Ugly Mug Mondays! #15

Just a quickie for Ugly Mug Monday! this week. There's a lot of real work that I should be focusing on, but all work and no play causes Jack Nicholson (and myself) to go insane and try to murder his family.

I feel I took it too far and over-worked it, but that's how it goes. I wish pencil were as facile as paint can be. Oh well.

Pencil on bristol. 2.5" x 3.5"

Ugly Mug Mondays! #14

I am King Cheez-It. I am not amused.

I was digging through files on my computer and I came across a handful from my last trip to New York. I became overly addicted to Cheez-Its and, well, you've got to do something with the empty boxes, don't you? And sometimes you've just got to wear a box on your head.

Casein on canvas paper. 2.5" x 3.5"

Ugly Mug Mondays! #13

Ugly Mug Mondays! are going to be making a return in a big way! This one is a littledifferent from the last ten ugly mug posts I've offered, but I've learned a lot since then, so I don't think anyone will hold it against me. I like the little casein paintings I was doing and I plan on getting back to those, but I have plans for this particular drawing. Stay tuned!

11 x 14. Pencil on layout bond.

Ugly Mug Mondays! #10 and #12

My lady has been on vacation for the past couple of days, which has made getting artwork done a lot more difficult than I had imagined. All of a sudden there are three furballs brawling it out for my undivided attention. Needless to say my concentration has been shot. Between that and struggling with my recent painting (which I'll post in a day or so) I've been off track on painting my ugly mug. I did this one earlier in the week, from life. The last few I've done have all been black and white over the white of the page, but I thought this time around I'd try it over a red ground. It's interesting, I think. We'll see where it leads.

Casein on canvas paper. 2.5" x 3.5"



This week's offering I kind of phoned in. I've been sketching a bit more again, so I wasn't really feeling sitting down with paints; and then there was the fuzzy coalition protesting in my apartment - one of whom is a really inquisitive cat that likes to get into everything. On more than one occasion he's jumped onto where my palette is kept and I have no desire to clean up a painted kitty. So I deferred to a quick pencil sketch.

Pencil on bristol. 2.5" x 3.5"

Ugly Mug Mondays! #9 and #10

I kind of skipped last week's Ugly Mug Monday!. It was completely accidental, I swear. I was up late duking it out with the final drawing for my latest full scale illustration and by the time it occurred to me it was something like eight in the morning. Then I spent the past week wrestling said drawing into submission and before I knew it - POW! - it was time for a new week. So I did two portraits for this week, as a way to play catch up. This time 'round I tried working from photo reference instead of sitting in front of a mirror. I kind of felt it was cheating, as I usually (read: always) work from photos, but I stumbled across my senior portrait and couldn't resist.

Once upon a time I had an afro. I thought it was cool. What can I say? Also I have a gap in my teeth. It isn't nearly this bad, but i thought it was hilarious and just couldn't help but leave it. It was originally the center-line in the face and wound up being one of those happy accidents that end up making a picture just that much more whimsical and quirky.

I realized that with the exception of my first week's offering, all of the self-portraits in the Ugly Mug series have been in black and white. There are two reasons for this;

1. I look at things in terms of tone. The simplest way to do this is in black and white.

2. I only have three tubes of casein paint. Black. White. And red. As it would happen I've fallen in love with casein and I sort of naturally reach for them whenever it's time to paint my ugly mug.

That being said, someone once told me I was afraid of color. She was basing this on the fact that everything in my sketchbook was in black and white. Either pencil or pen and ink. I was taught fairly early on that "if it doesn't work in black and white, it isn't going to work in color" and "you choose a color for it's value". These are the two things I hear in the back of my mind whenever I'm painting. So a lot of the time yes, I do work in black and white, but I think it's ridiculous to say that I'm afraid of color. To prove it, I put some red in this one. Hope you like it.

As an aside I really like these two paintings. I think the economic use of brush strokes is pretty cool, and I'm quite fond of the purely implied expression - especially in the second one. I'm liking the direction these are heading in, I hope you good folks do too.

Ugly Mug Mondays! #7

I've been enjoying the casein studies that I've been doing so much that I decided to shake things up a bit. There are a lot of things digital "paintings" can do well and I think my favorite are the blacks. You can get them instantly without any fuss and they don't have the tendency of deadening a picture. Rich blacks are fantastic.

At any rate, this week's offering for Ugly Mug Mondays! is a digital one. I've been tooling with the ol' Wacom less and less often these days (other than value studies for paintings) which I'm surprised to say surprises me - I'm really starting to have fun pushing the pixels around.

I've got two paintings in the pipe right now. I hope to get those up here within a fortnight.

Ugly Mug Mondays! #4

It isn't much of a likeness this time around. I just didn't have it in me, I guess. I've discovered that I'm enjoying the casein but I don't know. My head was elsewhere. I'll make it up to you next week.

Casein on watercolor paper.

Ugly Mug Mondays! #3

It's that time of week again! I found some casein while cleaning up some stuff in my studio so I thought I'd play with it a little. I tried to keep it loose and quick, so I used a single #4 flat brush, just so that I wouldn't get caught up in any of the detail. There are some pretty tasty passages that I really enjoy and some things I wish I spent more time on - but that's how the cookie crumbles.

Casein on canvas paper. 30 minutes.

Ugly Mug Mondays! #2

Originally when I set out to do this thing, this... Ugly Mug Mondays, I had intended them to all be paintings. Well, I had a couple of false starts tonight and the clock kept tick-tocking away and before I knew it, it was pretty darn late. So, I trashed what I had done so far and sat down to just do a pretty little pencil drawing. All was not lost! I learned a couple of things.

I apparently can't sit down and produce a "realistic" self-portrait. I always have to exaggerate something. But you know, I feel it always looks like me. Maybe it's because I'm so used to seeing myself that I have to play with my appearance to get through the drawing. Kind of like a kid sticking his baby carrots into his mashed potatoes to make a blob monster that's reminiscent of something from Calvin and Hobbes.

I also tend to make the same squinty one-eyebrow-cocked kind of face when I plan on doing a self portrait. (I wonder what the hell that's about.) So I made my eyebrows really big - especially the one I was cocking. What's more is I tend to make dumb faces in general. Oh well. It is what it is.

Pencil on bristol. 30 minutes.

P.S.
My ears don't really stick out that far. Just felt the need to let you know that.

Ugly Mug Mondays!

Once upon a time I thought I would start doing self-portraits once a week. As with most things I had the thought and let it slip past me. Well I came back around to that notion just the other day, but this time I gave it a name. I don't know what possessed me to do such a thing, but I have named it:

Ugly Mug Mondays!

The plan is to post drawings or paintings that are of the self-portrait variety. Of my ugly mug. It isn't that I'm vain and that I love staring at myself in the mirror - or even that I'm that great of a model - but hey, I'm always available. Cheap and available. If nothing else, I always know where I am.

For the first venture, I broke out the gouache set again. I started with a quick and loose drawing on bristol then I spray-fixed it. Once that was all setup and ready to rock and roll I made a mess on top of it with the gouache. Messes are fun. Weird things happen when you make a mess and have the daunting task of cleaning them up, and in that weird space you learn. I can't wait to see what happens next week!

Deeper into the Digital Rabbit Hole I Go!

Sometimes when I can't sleep I like to play dress up and play with some of the myriad of props I've collected. Trouble is, I often never have a project in mind for them, so they end up collecting whatever the digital equivalent of dust would be.

Unable to let things go, I've been tinkering with brushes in Photoshop. (Who? Me? Stubborn? No!) I forgot that you could customize them and make them do your bidding as you bend them to your will. Silly me. So tonight I thought I'd pull one of the aforementioned silly pictures out of mothballs and try to make something happen.

I think this is a lot closer to what I'd want to be doing if I were to create illustrations with a Wacom tablet. It doesn't feel as sterile and flat as other things I've done in the past, and I didn't even have to impose a texture on this one! Originally I planned on coloring this image (and I may very well still do that) but I got really into just playing with black and white - then I realized what time it was. So, I'm off to bed before my lady wakes up and kills me. Or looks at me with severe disappointment. I can't tell which would be worse. You'll have to wait until next time for any kind of update on this cowpoke.

What's he looking at, I wonder?

About an hour and a half. Photoshop Cs3. Intuos 3 tablet.

P.S. I have some ACTUAL paintings coming down the pipe. I miss oils.

Self-Portrait

Once upon a time, back in the days of art school, a teacher tasked us with drawing 50 self portraits over the weekend. I suspect he wanted to force us to loosen up and not be so... academic in our approach to drawing. So, I sat down in front of a mirror and set about my task. Needless to say a lot of the drawings wound up as kindling (or would have if I had a fireplace) but there were a few I liked or was talked into keeping. This would have to be my favorite from that exercise, and as such I've had it pinned to my studio wall.

Recently I decided to pull it down and use it as a base for a painting. Sitting down in front of my trusty mirror again I set to the task of painting it out. Paying attention to the relationships between shapes was more important than getting the shapes accurate. I miss the fact that it looks like I'm on an oxygen tank in the initial pencil drawing. And I don't know why, but I like the look of the receding hairline in the drawing as well. Oh well, maybe next time.

Vacation's Over.

I'm back to finishing off my 4x6 portrait series. I know it's been a month since I've posted something, but I plan on returning with a vengeance. I was sitting down last night to work on a submission for the Communication Arts annual and I decided to knock out a portrait as a warm-up before I sat down to what I thought of as my real work.

If nothing else I'm pleased with how natural this one came out. I worked on it for about twenty minutes and decided I liked it just the way it was and just stopped painting out of fear of ruining it - as I've been known to do.

Aside from that I've spent two weeks delving into the work of Ashley Wood ( here and here ) and I think it shows. I've been wanting to loosen up and be more... expressive (Mark Eanes would be proud, I think) in my paintings, and I think Mr. Wood helped me do that whether he knows it or not.

I've got one more 4x6 canvas in my arsenal at the moment, so I may be calling it quits on that in the near future. But fear not! My lady gave me a stack of painting surfaces she happened across, so I'm sure I'll be experimenting on those as well.

Oh! Also, before I forget; my buddy Rusty showed me some love on his blog, so I'm going to point you over to his blog in hopes that you'll give him some love too. Here.

Insomnia has its uses.

Well, my beloved insomnia strikes again, so I thought I'd take advantage of it and post the mini-painting I did this afternoon in the hour before I had to leave for work. I think I'm on to something. The only problem with being on to something is I want to go back and fix old paintings (or redo them entirely) so that they all "fit". There aren't enough hours in the day...

This pretty much marks the first self portrait I've painted since high school. I did one in gouache in my sketchbook about a year ago, but I don't know... I have trouble calling things in my sketchbooks paintings, even when I'm using paint to make the marks. Ok, fine, how about this; this is the first self portrait I've ever done in oil. I think. I can't remember any others, so therefore they must not exist, right? Right.

I learned a few things working on this little guy. Primarily I pretty much have a dark caucasian tone to my skin. Since I basically got away with using the "formula" I normally use for painting people (and I tend to paint a lot of caucasian people) with more of the slighty darker tone serving as a midtone. Ok, I think that's actually the only thing I learned about my features doing this painting. The nose came out redder than it is in the painting - but I did make my nose redder than it is in actuality. Why? Artistic license - that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Aside from that I learned that I need to learn to mix better greens and that painting a dude is just as easy (or difficult) as painting a dudette. (I was recently asked me if I planned on painting a man any time soon. I guess this is as close as I could come.) I do remember thinking in the early stages of the painting that "painting black people is hard!" but like I said, I'm just a dark white person, so it worked out. I intend to work on that and maybe do Matt Crane proud and finally start painting culturally... (Whatever that means.)

Last but not least I learned I need to find a better way to photograph stuff like this. I know how, actually, I'm just lazy at 3 in the morning and don't feel like setting up a tripod to get a better picture. If I get enough in the way of protest I'll see what I can do. I just look at it as incentive to invest in proper light set up. Well, it's either that or figure out how to create an overcast day on command. Now, there'd be a neat trick.