One more Breadth piece!

Yay More Breadth!

BREADTH!

More Concentration Pictures!

More Concentration drawings!

Concentration Drawings 1!

Progress Updates

So, in the past week I managed to finish another project. Over the next day and the weekend, I should probably do another two. This is a little scary, as I'm crunched for time and sleep deprived. So I'm going to do another portrait of me smiling (cuz thus far I've been too lazy for it) and I'm gonna try to do it in color as well. I'm thinking that colored pencil might be faster than pastel, but I'm notoriously lousy at colored pencil technique, so we'll see.
Anyway, that's this week's plan.

Yay shades of gray...

So, starting next week, I shall play with color, and stop talking like Ignatius from A Confederacy of Dunces. That said, I really shall play with color, because all my art is boring and gray. I don't really have any ideas, I need to take some photos and stuff again so that I can come up with something to draw, but I have decided that blue and purple sound fun. No guarentees that I'll use them, but they sound appealing at the moment.
The piece I've been working on this week turned out suprisingly well. After two weeks of plowing out crap, I actually did something that looks worthwhile. I like the contrast in it, it's a little bolder than most of my art has turned out. I like bold, but apparently I'm bad at it. Anyway, I have plans to complete a half done painting this weekend as well, but that may not work out.

Egads. I've gotten nowhere this week. Okay, so I drew out what I want to paint on my canvas, but that's about it. I have a sociology test tomorrow, so it's unlikely that I'll be getting any painting done. I'll have to do most of it over the weekend, since I'm phenomenal at forgetting to bring my paint and brushes to school with me. Anyway, I have a sketch for my next project in the works, and so far it looks okay, so I am sort of being productive. Sort of. I'm trying here.
Wish me luck. :)

Okay, so here's one of the posts I owe. I've been insanely busy lately, and blog posts kind of slipped my mind.
As of right now, I'm very frustrated with my art. I am so sick of drawing myself, but I don't want to get reinvolved in a breadth project, because then I'll just be even more behind on my concentration. So even though I feel tremendously uncreative, I've resolved to pull out the camera and take some photos of myself so that I have something new to draw. I'm sick of the portrait shots. Anyway, that's about all I have to say for today. I'm now motivated to get off my butt and do something somewhat worthwhile, so ta-da...
I'm off to go find a camera.

Notable Self Portraits

Since I'm working on self portraits, I decided that maybe it would be a good idea for me to actually look at some self portraits done by actual artists. My natural starting point was Frida Kahlo--any time someone mentions self portraits, I usually think of her. Admittedly, Kahlo's portraits have a lot more personality (and color) than my own, and she's far more unique in her portrayal of herself than I've bothered with. That said, I'm honestly just trying to get stuff done--I don't really care as much as I should about whether or not it's in some way interesting to look at. Anyway, I like the intensity of Kahlo's stare, and also her use of color and emotion.
Also while browsing through Wikipedia's article on self portrait artists, I found Gustave Courbet's "Self Portrait (The Desperate Man)", which features the artist with such an intense look that I couldn't help but do a double take. Something about that particular portrait marvelously outdid most of the others on the page. It probably had something to do with the panic in his face, and also the fact that he looks kind of like Will Turner from Pirates of the Caribbean, which really threw me off. (I thought it was fanart or something at first, and wanted to know what the heck it was doing in that article.)
Francis Bacon's self portrait was also very unique. I have no idea what he was trying to portray or say with it, but it was interesting to look at. More orignal than most that I came across, that is.
So, um, I've decided that maybe I should have an expression or something on my face next time I draw/paint myself.

New Project

So I had a lousy week in art so far, and I haven't gotten much done. I spent all of Tuesday struggling to draw. Nothing turned out, and I was so swamped with other homework that I didn't really get a chance to try again later. So today I gave up on drawing myself from a photo and broke out the mirror. I wasn't really anticipating that, but it worked out okay. I'm thinking I might take the sketch I did today and turn it into a painting, but it would probably be kind of bold and graphic and not exactly in sync with everything else. We shall see. It's quite possible that I might not be able to get much done over the next few days (which is scary), but I'm going to do my best!
Next week I promise I'll either get a photo or comment on an artist.

Lazy Week

Okay, so this week I was out sick. I honestly didn't do much but sit around doing nothing because I had a lot of headaches. So I have one lonely sketch of me for concentration 5. It was, thankfully, an okay sketch. I'd planned to do a painting of it, but it didn't really work out for me this week (I really would've at home, but movement made me nauseous).
And this blog is late because I was sick all week and then I forgot about it Friday. So sorry.
Anyway, I'm searching through my photos for next weeks' concentration, so hopefully all will be well and I'll be fairly caught up by this Friday.

Art of Diane Tremblay

http://www.dianeart.com/surrealism_paintings.html

I'm beginning to think that perhaps I should have elected to do surrealism for my concentration, but alas, that takes too much planning for me to work quickly. There's that, and I'm always short on ideas. Meaning that self portraits were probably a good idea.
Anyway, so above I have the link to the surrealist artist Diane Tremblay up above. Half the website is in French, so I'm assuming she lives in France, or caters to the French. I'm not sure.
Anyway, her paintings are typically done in acrylics, and she paints a lot of women. While her paintings are very colorful, the hues are muted and gentle, giving her paintings a slightly eerie feel. Typical themes I've noted are life, death, birth, various aspects of feminism, nature, and religion. There are probably others but I've yet to figure them out/notice them.
The paintings I found most notable were: Peace at the Intensive Care, Balancing on the Edge, Superman, Evolution, Jungle Urbaine, The Sea (love the bird people), and Pleine Lune.
I found the use of birds as angels (I think) particularly interesting in Peace at the Intensive Care, and also quite liked their appearance in The Sea as well. What the represent I'm unsure of, but they have an intriguing prescence in her art. Loved the nature theme and how she used it to portray the woman's body in Pleine Lune, the colors in Balancing on the Edge, and the robot in Superman.
Anyway, it was interesting for me to look at. I'd recommend browsing through the site.

All right. So while perusing the web in desperate search of an artist, I came across a web page for Robert Beal's surrealist artwork.
http://www.beal-surrealiste.com/introductorygallery.htm
Okay. Hopefully that link works, because I can't get blogspot to let me paste anything in here.
I loved his use of colors. They tend to be very bright and analogous, and create a sort of unanticipated contrast and depth... or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, which is also distinctly possible. My favorite piece in here is probably The Fool's Cap, but it is quite hard to choose, as all of his art is intriguing and in its own right, uniquely beautiful. I do think that the person in the Fool's Cap has a very interesting face, and reminds a bit of the distorted faces I used to draw. Except his are way better.
The Wheel Barrow is also fascinating, not only because it's a traditionally weird surrealist piece, but also because it's done in oil, but so smooth and controlled that it looks digital. Having oil painted before, I think it's a sign of huge talent that he can get everything so accurate and beautful, rather than gloppy and textured like most oil paintings are.
I also like his concepts--The Inventions of Culture and Stocks, Pilleries, and Cultures of good Intentions in particular stand out to me. The blue mannequins are my favorite part of the paintings. Another painting that caught my attention was 'The Great Imperial Fantastical Kingdom of Diddley-D0-Dum" because it's both creepy and funny in its depiction of childhood and toys (I think. I'm sure there's a much deeper meaning that I missed.). Anyway. I like his art. End of story.

Concentration 1

Yay! It's the self-portrait in progress!

Mmkay. So I did this with black and white acrylic paint, some nifty new fine point paint brushes, and a lousy photo reference. So that said, I think I'm doing okay, considering how time deprived I am. Thankfully, the painting is coming along better than it was at the time this photo was taken. I fixed the disproportionate arm, added some more value, tried to fix up the background, etc. There's a little more detail on the face, but since it's such a small painting I had difficulty with that. Anyway...

So... while I was browsing the internet yesterday looking for photos of foreign architecture (I don't remember why), I stumbled across the blog of an artist called John Lovett.
http://splashingpaintblog.com
Anyway, I'd never heard of him before, but as I scrolled through his blog searching for the particular photo that had appeared on Google, I was completely taken with some of his art. The rock arrangements inspired by the color wheel were definitely different, but I preferred his many paintings instead. While the artist referred to several of them as sketches (and some of them certainly are simplistic, but that's where the charm lies, too), they had a certain combination of detail followed by immediate vagueness. Parts were done in watercolor, sketched over in pencil, in some cases very rough and sketchy, but I still liked the look.
For some reason, the less professional something looks, the better I tend to like it. Sketchy is preferable to perfectly fleshed out. For me anyway. Most of the time.

Alright. After much thought on the subject, I have at last come up with a more final concentration idea. I've noticed that I have a tendency to just randomly draw faces--usually without a subject present, hence the randomness.
Between that, and a slight penchant for drawing things in an intentionally warped way that I have, I've thought that maybe I could do some sort of surrealist/facial portrait thing. I don't know.
I'm just trying to think of something I could maybe stand to do for an entire semester. So yeah, that's what I've got thus far.
Ideas are always subject to change. :)