Illustrator Work

Moon and Crows, Illustrator EPS, 8" x 10"

I have been working on my skills with Illustrator and Photoshop. Here is a rendition of a composition I produced in oil and charcoal.

Crows, Oil and Charcoal, 8" x 10"

Have an interesting week.

Brad

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope for a happy Thanksgiving for all, whatever your situation, may you have a day of respite and reflection.

Jess and Mom, Charcoal on Paper, 8" x10"

Brad

Stage III

An update on my tempera portrait. This is the result after the first glazing. I will add more glaze, thickening the sweater and adding a very light bit of color. Also the hair will receive the same treatment. I will also adjust any areas that need shapes modified, highlights, and odd bits of color for interest.

Laura, Egg tempera with oil glazing, 8"x10"

I went to the reception for the Faculty Art Show at North Georgia College this evening. It was good to see all my friends. The show was very good and photographs, raku pottery, fiber-art, sculpture, drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture were included. I'll try to get over and take some photographs for my blog. Have a lovely evening.

Brad 

Booming

I was born in April 1950, on the crest of the Baby Boom. Now, I am facing one of those milestones that gives one pause. We Boomers have a significant history in that we are the bridge generation for the age of Rock and Roll, the Space Race, and the Era of Environmental Awareness among other significant historical and cultural events. This is all pretty well documented, Vietnam, Woodstock, Apollo 11, et. al., each time a journalist has a touch of nostalgia. Beyond that though lies a significance in that our parents were the World War II generation, a generation that grew up in the Great Depression and then fought a great conflict of moral imperative. The downside was that they thought they were right about everything, little wonder we were rebellious. On the upside, most of what we are is a product of them beyond the misery they gave us by being our parents. 

My dad was born in 1921 and was drafted into the army in 1942. Bill Haley as in Rock Around the Clock was born in 1925. Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 and Alan Ginsberg was born in 1926, the writers credited as the nucleus of the Beats. Timothy Leary, the psychedelic guru of the sixties was born in 1920. Malcolm X was born in 1925. More of what we are is a product of our parents generation than just our physical selves. It's a pointer to the fact that our story flows more like a river than like the cars of a train.

Masquerade, Charcoal on paper, 8"x10"

Today's drawing has nothing to do with all of this but, turning sixty is a bit unsettling which in itself is a bit unsettling and touch of youth seems appropriate.

Have a lovely remainder of the weekend.

Brad

Drive Time

On the Road, an American Romantic notion. Since Jack Kerouac wrote his novel in the early fifties, driving, being out on the road, is an ingrained part of the American psyche. It's reflected in our culture. Television in the nineteen-fifties brought us Route 66, about two friends roaming up and down the iconic highway that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles. Also, the song by Bobby Troup, Get Your Kicks on Route 66, celebrated this same bit of Americana. In the nineteen-sixties, television brought us Then Came Bronson with Michael Parks as a disillusioned journalist (who wasn't disillusioned?) who buys himself a bike and takes to the road. Of course the sixties were the heyday of being on the road as The Easy Rider rode off to 'look for America,' Humbert and Lolita rolled across the country staying in seedy motels, and the rest of us were Hitching a Ride. The nineteen-seventies expanded the scene in novels such as Michener's Caravans, which took on the road global. The list can go on through the eighties, nineties and the oughts.

Maybe it goes back to the frontier west, the wagon trains and the wandering cowboys. Or, maybe its the independence, the anonymity, that is the allure. An article in the New Yorker commented on On the Road and Lolita and how there was a normalness to travelers that would look odd in a normal settings such as a middle-aged Humbert could travel with an adolescent girl and not raise a question that, in any other setting, might.

Rachel, charcoal on paper, 8"x10"

So. let's celebrate the highway and revel in the romanticism of the idea. I'm working on pieces that draw on these ideas for their inspiration and want to hear your ideas of these native romanticisms. Have a good evening.

Brad

A Quick Sunday Post

I have been producing these drawings from photographs and have learned a great deal in the process. Using photographs has the benefit of letting me work quickly because I can short cut the layout procedure by using devices such as printing inkjet images and coating the back with charcoal to make a carbon paper like transfer. Also, I cut the inkjet prints to make masks that I can use a bit of powdered charcoal in a piece of cloth to dab around the edges to give rounded forms to work from. I sometimes prepare what I call an armature in Photoshop and print it. I vary these techniques or combine them to whatever effect on which I want to work. The more of these techniques I use in tandem the more concise the layout and the quicker the rendering can proceed.

Working from a model or a photograph and laying out the landmarks and forms by surveying the model and transferring them one at a time by measurements is a laborious task and can interfere with the learning process. That makes it more desirable to shortcut these and get on to the things I am more interested in.

Jennifer, Charcoal on paper, 8"x10"

Thanks for stopping by on this rainy Sunday. Have a nice finish to the weekend.

Brad

Heather

One thing I am learning from the charcoal sketches that I am doing is that less is more. That seems to fly in the face of something that I learned from a book about drawing and that I truly believe which is, 'it's good to exaggerate, and it's better to exaggerate too much than not enough.' It's a paradox I haven't resolved yet. I realized this truth from doing perspective drawings and the way they naturally exaggerate the angles of the lines.

Heather, Charcoal on paper, 8"x10"

1670 (detail), Acrylic on paper with collage, 18"x24"

This lovely young lady posed for photos as a model for this painting and the charcoal is from one of the photos. I have several of the photos and will be doing some more charcoals from them. One of the purposes of these exercises is that I am about to start work on some engraving prints and want to get the hatch correct.

Have a lovely weekend.

Brad

Portraits

Martha Miller has been writing lately about her angst about doing a portrait for commission. I myself have thought over all of the pros and cons of doing portraits and whether the sitter will like the work. So far, so good, all my subjects have been to kind to tell me if they loathed my work.

Part of the problem is that where do you target your attempt at a true likeness of the subject. I have been doing some practice drawing for my blog from photos using charcoal and working from photos. I find that working for a more true likeness kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. You take time doing a really good layout using a transfer methods such as a grid, projection, camera obscura, or tracing and then it is a matter of paint by numbers. The hard part is putting more of yourself into the work.

June, Charcoal on paper, 8"x10"

Little Yellow Idol, Oil on canvas, 18"x 24"(Gallery View)

I like charcoal because it does so much of the work of for me. I like the way you get areas where the mark making is so lovely. Take for instance the portrait of Laura from my post of February 12, the hands turned out very nice. My take is that for a good portrait from a photo, the photo has to be good, well composed with good lighting. I'm not a good photographer so I take many photos and hope after the model quits posing I get photos that reflect the person I want to portray.

This goes to the heart of the matter. The portrait is a collaboration between the model and the artist. Both must relax and show themselves and they both have to bring part of themselves and invest it in the work.

But, then, I'm just kind of going on without knowing what I'm talking about.

Have an exciting evening.

Brad

Back in Black...

and white. I apologize for my lack of postings for the last while but, life gets in the way, sometimes. I'm working on drawings again trying to get my sea-legs back. I am working on my hatching and changes in value leading up to doing some painting. This is a charcoal drawing of sweet wife and I am revisiting old studio drawings, redrawing them again with hatching and more value.

Laura, Charcoal, 8x10

Thanks for stopping by. Have an exciting weekend.

Brad

Miscellaneous Items

I'm busy, busy these days grinding away at my CAD work station. I thought I would take a few minutes to post a couple of items. The first is a painting I executed in photoshop. The colors reversed when I uploaded the file to Blogger even though I used a web safe palette, hummm. I had this problem before, Oh, I'll post it anyway. Any ideas why, I would like to hear. I'm going to execute some Photoshop painting especially for posting mainly for the practice and I like to do them.

I'm also posting another piece of working background music I'm enjoying these days. Enjoy!