program works with several different file formats. This will allow you to screw up images in, um… “nonraw” formats as well. 🙂 Thankfully, it’s non-destructive so you can back off all of the weird little adjustments you’ve made while you were fiddling with stuff.
This thing has a scary amount of depth and a fairly high learning curve. If you do decide to use it you’re going to need the manual. Given what you can do with it… it’s probably worth learning if you deal with digital images. The program features an extensive collection of sharpening filters, noise reduction, a zillion different ways to change your brightness, contrast, gamma, color curves, etc… lens compensation, demosaicing, cropping, sizing and so on. …Most everything under the sun and a few adjustments that only come out at night. Quality is excellent… depending on just how carried away you get with the settings, of course.
Raw Therapee is free. It runs on Windows, MacOS and linux. You can use it as a basic organizer and viewer for your images and run batch processes on them. The program runs as a gimp plugin as well…
I know the whole “automatism/scribble” idea may sound a little ridiculous. It’s something I’m entirely serious about. I don’t do everything that way. I still do portraits and figure drawings and so on. I do have a lot more interest in it than I do most anything else. I’m not quite sure that I buy the idea of channeling your unconscious mind and so on that the Surrealists were so fond of. I do like the idea that it helped create a real break with traditional representative art and helped lead us to Abstract Expressionism and so on. I think there’s still something vital and important to be found there.
I started this sort of thing during what was probably the last artist’s block I’ve ever experienced. Late ’80s, I was suffering from fairly severe depression due to a few failed relationships and the culmination of a fairly long battle with “substances“. To this point, I’d simply drawn the stuff that I saw in my head. It occurred to me one night that I might actually be able to express something of what I was feeling through automatic writing or drawing. I decided I’d write a suicide note. Not that I actually intended to commit suicide; though it was a fairly frequent consideration back then. I just figured that it was a fairly intense idea to put down on paper. I started writing on a fairly large sheet of paper and by the time I’d finished… I was shaking. The whole thing was nicely cathartic but did leave me with a large sheet of paper covered with unreadable scrawl. I decided I’d try to turn this mess into something that meant something… started drawing into it, picking out shapes, adding elements and so on. The painting actually worked. It sold a long time ago… way back before the age of digital photography. Otherwise, I’d have an image of it here.
Amusingly enough, I included the painting in a show at one of the Illinois government offices. It was around Christmas. I got a call one afternoon to come down and move it seeing that the workers there didn’t feel that a painting titled “Suicide Note” was all that appropriate in the same room as the Christmas tree.
Since then, I’ve incorporated some form of automatism in most everything I do. At the very least, it can offer a way to develop a composition. I frequently develop forms from the spaces and shapes it creates. As of late, I’ve dealt more with abstraction and the sort of emotional/expressive qualities of the whole thing. I do keep some sort of intent in mind while I’m doing this. It’s not entirely automatic. Occasionally, I’ll put in a portrait or figure or try to build a landscape from things.
Working this way does offer a sort of catharsis. Working large can actually be physically exhausting. I have stretched rolls of canvas across the wall and simply attacked them with a handful of pastels or charcoal. It’s actually a pretty good workout both emotionally and physically.
(Oh… I no longer mess with “substances”, I’m happily married and suicide’s about the furthest thing from my mind these days.)
I spent far too much time editing photos in this program yesterday. I may not quite be the digital junkie I was back around the turn of the century; I no longer believe that Usenet can save the world, life can be better virtually or that we’ll all be in a symbiotic relationship with a machine in a few years (Despite the IPhone.). I can still manage to be a little obsessive once in a while.
Gimp is a “free” photo editing program. It’s built and maintained by the free software community. Many people from many places around the globe have had a hand in its construction in the years since 1996 when it was introduced. The toolkit it spawned has served as a basis for quite a few programs. Many of which I also use.
Gimp runs on just about every system out there. Personally, I use linux on a day to day basis. I don’t actually dislike Windows or Apple. Chrome Os or Android for that matter. I have a Windows partition on this machine and a Windows machine connected to the printer in the studio. I just prefer the simplicity, functionality and elegance of linux for most things.
This is one of the few editors out there that can actually compete with Photoshop. 🙂 I don’t dislike Photoshop either. I own just about every version of it that came out before the CC license and have made a living with it off and on for many years. It’s an exceptional program. I still have version 2.54 on floppy disks. I also have many of the program’s competitors on floppy. (CD, etc)
In my mind, Gimp is a better solution. It doesn’t wash the dishes or fold your socks. It does do what I want from a photo editor… It edits photos. …Very well.
Seeing that this page is named Studio Time and is basically about what goes on there… I figure it might help to have an idea of just what that means.
My studio’s basically a 14 foot square room with what used to be a clothes closet on one wall. It’s not a huge space but it’s just about right for what I need. I have made an effort to save space wherever it’s possible. I have a largish, lyre easel that I’ve carried around with me since 1990 or so. It’s a lovely easel… It does take up more than its fair share of floor space. Right now, it’s in the hallway outside of the studio waiting for me to get up the energy to put it in the garage. I’m sort of sad to see it go, really. I’m thinking I’ll put it on the deck this summer and work out there once in a while.
Anyway… seeing that I’m a firm believer in D.I.Y. (“Artist“… sort of goes with the territory.) I decided that I’d build everything in the space myself. I can design stuff to work exactly the way I want it to and to work efficiently with the way I do. The idea of a wall easel struck me as a pretty good solution.
This is basically 8 1x2s screwed to the wall. There’s one at the top and bottom to attach the vertical bars to. The verticals float a few inches from the wall so as to enable the bolt heads in back to slide up and down. The clamps that hold the work are made from 1x4s with 1x2s attached to them to hold the work.
Seeing that I frequently work with panels and can’t stand trying to paint around the easel tray, I put a few screws on the front of the tray to hold flat work. The panel floats on top of the trays that way and I’m not constantly picking dust and “paint grime” off of my brush like I would be otherwise. The “odd” configuration there is something I figured out by accident. It holds larger paintings more tightly that way… kills some of the “flex” that I might otherwise have to deal with. The painting’s hiding the fact that those jaws are held on by wing nuts. It’s a little easier than bolts.
The 2x2s that are attached to the wall hold working brushes. Some day I’ll remember to stick some hooks in them to hold rags. The 1x2s on the wall to the right are paint shelves. …That’s for another post. The paper on the wall’s for white balance. 🙂
I’ve been working on this sketch for quite some time now. I finished it yesterday. At least it’s finished enough to serve it’s purpose as a sketch. It gives me enough information to move on to color. I’m still going to need to come to some sort of understanding with a few of the linear elements.
This is fairly large… 36×48 inches. It’s canvas adhered to a hardboard panel with acrylic medium. The canvas isn’t primed. I prefer drawing on raw canvas… It’s an amazing surface for pastels, charcoal, graphite and so on. This is done with watercolor pencils and water-soluble graphite. I’ve misted it with a spray bottle so that the pigment soaks into the canvas… a bit like a dye.
Next step is to seal the whole thing with gloss acrylic medium. I’ll probably block in a few forms with acrylic paint then move on to oils.
This began life as an automatic drawing. The forms and so forth come about through interpretation of it. Dali did something similar with his Paranoiac-critical method, Ernst built his grattage and frottage stuff by interpreting rubbings and blobs of paint. You’ve probably done it when you looked for faces, elephants, demons, wizards and so on in clouds or wood grain.
This actually had some intent behind it. I wanted to represent chaos in a sort of street scene. The straight lines allow me to work in some sort of architectural elements. 🙂 Whether that will come across in the final painting or not remains to be seen.
I did digital art exclusively for many years. Quite a few years back (2010 or so), I got fed up with it, tossed the computers and went back to doing art with traditional media. A couple of years ago, I decided that the decision to erase computers from my life entirely might have been overly hasty and started to integrate them back into my artistic workflow.
Inkscape is a vector editing program. It’s open source, very capable and “free“.
I sort of wonder if the idea of automatism and that of digital drawing are all that compatible. I suppose that’s an artistic, philosophical quandary that I’ll deal with at some point but, for the time being, the program does offer a way of creating “scribbles” that are infinitely editable and that print cleanly and precisely. It’s an experiment that I’m having some good results with.
Doing things digitally gives me results that are strangely modernist. I get the feeling that some of the work would fit into the mid 1950s very well. It doesn’t provide the same sort of release that working with traditional media does. It’s cerebral with nothing really physical involved. There is no “random” to speak of. I’m sort of tempering that by using the drawings as sketches and adding “random”, paint effects and so on with actual paint.
This is pretty typical of the work I’ve been doing lately. (My son calls them “chaotic”.) I have twenty five or thirty of them going. They tend to get to be unworkable when I’ve painted in a lot of shapes and force me to spend half my time cleaning paint off of my hand and wiping smeared paint off of things. If I work on a bunch of them at once, it saves me remixing paint, leaving excess on the palette to dry up and go to waste, and… it keeps me from getting bored.
This is basically an automatic drawing done in watercolor pencil, sealed with clear acrylic and blocked in with oils. …A detail of it anyway. It’s stretched on a stretcher that’s a bit larger than the final image will be. The actual painting is a couple of inches larger. It’s a little (lot) more work but it allows me to stretch it on an appropriately sized stretcher and wrap the image around the edges. It saves framing and looks a lot better than the raw edges.
I glazed this with Indian yellow this morning. It may look overly “yellow” at the moment but the glaze evens out the paint film and gives things some consistency. When I go back into it and add the final colors, blend stuff, shade it and so on, it will take the paint a little easier. Of course the yellows are pretty much finished. 🙂
This sad, little guy is named “Ditty”. In 2012, when Ditty was born, he was a proud, colorful, little painting with his entire life and a bright, happy future ahead of him.
This was before Ditty came down with “Sharpie”.
The ravages of Ditty’s disease are pretty obvious. Those black marks weren’t in the painting when I finished it. By the time this came back from it’s first show, they’d already started to bleed up from the sketch. Thankfully, it didn’t sell.
Most everything I do involves some degree of experimentation. This one seemed like a no brainer… lay the thing out with a permanent marker, build the actual painting and just finish it up. Not even an experiment really. This is one of the few times I’ve not been able to salvage something. I don’t even want to try to paint over what’s there. I’m pretty sure I’ll just end up with the same results.
People ask on social media whether Sharpies are appropriate for fine art. My comment is usually something like “no… they bleed”. This is what that means.
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Ditty is so named because it’s supposed to represent a short snippet of a song. I usually view my work as something analogous to experimental jazz… where musicians take a phrase and expand on it. It’s all improvisation though I don’t really do things in real time. This was just a simple phrase.
Studio Time 