phoenix-spook

[phoenix-spook]

Hi, my name is Maes; he/him and they/them pronouns are fine. I’m a PDP major, and I hope I don’t add a minor to it. I’m excited to be learning in this class because I had a rough time with intaglio in my intro print class. I really want to learn how to do intaglio prints properly, especially now that I can do so in the studio and not at home. Here are images! The top one is me (right) with my best friend (left) on a recent book signing trip in Kentucky. The second image is my cat Spooky, he’s a fairly big cat in person, but he’s usually shy and quiet. The third image (oriented the wrong way by Tumblr) is my bearded dragon Garfield, named so because he is tubby and orange in person, and very grumpy. I call him Grumpy Butt and variants of that with expletives depending on how much he misbehaves on any given day.

[phoenix-spook]

Hi! My name is Maes, I use he/him pronouns. This is me on the right with my best friend on a recent book signing trip. Above that is a favorite litho print of mine made from home during my online intro print class. I’m a PDP major, and I’m excited to continue learning painting in this class. I really want to learn more about color mixing and color accuracy while painting from “life” (photo or actual life). It can be really daunting to try to recreate the colors and shades of something in painting form, especially with so many different paints available for use. Although we explored a number of techniques in painting one, I’m still not sure which ones work best for me, and I don’t have a complete idea of when to use different ones. So, I’m hoping to try out more techniques and/or revisit ones from painting one to get a better grip on them. Amy taught my painting one class, and she made it easy to get into painting as a beginner. I was pretty intimidated by oil painting at first, but over time, I became more acclimated and confident enough to simply put effort forth and be accepting (but constructively critical) of the results. 

P.S. My apologies for doing this intro so late, I’ve been moving between apartments this week, and it’s been incredibly hectic.

[phoenix-spook]

“Important Meetings.”

Explain a little about your process. I took two of my old favorites from previous modeling work I did and put them together on a page in photopea. After the critique, I had a shooting session with a bunch of different poses and perspectives, and I worked those in after the physical preparation sketches. Instead of adding on to the sketchbook pages, I added the new poses digitally. Originally, there were a total of 9 figures, but once I put the new ones on the page in gesture, I decided to scrap a good number of them. 

Explain what you feel is successful in your painting. It’s weird. I think that feeling is the most successful part of this piece. It’s almost contradictory to say that the piece being strange is its strong point, but I really get an odd, icky feeling from looking at it. The first two original figures are the best ones, easily in terms of shape, perspective, and shading.

Explain what you feel could be improved in your painting. All the other figures need vast improvement. Perspectives are all over the place, and I knew that would be an incredible difficulty going into it. Just working through all of them and trying to make sense of them as I was drawing was super challenging. The two on the left have tiny hand syndrome, the far left has big head syndrome, and Mr. Top Right is also Mr. Alien. 

Tell us what you learned by making this painting. I think I learned that perspective requires very careful planning and mapping. Stepping back often, using a ruler, and checking all angles and shape changes through perspective are all integral to getting it right.

[phoenix-spook]

Explain a little about your process. I dedicated a day to taking a bunch of photos in various settings and angles with different positions and props. Eventually I settled on one at my desk drawing where I spent most of my time during quarantine. I drew a gesture, loose shape study, and shading shapes warmup just before starting on the final piece.

Explain what you feel is successful in your painting. The shading and shape of the hand match my reference pretty well. Shading on the arm is also fairly close to the reference.

Explain what you feel could be improved in your painting. Shapes and perspectives could definitely be improved. Overall, I think the depth of the image needs work. I wasn’t sure how to approach textures while using cross hatching, they suffered for it. In particular, the hair was the most difficult. I’m not sure if it was the charcoal I was using or how I was using it, but I really struggled to get the hair down.

Tell us what you learned by making this painting. I learned a bit more about using cross hatching to build up darks. 

Extra (You)

Tell me if you used an object and why I basically used my normal desk setup with my keyboard, sketchbook, and mouse (which ended up getting cropped out). To say the least, these objects became a nauseatingly familiar sight during lockdown and Zoom classes. Seeing them all day every day became surreal and strange after a while, like how saying a word too many times in a row will make it sound foreign.

Tell me what you used for your environment and why I stuck with my room as the environment, as it’s not a very big space, and I often felt stir-crazy within it.

Explain how the theme (In A Time of Crisis) inspired the piece Overall, I think of this as a snapshot of where I was during lockdown. I was in the same small room, looking at the same small desk, and drawing in the same small sketchbook every day. The limited environment in the foreground and background reflect the miniscule space I had.

[phoenix-spook]

I took a bunch of photo references for my face, and picked the most interesting 3/4 perspective one. I did some gestures of both my face and the skull, taking some expressive liberties with the self portrait gesture. I put a grid on the bottom left of the BFK paper, and worked from a digital grid to recreate the skull. The coordinates and lines went down first, followed by angle notes, shadow shapes, hatching, and adjustments. For the self portrait, I did a very light gesture with some structure, volume, and angle notes before getting into contour specifics. Once contour lines developed far enough, I drew the shadow shapes, highlight shapes, surface angles, and freckles.

On the skull, I feel that the shading and values are improved from previous copies. It still needs some work, especially in the teeth. On the self portrait, I feel like I got a pretty good amount of shadow shapes in.

The smoothness of the hatching finish on the skull could use some more attention. I also think that the shape of the back of the skull could be shifted to be more accurate. On the self portrait, I believe I could place the eyes better. The eyes of my self portraits are always a struggle for me, because one of my eyes’ lids is always a bit lower than the other, and so sometimes they won’t look right on paper.

I definitely learned more about the complex, round form of the skull and the head. Seeing where all the values go on a skull helped contextualize how the flesh follows the bones in shape and sometimes value.

[phoenix-spook]

I started with 3D shapes, angles, and hatching studies to get a feel for the image and its subjects before diving in. Combining that abstraction with looking at the grids individually helped break the image into more doable and palatable pieces. I followed the grid closely, and stepped back from the paper every now and then to check each box’s relation to the rest of the image as it came together. Once the contour outline and shadows’ outlines were on the page, I did my best to mimic the original artist’s hatching marks.

I feel that the bones and shading on them turned out the best because they register as a skeletal leg to me even from a distance. 

The shading on the flesh leg definitely needs improvement. It is too vague in some places, and lighter than it should be in others. 

Feet are confusing. It’s easy to get lost in shading muscles in high definition because their organic, dimensional presence creates incredibly complex gradients.

[phoenix-spook]

this mans arm TOO THICC

The three gestures/studies from Thursday are also here as representation of the drawn and written visual notes I made before beginning the grid drawing. I resized the image in photoshop so that it wasn’t ¾ of an inch on either height or width. 

The difficulty of the bones alone made me feel like completing the drawing was an accomplishment all by itself. That aside, although the bones all need improvement, I believe the copying of the pelvic bone and tail bone to be one of the better moments in this drawing. For the most part, the odd shapes and perspective have been transcribed from the drawing fairly well. The directed shading on the flesh arm, as well, represents focused attention to how the original artist visually described the arm.

Bones. All the bones require more attention.. The drawing was small, which was frustrating when it came to the arm and hand bones, as well as the spine and ribcage. Regardless, however, the clarity in the aforementioned bones needs improvement. they are not as accurately and clearly articulated as they should be, and their real forms should be more apparent and forefront in immediacy to any viewer.

I learned spines are weird. Ribcages are exceedingly confounding. Bones in all their glory require a careful and patient hand, as any perspective of them presents a challenging composition of oddities. Humans have evolved to have the strangest pelvic bones that don’t quite register correctly in any orientation. 

[phoenix-spook]

The three gestures/studies from Thursday are also here as representation of the drawn and written visual notes I made before beginning the grid drawing. I resized the image in photoshop so that it wasn’t 3/4 of an inch on either height or width. 

The difficulty of the bones alone made me feel like completing the drawing was an accomplishment all by itself. That aside, although the bones all need improvement, I believe the copying of the pelvic bone and tail bone to be one of the better moments in this drawing. For the most part, the odd shapes and perspective have been transcribed from the drawing fairly well. The directed shading on the flesh arm, as well, represents focused attention to how the original artist visually described the arm.

Bones. All the bones require more attention.. The drawing was small, which was frustrating when it came to the arm and hand bones, as well as the spine and ribcage. Regardless, however, the clarity in the aforementioned bones needs improvement. they are not as accurately and clearly articulated as they should be, and their real forms should be more apparent and forefront in immediacy to any viewer.

I learned spines are weird. Ribcages are exceedingly confounding. Bones in all their glory require a careful and patient hand, as any perspective of them presents a challenging composition of oddities. Humans have evolved to have the strangest pelvic bones that don’t quite register correctly in any orientation. 

[phoenix-spook]

To begin, I drew a string bean version of the figure, then a framed gesture, and a free range gesture. Then, I started with drawing the feet, and moved my way up on the body on the outline. I paid attention to the grid and its relation to the lines of the body especially. My paper, however, was white and not toned, so some tonality is lost in my copy. I decided to minimalize any extraneous shading rather than recreate the tonality artificially. I feel that everything in my copy is in its place, and that most of the hatching lines have similar angles to their counterparts in the original drawing. However, my shading falls short in the back region. It needs more of the grey areas of shading rather than just the shadows and highlights. Some muscles are also exaggerated, and their lines should be subdued to be more subtle. Doing this copy, though, still taught me a lot about the genuine shape of muscles and bones. Isolated, many parts of the body felt inhuman and strange, but put in a working context, it all comes together to read as a person.

[phoenix-spook]

Mug painting that I like

[phoenix-spook]

This is me on a late night instinctively catching something dangerously yeeted at me. Call me Maes, my pronouns are he/him. I'm a pdp major, but I lean more towards drawing and painting rather than printmaking. I really hope to learn proportions in a memorable way, to get a better understanding of anatomy, and to frame figures in believable way (so that nothing is wildly out of place and everything fits in the frame of the paper). I have a tendency to focus in on a body part or half of the body and draw that rather than the whole thing. To be honest, I forget the legs exist half the time, so I have trouble drawing those, and then arms and hands also tend to look out of place to me whenever I draw them. I actually love drawing people, but my grasp on the anatomy of a person needs some work. I had Liz Gibson for drawing one and Katherine Miller for drawing two. I really enjoyed both of the classes, I felt like I got a good introduction to drawing techniques and measuring with sight.

[phoenix-spook]

Notes to Self - fabric printing

Moisten canvas totes/t shirts/ rags before printing on them. Use fabric ink or oil based ink. Roll the thing in newsprint and leave it to dry. Once dry, tumble it in the dryer and then it is permanent.

[phoenix-spook]

Notes to Self - Gelatin Printing

Gelatin Plate Recipe (This recipe is for a cookie tray 9" x 13")

Ingredients

0.5 cup of hot water

1.5 cups of cold water

2 packs of Unflavored Gelatin (8 envelopes)

1.5 cups of Glycerin

Step 1

Add 1.5 cups on Glycerin to 1.5 cups Cold water and mix well

Step 2

Add 8 envelopes of Unflavored Gelatin to the mix. Mix well.

Step 3

Add 0.5 cup of hot water and mix well.

Step 4

Pour mix onto 9" x 13" tray

Step 5

Refrigerate for 12 hours before printing.

Apply ink to gelatin using stencils and gently press paper on it. Ink will build up over time, no need to clean it.

[phoenix-spook]

The theme for today is: not very successful, but very cool looking.

[phoenix-spook]

Here are some prints from the tape method. I didn't really like this one because I only had straight line tape to work with, and not contact paper. I don't think these are very successful, but I just got smaller tape to use, so I can make a smaller image and hopefully fix most of the spotting issues in these.

[phoenix-spook]

[phoenix-spook]

These are today's screenprints. Some got messed up, but I think I'm getting it just a little bit now.