"Ruins" (Final Photo)

Ruins

Charcoal, Graphite and White Chalk on Tinted Paper

11"x7" (2011)

Still-Life Drawing: Finished! (April 14, 2011)

(click to enlarge for better quality)

It's done! I am getting this photographed tomorrow so hopefully that goes well. I prefer taking photos in daylight so maybe tomorrow morning I'll post a better picture. As you can see I'm preparing my board for travel and there better not be any smudges when I take the board out tomorrow, lol, or I'm going to cry!

Still-Life Drawing: Stage 2 (April 6, 2011)

I'm racing to get this done by the end of the month and being new to using white chalk so extensively in a drawing, I'm a little worried. But I'm actually having lots of fun! There's nothing like creating light with white chalk on tinted paper. It's feeling very intuitive right now, which is great. No wonder so many artists love this process!

Still-Life Drawing: Stage 1 (April 2, 2011)

I just started this today but I've been planning it for awhile. I broke a beautiful container a couple years ago that I was previously thinking about using in a painting. The funny thing is I was more inspired to use it after I accidentally broke it. It looked much more intriguing and I had a great opportunity to do something conceptual with it.

Once I set up the broken pieces, they reminded me of ancient ruins and they have a beauty that didn't exist when the container was intact. So that's what I'll call this drawing; "Ruins".

It will be on tinted paper but I want to incorporate white chalk, which is why I didn't start straight on the "good paper". I'll be using white chalk a little more than I'm used to and I don't know how it'll turn out. That's why its good for me to have a cartoon or blueprint (if you will) so if anything goes terribly wrong, I don't have to start from scratch.

I'm still a little unsure about the composition. I'll take another look at it tomorrow but I might just end up moving one of those little broken pieces around...

Drawing In Progress: Finished!

Laura Horseman, Graphite on Tinted Paper, 9.5"x12", 2011

She's finally finished and I'm so glad! I've also decided to add my new signature, which is the monogram I already use for my stationery. I think it's much better than my old signature, it's much more polished. Thanks for following and sorry about the graphite glare.

Inspiring Imagery from the Entertainment Industry

Just last year I was enjoying the music one of my favourite bands, Sade, when I noticed how incredibly beautiful their album cover was. The album is Soldier Of Love (2010) and on the cover is the lead singer Helen Folasade Adu and I could have swore this was a painting. I was immediately trying to think of who could have painted it and thinking I wish I did it myself! To me it’s clearly influenced by painting but it turns out it’s a photograph/Photoshop as usual. I think it’s interesting that it’s not the usual photograph with the band’s name on it and there is an attempt to evoke a very sophisticated painterly quality. There are numerous other artistic album covers but this one grabbed me because it looks to me like a contemporary realist painting.

Then yesterday I came across this movie poster for The Other Woman (2010) starring Natalie Portman and there she is but, again, not in the usual way. Are illustrators making a comeback in the movie poster business? It could have been the usual photo collage with the title on it but this appears to be a hybrid of a hand drawing with digital elements with the intent to appear mostly as a drawing. I think it’s really well done and it got me thinking that these types of images in entertainment could be helping contemporary realism right now. Granted it’s not painting but it’s a shift from just photos and text back to art. And again, there were always the occasional artsy posters but this one is clearly influenced by contemporary realist art.

I'm not sure this is a trend but I hope it is.

"Intensity" vs. "Chroma" and Understanding Munsell

Ever since I found Rational Painting a couple years ago, I've been puzzled by Munsell. There's a colour wheel and that's about all I could recognize about it. As you know, most kids in art classes are given the colour theory of the Impressionists and that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think about my early colour theory education—Monet, Seurat...If you could use colour theory to create works like them then you fully grasped colour. That's what I learned and that was fine because there wasn't anything else, at least not what my teachers knew about.

Looking back to my early attempts at mixing “intensity scales” and monochromatic scales...all sorts of scales, I realize they didn't really help, not when it came to painting what was in front of me because the standard mixtures were not sufficient, they were too arbitrary. I quickly realized that not all pigments fit into these pigeon holes and the colour wheel stopped working and became this mysterious thing I felt I needed magical powers to make work for me.

Painting became something I could do one day and not the next. I could never mix the same colour on the fly one day and get again the next day and I accepted that as part of what painting is. That's why drawing was always better for me; value is value, there's no confusion there. I thought “Why can't paint do that?” When I found this site and saw these strange Munsell notations, it went straight over my head. I heard the term “chroma” before and it sounded familiar to me, then I saw people using it synonymously with “intensity” and I relaxed again because I know about Hue, Value and Intensity. Then I found that actually didn't help me understand chroma at all.

Intensity seemed to block my understanding of chroma. I read some people saying it's the same as chroma, some people saying they are completely different. I figured artists disagree frequently and that's all that is, but after attempting a self-portrait and trying to mix my skin tone day after day, I had to get to the bottom of this issue. I knew Munsell had to solve this problem but I couldn't grasp it if I couldn't grasp chroma. Intensity and Chroma could not exist together in my mind and reading this excerpt from A Colour Notation by A.H. Munsell, I finally understood why.

“Intensity is a misleading term, if chroma be intended, for it depends on the relative light of spectral hues. It is a degree rather than a quantity, as appears in the expressions, “intense heat, light, sound”--intensity of stimulus and reaction...The word becomes especially unfit when used to describe two very different phases of a colour—as its intense illumination, where the chroma is greatly weakened, and the strongest chroma which is found in a much lower value.”

That's like fresh air rushing to my lungs. How did I survive without this hundred-year-old information for so long? It really is unbelievable. Now I can actually start learning and using Munsell.

Ahh, that's better.