Star of Serenity

I was all ready to post this red/blue astronomical fantasy when my Internet connection again went down. Cox Communications gave me a brand new modem so this was not supposed to happen. It just proves that something, somewhere, is full of crap. But enough invective. Here's another nebula picture, similar to others I have done. A fresh new star illuminates the gas around it, while other sections of the nebula glow in hydrogen-alpha red. This painting is slightly bigger than the usual ones, so that when reduced in size the details and texture are smoother.

"Star of Serenity" is acrylic on illustration board, 11" x 14", July 1992.

Cornucopia

The bounty of Autumn comes to Trader Joe's, pouring out of a traditional cornucopia which I painted on Tuesday. The background depicts the Blue Ridge mountains in early fall, with red and gold touches. The vegetables and fruits in the cornucopia basket are right there beneath where the sign will be put up. The "vignette" on the corners will disappear when the board's corners will be cut in a curved shape. A message will be added to the sign, written on a transparent overlay. This sign will be up all the way through Thanksgiving, when it will be replaced with "holiday" themed displays. The manager who ordered this sign hopes that it will be kept as part of the store's display resources, to be re-used next year at this time.

The style is somewhat "folk-arty," since I didn't have the time to produce a truly realistic still life painting. I wanted to make sure that I depicted as many produce items as possible, including mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, apples, a butternut squash, and a honeydew melon.

The Cornucopia sign is acrylic brush work and acrylic markers on Masonite. 4 feet by 2 feet, October 5, 2010.

Girly Doodle Faces

So here I am, copying girl faces from my instruction book with just a pencil on sketch pad paper. When I was just a young thing in middle school, I used to see other girls doodling these "pretty girl" fashion faces or profiles on their notebooks or wherever else they would draw when they were bored. The style is distinctly a late-60s or '70s look of the American ideal: round white face, pert upturned nose, big wide eyes with lots of makeup, and a puffy hairdo. Meanwhile I was drawing Roman and Greek warriors with bronze crested helmets. Or superheroes.

I have returned to the level of a bored schoolgirl as I learn to draw these conventional girl faces. What is interesting to me is how exacting the depiction of "prettiness" is. One tiny disproportion, one wrong angle, and she is no longer pretty, she is stupid or even evil-looking. Or ugly. It just takes one little pencil stroke to change her character.

I need to draw hundreds of these, and fix the perfect proportions of prettiness in my mind. Here below are two I did in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet. I'd like to draw them both in traditional pencil and paper, and on the digital tablet.

Superfilaments

Here's another one of my classic blue-and-red nebula pictures. This one depicts filaments of glowing gas, backed by another section of the nebula emitting hydrogen alpha red light. The title of the picture is "Superstrings," but to be scientifically proper that is a wrong title because the "strings" proposed by string theory would be invisible to anyone living on our scale of reality. Therefore a more accurate title is "Superfilaments," though there is nothing "super" about them. It's just gas.

"Superstrings" is acrylic on illustration board, 10" x 7", July 1992.

Winery Outbuildings and Vines

Today's Saturday Vineyard Visit brought me to the Gray Ghost Vineyards and Winery, in Amissville, Virginia. The winery is named for a famous Confederate guerrilla fighter, John Singleton Mosby, known as the "Gray Ghost" for his stealth and daring operations behind enemy lines. Gray Ghost is located in the heart of the territory where Mosby lived and fought. It's a small winery compared to some of the others I've visited, but the quality of its wines is excellent. They produce fine reds, such as a Merlot and a dry rose'. But this is not a wine blog, but an art blog, so I present a sketch done in about 15 minutes of some outbuildings on the Gray Ghost site as well as some of their vines, supported by slanted posts.

Pitt fine point pen on sketchbook page.

Girls, Girls, Girls

I'm working on a new learning project. I am finally going to learn how to draw pretty girls. All my previous attempts at drawing a pretty girl have failed. There are many reasons for this and one of them is that I was trying to draw faces realistically. What I really want to do is create fantasy women characters and many of these go by cartooning and drawing formulas. I am working with a book I just got, called "Figure It Out: The Beginner's Guide to Drawing People" by Chris Hart. This takes a cartoony approach rather than a "serious" realistic way, and works without a model, since he knows that most aspiring artists don't have easy access to live models.

He starts with faces. He demonstrates how faces are structured by using basic shapes. He gives you examples to copy, and shows how they fit together. I have been filling pages with pretty girl heads. These are some of the better ones. They all look kind of alike, they all may be the same girl, but that's because they're done from a formula. Later on Hart will teach me how to put expression and individuality into the faces. The book covers how to draw the whole body, and includes how to draw males too. One thing I've noticed is that the prettier a girl is, the less individual she looks. My favorite in this set is top row, second from left.

Faces were drawn in pencil, and excerpted from scanned drawings. October 1, 2010.

Tasty Treasures New Items

I have been doing a lot of art for Trader Joe's lately. After the "Butcher Shop of Light" I proceeded to the "New Items" sign, featuring a clipper ship loaded with tasty treasures. This is the third time in my tenure at TJ's that I have done the "New Items" sign. The yellow sign at the top which says "New Items" reminded many of my co-workers of a shark's fin but it is really a triangular sail. I like that shape, the triangle with bent sides. The New Items sign is now in place but the lower part of the sign, with the blue waves, is currently blocked from view by many boxes of TJ's very popular Pumpkin Bread and Muffin Mix.

Acrylic on masonite with painted foamboard application, about 40" x 30". September 29, 2010.