The finished painting
Sometimes–actually, often–I get stuck on paintings. Sometimes I get stuck from being unsure how to fix a layout, or get a certain color or texture, and just need to set it aside so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. Sometimes, though, it just feels like the wrong time. That’s what happened on this one. I knew I wanted to create another in the same vein as the original House of Chu calendar repaint I did a few years ago, and began by painting out all of the calendar parts. It was the middle of winter, and I just couldn’t motivate myself to work on it while it was cold and gray. The only thing that came to my mind was Bunnicula, or just painting some extra blossoming branches into it. I didn’t really want to do either, so I left it out and hoped for inspiration to strike.
Spring seemed to do the trick. A week ago, after a passing glance at the mist, it occurred to me that I could fill the rest with a meandering creek to echo the shape of the Great Wall and the mist. I took a picture and sketched out what it would look like in Photoshop, and while doing that realized I could make a nice big reflection of the moon–specifically, the “rabbit in the moon“. Perfect!
I had an idea now and a fitting deadline of Easter, so here’s the progression I went through this week to finish this up. The creek and the grass detail came easily. I thought I’d see if I’d stay motivated by alternating between painting this and painting a few miniatures with the extra colors as I went (verdict: kind of). It slowed down when I got to the moon, as it took a bit of trial and error. And then: stuck again! As I looked at my sketch I decided the blossom reflections were too noisy, but I wasn’t sure what else to do.
I’d kept the first repaint next to it the whole time to get a sense of how they’d work together, so I studied it closely. I saw that I should add more of a border back along the sides for a similar look. That wouldn’t be enough though. I hadn’t considered adding any illustrative or outlined areas like the clouds and dragon foot, and saw now that it was the biggest omission. I outlined the creek on my printed sketch, and it seemed right; but despite the test run it felt much more uncertain when I started actually painting it. It was either going to fix it or really screw it up, as it wouldn’t be easy to correct. I only felt certain once I saw it done and could see that the visual theme held.
Now that I have the theme, I would love to make more if I can track down another chinese zodiac scroll calendar or two.
The original calendar
First step: block it out
No more calendar!
Kicked back in
Greenery, filled in
Cross-training
The start of the moon
Stuck, just before done
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Object Oriented, the book
I have a weakness for sketchbooks, and often buy neat-looking ones in the hope that they’ll be a good motivation to draw more. I found these funky little 3″ x 3″ leather-bound books at Cost Plus World Market a little over a year ago, and decided it’d be just the right size to carry around. While it’s just a cheap little notebook, I really like the size and feel of it, and wanted to make it into a worthy standalone art piece on its own. I’ve diligently stuck to the same theme and the same marker, a sienna brush pen, to keep the look consistent even though it may be months between sketches.
Why Object Oriented? Objects, as subjects, are easy. They don’t move (usually). They don’t get self-conscious. The textures are challenging…especially the smooth, manufactured ones. It makes me look around my environment more. And it’s a term drilled into me from my computer science days, a concept I still like. I’m a quarter of the way through the book; I’ll post more sketches when I make it halfway.
Puzzle pieces
Tape measuring
Teeny espresso cup
Modern chair
Stained glass light
Clock countdown
Winding line of chairs
Part of airplane seatbelt
Plastic coffee lid
Empty gumbo bowl
Corduroy hat
These things take concentration
Here’s a new sketch, as my half-done projects (an elaborate embroidery, and another calendar repaint) remain stubbornly half-done. This is a good example of how the materials themselves shape what I’ll draw.
I sketched this while Alan learned the fine art of pour-over coffee at Barefoot Coffee, on a tabletop made of pennies suspended in resin. I’d forgotten to bring specific drawing materials to occupy myself, so fortunately he had a pencil & sharpener and kindly lent it to me to use. I usually keep a few “artist trading card”-sized pieces of bristol board with me, though I’ve also used the back of a business card in a pinch.
There’s an inverse proportion between paper size & level of detail for me–the smaller the paper, the higher the detail I want. I’ve drawn on a few with stubborn pens that dry out or blot at random, and been frustrated with the clumsy results. I will only use a pen now if I can get a relatively new micro ink (not gel), ballpoint (good for gradation), or brush pen. It’s been a while since I used a pencil, though, which is much more satisfying and less taxing for getting good shading.
I looked around for people or objects that I could surreptitiously draw, and wasn’t really seeing anything of interest so I started sketching curves and shadows until a character started forming. Using a pencil must have tapped into the high school portion of my brain when I would make pencil-shaded drawings of elaborate dragons, gargoyles, and demons. I decided I was in the mood to draw octopus tentacles, so here’s where it went.
What kind of dog is this?
I took advantage of a smooth flight and an hour and a half of no interruptions to do a bit of sketching. After flipping through the United Hemispheres magazine I found this ad for the Ritz-Carlton Chicago penthouses with a nice pose of this woman and her dog. The arrangement itself is interesting, and I was in the mood to work on textures, and both the dog fur and the satiny sheen on the dress looked like good subjects.
I drew this one with a cheapo ballpoint pen in the same brown craft paper notebook that I took to Hawaii and Norway. I’m trying to be better about taking this notebook along with me when I travel, which means I’m gathering a number of drawings of people in airports.
All together now!
The blanket that anchors it all
This one’s a wall mural I painted for the nursery for our friends Hannah and Amanda. The starting point: a jungle theme, butter yellow walls, brown curtains, and a few items including a curtain and a blanket with monkeys.
After taking pictures of all of the walls, I made these mockups in Photoshop to work out the design beforehand. We ended up scaling back to two walls instead of three, and I painted this over two rainy days. I masked the square and the crosshatched lines with painter’s tape, and sketched the plants freehand. I’d attempted to paint the circle by using a string pinned to the center, but after a few dashes I realized it wasn’t curving consistently; I got better results going freehand with the rest.
While painting, I mixed the blue and green to create an extra green for variety for the plants…and after painting one bush, I realized that the mixed color blended too well. I needed more contrast, so after adding in some white it was good to go. At some point I’ll remember these kinds of things before I begin rather than during painting..! It all came together in the end. With the inspired addition of the pith helmet, it’s a room fit for baby Zachary.
Closet wall, pre-paint
Closet wall design
Backyard wall, pre-paint
Backyard wall design
Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd!
A few months ago the Product group at LinkedIn moved into a new building full o’ corporate cubes and hosted a “Pimp Your Row” contest to spiff ‘em up (as documented by my friend Marissa on the Linked blog). I recently switched over to the Enterprise Hiring Solutions team, and got inspired by the Subscriptions team nearby and their Yellow Submarine theme. Hence–the Star Trek (or rather, Enterprise) theme!
My row neighbors braved the ladder to fill our row with planets, glow-in-the-dark stars, and the Enterprise (of course). There was a well-timed quote from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman to go along with a Data cardboard cutout. We installed the awesome System 47 screensavers on our computers. And–the final piece–I created LCARS-style “interfaces” for everyone in the row that I printed and mounted behind the glass in front of each cube. I created these in Illustrator, and grabbed interesting-looking 3D wireframes from the internets.
As I built it I couldn’t help but build out a somewhat meaningful structure for the “interface”. The structure breaks down to two primary levels: the structure of LinkedIn (your connections, groups, etc) and the info on your profile (your current position, past, etc.). These presumably showing info about the “current” position, so it shows the person’s name, their role, the departments they’re in (e.g. Product, and within that, Monetization), their product (in my case, “candidate acquisition platform” or CAP), and its users.
Beep boop bip
Yep.
Appropriate beverages
It's the future!
Dished
Cubism
Twisty
The San Jose Glass Institute offers a “Glass Artist for a Day” workshop which I took with my mom a little over a month ago. It’s an introduction to three kinds of glasswork: glass fusing, stained glass, and torchwork.
Glass fusing
The process is simple: cut & assemble pieces of glass, fire it once to fuse them together, and fire it again to shape it. The glass is specially made for fusing to ensure that the pieces will all melt at the same temperature; otherwise the pieces might not fuse correctly, or worse, crack or explode during the firing. Cutting the glass involves etching a guideline and then snapping or tapping against the glass to break it along that line. It takes patience, and makes me think there must be additional ways to cut the glass that must be more precise. The glass pre-firing also can look quite different than the fired look, and can turn from near-transparent to a bright solid color. I picked green & blue colors and made this little curved dish (5″x5″). The lime green parts were a bit of a surprise, but I like the result.
Stained glass
This was a straightforward technique for small pieces: line the edges of the glass with a special copper tape, and solder the edges together. The diamond shapes were pre-cut (the hard part!) and I picked some that would look like an optical illusion of two cubes side by side. Soldering is extremely forgiving as the flux is extremely cohesive, and mistakes laying down the flux can be corrected by reheating it.
Torchwork
By far the most challenging! It’s a process of slowly melting the ends of glass rods over a torch. This one was built up by melting one end into a ball, pressing it into a disc while it’s still pliable, and then attaching another rod to the end and slowly stretching and twisting it into a spiral. Imagine holding a pencil and spinning it steadily in one direction, twisting at just the right speed (not too fast, not too slow) to keep the ball from collapsing to one side and keeping it at the right distance from an open flame. And then holding a pencil in each hand and joining them into one even line (also over flame). And then twisting each end at different rates (again: over flame). Tricky! I have newfound respect for people that work with glass and torches.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Sketch & bowl o' matcha
After a failed attempt to get in on an advance screening of Unknown at the (no longer Sony) Metreon, Alan and I cut out to spend the remainder of the evening at Samovar Tea Lounge. I didn’t have any artist trading cards with me, so I sketched this on the back of a business card with a rapidly fading felt pen.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Jar of pixels
Was inspired to make this after seeing my friend Dave’s Facebook post this morning: “Apparently I’ve been working too much. I put “Claussen Pixels” on my grocery list.” Good thing I had this pickle jar hanging around for just such an occasion. Here you go, sir!
These “pickles” are made from Pixelblocks, which are a bit like translucent Legos. On the plus side, they have grooves so you can attach them side-by-side. On the minus side, they are rather difficult to separate.
Pixelblocks work well as a medium for building little 2D replicas of old school video game characters, and I do have an Excitebike rider and Katamari King of the Cosmos gracing my living room. I like the idea of life-size replicas, though, so I may try out some other types of food now that I see how pickles turned out.
In a similar vein: years ago I built a few Looney Tunes characters using a bin of Legos. At some point I may use these as reference photos for tinkering around with isometric drawing or noodling around with this app.
Yosemite Sam (front)
Yosemite Sam (back)
Sylvester (front)
Sylvester (back)
Tweety (front)
Tweety (back)
Daffy Duck (front)
Daffy Duck (back)
Foghorn Leghorn (front)
Foghorn Leghorn (back)
Monday, November 22, 2010
View from Roy's Coffee (SJ Japantown)
I have no explanation for the recent art hiatus other than a mental block. Been doing a little embroidery, a little drawing, a little pumpkin carving. Oh, and I ended up on a jury for a criminal case for almost a month. While in the courtroom, I got a notebook to keep track of details. During the little bits of downtime when the lawyers approached the bench, I started sketching things around the courtroom. Unfortunately the notebook has to stay in the custody of the court, so those handful of sketches are probably destroyed by now. But…it did get me sketching again, and it left me with a little free time during lunch.
The Hall of Justice is about seven or eight blocks from San Jose’s Japantown, so I had lots of lunches down there. It’s tiny–just a couple of blocks long–and just a cool little place with some great restaurants. I frequented a coffee shop called Roy’s Station which is in a remodeled auto service station, complete with original 50′s Coke machine. If you go, try the Spiced Dirty Chai (unsweetened chai + espresso). I’d had a few artist trading cards with me, so I started sketching the view from Roy’s. It was originally just the card on the right, but I felt it was a bit stark so I added another to make it a bit more complete.
It’s not quite accurate as I sat in three different spots, and it reminded me of how freaking hard it is to get perspective looking right. Even if I had a straight edge, get the vanishing points just a tad off and it’s going to look wrong. I like it as it looks, but when I was sitting in front of the real thing I winced at how torqued some of the distances ended up. Note to self: pick out the repeating patterns, like the flags, first and work from there…
That pointy thing on the far right is a sculpture. According to the guy that came and chatted with me for a bit during day 2 on this, represents how the lives of Japanese-American citizens were forced in a new direction during WWII. Fortunately, the local community was able to get re-established in the same spot after the war, and preserve a very cool part of SJ.
