07/28/07 - PleinAir - Joseph Beth Cafe

Two little sketches - not really great by any means - but significant in that I was able to do some sketching in a public area. I'm usually a little skittish about drawing in public all by myself. Holly and Clara (just returned from Maine) were there part of the time (between trips to bathroom for C) but this was really a pretty nice to place to sit back and drawn in. From the patio at Joseph-Beth Cafe in Lexington Green you can hear the live music and see a man made duck pond with a fountain. Inspiration: Mike Manley, (look for his blog Draw! in my watched blogs section) a pretty fearless artist and great role model.

07/24/07 - Digtial - Painter X (Rocks!)

Just installed the trial version of Corel Painter X on my home machine and I have to say it quickly sold me on the need to upgrade from version IX!
Here's a quick little piece (Note: I used auto-clone and the pencil tool to trace a photo reference) to look at - boy, is this easier than Photoshop (much more intuitive - you can take your knowledge of real art media and translate to this program)!

06/27/06 - Comic - Digital - Painter IX

Believe it or not I taught a class on cartooning for high school students last summer (2006) at Berea College for a college prep program called Upward Bound. I guess if you do something long enough someone will eventually take you as some kind of expert (or as a wise friend said to me years ago: "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king." Quite true Hemang, God rest your soul.)

They were a rowdy bunch and shook my confidence in my ability to teach the class - I won't do it again without a fixed computer lab (try handing out and taking up laptops every class, ughh!!). We created a blog and used Photoshop to computer color their hand drawn original comic strips.

As a demo for the class I created this little comic strip completely digitally using Corel Painter IX.

07/23/07 - Famous Namesakes and Blog Narcissism

Above is the "Political Johnny Gilpin" from an 1892 Punch magazine illustration (see page 319). Also here on page 31 - this must have been a fairly famous ballad - although I seem to think my relative is getting lambasted?

OK, almost anyone who blogs or builds a web page eventually checks out how their site comes up in search engines...while engaging in this bit of digital ego stroking (searching "gilpin art" on Google) I discovered some very distant relatives (Rev. William Gilpin, (English (Cumbria) clergyman, painter and aesthetic) Sawrey Gilpin (brother of William and famous animal painter), Wiliam Sawrey Gilpin (son of Sawrey and student of Uncle William), Laura Gilpin, American photographer) who each made an impression in art. And also this little story about a "John Gilpin" from a Gutenberg Press archive.

Perhaps there is hope for me to eventually become successful (or notorious) as an artist, after all ;-)
























Oh, in case your were wondering, I gave up looking after the twentieth search page for a page ranking from this blog. My wife's school blog came up very quickly even though I don't think she has posted there more than five times!

Holly, you must of cheated somehow! Page five indeed!

10/16/06 - Digital - Photoshop CS2 - Painting practice

When I stick to B/W images my Photoshop painting doesn't turn out too bad. This was done with the following tools: #2 pencil, conte pencil (both dry media brushes), and airbrush set at 50% flow. I added the layers palette from Photoshop in this jpg so you could see for yourself.

Again, if anyone is interested in looking at the source files for my digital work - post a comment and let me know - otherwise I will just post image files.

07/25/05 - Digital - Photoshop and Freehand

Here I have taken the life drawing scan (from the previous post) and colorized in Photoshop:



Then applied a watercolor filter to the colorized file (still in PS):



Then backtracked and used Macromedia FreeHand to vectorized (16 color steps) the first colored PS file.

07/24/05 - Life Drawing

Here is a life drawing from 2005 - a nice composition with a favorite model, Faville ( I guess she has graduated and moved on to greener pastures?). This was a 45 minute pose drawn with graphite on a 11x17" bristol board. Check out the next post for some digital coloring variations on this theme.

10/21/06 - Digital - Photoshop CS2 - custom brush

More digital work in Photoshop CS2. This time trying to get a custom brush for hair to work. This is probably my best success at creating a custom brush, but I still have lots of questions, such as: can you only use it one direction? You can actually see the group (circle) of different sized dots I sampled to make the brush from on the top right of the image.

03/26/05 - Digital - Photoshop 7 colored scans as BD cards

Here is a Birthday card design I did for a cousin back in 2005. The line art is hand drawn and inked then scanned. I used PS7 to color (airbrush, color holds on some lines) and add the text.

06/09/07 - Digital - Photoshop CS2 painting practice

As I stated in an earlier post - I struggle with finding a method to paint in Photoshop. Here I have included a practice piece based on a tutorial from 2dArtist (an excellent online PDF art instruction magazine) by Henning Ludvigson.

Not nearly as nice as what he demonstrates - I have put my questions down on the piece. The basic idea is that you frequently re sample the color for your brush (with less opacitiy or flow?) after you originally block in 3 or 4 shades across a curving surface. The goal is to have a nice blend across the color transtions - NOT THAT I DEMONSTRATE THAT HERE!

01/01/07 - Life Drawing Dump 1st quarter 2007

Some of my favorites from life drawings done in the first three months of this year.
I took digital photos of these (instead of scanning) as they are all in an 18x24" drawing pad. I think the digital files are pretty close to life size (at 72ppi resolution).

I usually try to record the date, models name, duration of the pose and the drawing tool I used. Often the quicker poses produce better drawings, what do you think?

For the quick poses I used a black Prismacolor pencil (which can't be erased). For longer poses I used a 2mm 4B lead in a lead holder, Ebony pencil or Draughting pencil.

09/16/06 - Digital - Photoshop CS2

Both of these rough color sketchs were done in Photoshop CS2 with my Wacom Intous 3 tablet.

I am still struggling with digital painting, especially using Photoshop. There are so many ways to approach a color piece and then there is the complication of custom brushes.

Photoshop is probably the most powerful graphics program but it's not very intuitive (good at simulating real media techniques).

07/01/07 - Digital - Sketchbook Pro 2

This cashier from Home Depot was drawn from memory with a wacom intuous 3 in SketchbookPro 2. When I want to get something down in color quickly and easily this is the program I use.

If anyone ever wants to see the native files with layers and everything just leave me a comment on the particular post and I will add a link. Otherwise I will just post images as a jpg or gif.

06/28/07 - Sketchbook Inking Practice

Here are two images (actually all on one sheet of tracing paper but too big to fit on my scanner ;-) ) that are inked versions of sketches made in July 2006.

These were done with the my new Pentel Brush Pen on tracing paper. I was still getting used to the brush pen so these are a little rough and sketchy. The line weights on the nude kneeling figure are too heavy on the highlight side but are more a result of not being able to rest my hand on the tracing paper (than purposeful intent).

The clumsily drawn hands I do have to take credit for (need to spend several hours just working on hands!).

On the plaid skirt I was intentionally going for a "dried brush" type of effect to approximate a woolen texture. This brush pen has to be squeezed periodically to get the ink down to the synthetic bristles - so you can get different effects as the ink runs out. Nice for sketching away from home but I don't think I would ink comics with it. Not as responsive as a real brush and you always have to worry if disposable ink pen's ink will bleed through white out corrections.

07/07/07 - Life Drawing - Ink

Long time since my last post! Here are two drawings from about a week ago using a Pentel Brush Pen (picked this up at Comics2Games in Northern Kentucky - the comic shop storefront for Blue Line Pro) on some nice printmaking paper (Stonehenge, I think) . I pencil sketched first and then finished in ink.