The lie that tells the truth.

There's an old saying- was it picasso?- Someone.
Anyway here are 2 life drawings. The model was dressed as a Japanese.... well I'm not sure, Japanese are fairly particular, so she might have looked to them as a peasant or worse.
She did have a parasol, -she did not have a turtle, or a dragon, or a sword, or footwear, she was not japanese but very caucasian.
So I stretched the truth a bit.
The other thing I found is that every time she sat- her drapery was completely different,- and since the drapery is most of her image, well that really means these drawings are at least 90% fabrication on my part.
Please consider.

20 20 hindsight

You know those old drawings you look at again,- and you can see their mistakes and how you could do better now- but theres still something in them or about them you like? Well here's a couple of old ones trawled from my site. One is an orc I drew in 1996- which sort of pre dates all of the LOTR movies stuff by quite a bit. The other a quick sketchbook one is this possessed asylum girl,- I like the way the cat is looking back at her and the egon schiele-ish way she ended up looking. This one is only about a year old.
Actually cats piss me off, they're worthless opportunistic creatures, and the only reason they rub against you is to mark you as a food source. Which is odd because cats seem to like me.... regardless, cats are for drawing only.

Insanity or death, .....or both.

Who to believe eh?
On the one hand they say "if at first you don't succeed...."
on the other they say insanity is trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.
And other blousy pirate shirted poet types say insanity or death is the fate of the artist that doesn't follow his muse.
Well in that case I probably ought to be dead already, I know I've definitely lost the plot.
Definitely the artistic undead in my 9-5.
Theres a few life drawings in this post. The 2 very nearly the same- the second was done in about a half the time of the first in the last 20 minutes and is just a bit wild and woolly-the boobs are too far apart for starters. Next week I'll try to lighten up and loosen up a bit.
Oh and one day I'll get the shading right on the boobs.
One day I'll get them to glow the way they actually do.
That will be a happy day, that glowing boob day.
The trouble with the long poses is.... the model doesn't/can't stay in it- so while you can draw from sort of similar lighting between shifts to shade stuff,nothing else stays the same. So you're left to guestimate where the shading ought to fit on the old pose/position of the model.
Sigh.

The guns on the first picture are artistic license- the model only had puny plastic guns, and we all know that just wont do. They play pretty good music at that class- they were playing james bond themes all the while we were drawing the gun girly.

The coloured works I dreamed of didn't happen so thats bad
, but I did finish of some freelance work instead so thats good. Hopefully the page I sent for Illustrators Australia works alright also... who knows.

I bought a book the other day- The artists complete guide to drawing the head. Turns out its just an expansion of the cheaper and far superior The Human figure by Vanderpoel. Vanderpoels book is solid gold, Maughan's is pure wank and if I meet him I'll punch him once for each and any of you reading this, and once for me. He states "Line is an artistic invention-it does not exist in nature" and then rambles on about what a sick deluded lot people who use lines in art are. Well maughan, lines offer economy of communication, they offer a way of defining shape and sillouette without having to render everything an object sits on or around to establish the objects shape,
-the fact that you can recognise things portrayed in line(edge detection) points to a way the brain processes images- a way we see things(or the brain sees them),
and I'll bet the use of line predates chiaroscuro(just how many chiaroscuro cave drawings are there?).
And what do we see him use in his gesture/block out drawings? Lines.
How does he represent the things on the periphery that he couldn't be bothered rendering- lines(or anywhere he damn well pleases).
What is his cheat phrase for using lines?
"the lost and found line"-
well why not just confess and say use a line where you need to like areas of the envelope or contour?
Not to mention all the beautiful use of line in art, comics etc,
- compare that to this guys realistic but sullen heads staring out in to the void.
So he talks but he doesn't walk.
He doesn't even draw what he sees, just does this "sfumato" thing instead for hair. Well I say Mr Maughan, your "sfumato" is so much smoke blowing out of your ass sir.
Of course if you want a rendering or painting then everything's tone and value etc, and Vanderpoel says it so much better. Man that Vanderpoel book is gold.
Gee thats a half hour of typing and thinking that I should have spent drawing.
Bad lach....Bad.