14 Wednesday Nov 2018
Posted in art studio, poetry
eclipse
when the sun disappears
we dance in its umbra
embracing lightless silence
where mockingbirds dare not fly
darkness belongs to bodies
we plant kisses like seeds
and if one star
carves its absence like a scar
then you and i are healing
in the wound
Pastel Planets 1
30 Sunday Mar 2014
Posted in art studio
Tags
art, Cat, cosmic hand, drawing, frog, pastel, pen and ink, sketchbook sundays
Instead of sketching this week, we devoted our sketch time to framing and listing several of our favorite pieces from the past year. It turns out to be quite a process: selecting and ordering frames, photographing each piece, and coming up with something compelling to say about them for the listing. Add to that unpacking, assembling, packing, and uploading, and you’ve suddenly got a pretty big project on your hands.
But, at the end, the final framed piece of art gives you a major feeling of satisfaction. You’ve taken an idea and made it real. In today’s world of goods and services performed virtually and delivered by email, we sometimes lose an important reward: that day you can step back, take a look at what you accomplished, and know it as a tangible thing.
29 Wednesday Jan 2014
Posted in art studio
22 Sunday Dec 2013
Posted in art studio
We had fun last week doing 9×12 portraits of an old DC Comics war character called GI Robot. Would you like to see how we put him together on a 16×20 in. piece of Fabriano Artistico paper?
First, we played around with a small set of Inktense colors. These come in little bricks like pastels but, when exposed to or brushed with water, turn into colorful rich inks.
Maybe the vintage copy of The True Story of Smokey Bear we read before bedtime inspired this fiery, angular background – or perhaps Franz Marc, or both.
Next, we use white chalk to lightly sketch the outline of GI Robot’s big areas of color. We then fill them in with pastels. We blend the first layer of pastels with our fingers, go over the area with the same color again, and blend a second time. This did a good job covering up the background, and it has a kind of ghostly cool where it still shows through.
Once the color takes hold, we outline the color areas in black pastel. Then, right over the white areas, we fill in the black shapes in and around the face. For several areas, achieving the right darkness of black requires the same process as the color areas: apply, blend, apply, blend.
We hit GI Robot with a couple coats of spray fixative. Then we went back to the black and white areas of the face and gave them another coat or two. After another layer of spray fixative, GI Robot rocks, ready to frame.
15 Sunday Dec 2013
Posted in art studio, war
Tags
art, comic book, comics, commando, DC Comics, drawing, GI Robot, military, pastel, Pat Broderick, Robert Kanigher, robot, Smoke, war, Weird War Tales
Inspiration for this pastel rendering of a robot in an army helmet comes from Weird War Tales by DC Comics. One can find the original panels drawn in 1982 by Patrick Broderick and John Beatty in Weird War Tales #108, in the Robert Kanigher story “Robots Don’t Have Hearts.”
You can buy Weird War Tales #108 for around $5 to $10 these days, depending on its condition. It remains collectible as an early appearance of the Creature Commandos, another short feature that ran in this issue.
In our gallery below, you can view the cover of this issue and the complete GI Robot story. Enjoy!
12 Tuesday Nov 2013
Posted in art studio
01 Friday Nov 2013
Posted in art studio
Portrait Twelve
Our twelfth pastel portrait came from the same pose as Portrait Nine, but with a much softer treatment. Toned tan paper has served as the background for most of our drawings since July. Here, we used instead the white surface of the interior cover of the notebook. It made the skin tones and the blended pinks and blues much brighter, almost glowing.
28 Monday Oct 2013
Posted in art studio
Pastel Planets Two.
The photo reference for this came from an old episode of Star Trek – probably The Cage, but don’t quote us on that. We grabbed a screen shot of a frame with a painted background. Someone painted sleek towering buildings of the future below a sky with one glorious, ringed planet. Thank you, anonymous set design person of the 1960s! You taught us how to add depth by including a shadow of the rings on the planet’s surface.
28 Monday Oct 2013
Posted in art studio
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Pastel Portrait Ten.
Fear nothing. You might not find that in any drawing tutorial, but it lies at the heart of our approach to these pastel drawings.
We struggled with pen for many years. Ink makes demands for perfection. You can’t massage ink into the right place. You can’t undraw the mistake.
But with pastels – especially these new oil pastels we’re trying – you can reshape reality at will.
When you know a mistake isn’t going to wreck anything, you can draw with absolute confidence. Be bold. Coax the shapes into existence, painting your subject with color and light. If you get it wrong, blend in the right color, then redefine the shapes with light and shadow.
Bob Ross talked about this absolute confidence. On his canvases, he said, he could move mountains and redirect rivers. He could build and destroy. He could make it anything he wanted.
So can you.
28 Monday Oct 2013
Posted in art studio
10 Tuesday Sep 2013
Posted in art studio
Tags
Notes: This is mixed media: layers of pen, pastel, charcoal, sharpie, pastel splattered with water, acrylic paint, and Rustoleum spray sealant. All on paper. We just built it up from a sketch layer by layer. And, it has some scraps from the dictionary. One is Hilbert’s dictionary entry, and the other is the entry for “dimension.”
Our friend Dan called in response to some synchronicity-laden package he received from Martian HQ this week. We ended up talking for hours about mathematician David Hilbert and some of his influential theories about dimensions of space and time. Hilbert appears in a wonderful mathematics book we got for pennies at the junior college library. Published by Time Inc as part of the Time Life Books series, Life Sciences Library, Mathematics really puts the subject in perspective. It’s loaded with pictures and fascinating pieces of history. It even explains the basic idea of calculus in plain terms. You don’t need to “know math” to develop an appreciation of it from this book.
Below you will see page 174, with the drawing of David Hilbert we used as a reference. The credits in the back say Don Miller drew it, but we have zero further information on Don. We really dig his line style though, the attention to detail he gives the hair, and shadows. This style of illustration has always appealed to us.
You can find Mathematics used on Amazon. It came out in some later editions, perhaps, but here is a link to the 1963 edition we have.
06 Friday Sep 2013
Posted in art studio
Tags
1934, art, Barney Oldfield, chicago daily news, drawing, hell driver, pastel, portrait
Our photo reference comes from the 1934 Chicago Daily News we’ve been mining for inspiration this summer.
Meet Barney Oldfield – HELL DRIVER!!!
Our art teacher comments that we made him into a comic book villain or vintage gangster. We did. Barney was probably a decent chap. But, don’t you see something sinister about that cigar and his general expression? The way he’s leaning forward into your space just a little? Like maybe he’s a hell driver because he’s f$#%ing wasted on cheap Scotch all the time? Like maybe he leers at your wife as he loads the kids into the car for a hell ride? Imagine Barney hell driving to the horse races regularly. Maybe he has deep gambling debts to shady underworld figures which have sent him into hiding “on the road” as a transient hell driver.
Who knows? But it goes a long way in explaining why our portrait isn’t very flattering. We imagined all this backstory for Barney as we drew. It made him come out far more sinister than he probably really was. Something stood out, though, that one could use for entirely different inspirational themes: the eye of Horus. If you look at Barney’s left eye in the original photo – the right side of the page, from our POV – the shadows form a shape similar to the classic Egyptian symbol of the eye of Horus. Perhaps Barney wasn’t a hard-drinking gambling man leering at your wife. Maybe he was the incarnation of an Egyptian deity!
UPDATE: Barney isn’t as entirely obscure as we believed. He was in the Tuscaloosa News Feb 28, 1935. An ad shows he appears in two “thrilling educational interesting” motion pictures: “Hell Drivers” and “Four of a Kind.” The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) has preserved a photograph of the racetrack at the Century of Progress International Exposition, along with details about Barney and his fellow drivers. Barney Oldfield also earns a mention as “world famous racecar driver and Chrysler spokesman” in a 2004 article about Ethel Miller. Ethel had the first Plymouth car ever built, and the article tells an interesting story about a publicity event where she would swap that Plymouth for the millionth one.
All of which is fascinating. But, if you really want to get to know Barney Oldfield, enjoy Who the Hell Do You Think You Are – Barney Oldfield? at the JCS Group website, which contains a treasure trove of racing articles. According to that article, he would have been retired from professional racing and setting speed records (including a breath-taking 131.7 mph in 1910), and it was perhaps a less than happy time in his life. The article says he drank too much and lost his job barnstorming at county fairs. His trademark cigar in our reference photo turns out to be something he clenched in his teeth to buffer the vibrations of the car and engine so he wouldn’t chip them.
Sounds like a pretty rowdy guy. Barney, glad to have met you! If we hadn’t ordered the Sinclair dinosaurs newspaper on eBay and the seller hadn’t randomly stuck newspapers in with your picture on them, we would have never known. Rock on, Hell Driver!
05 Thursday Sep 2013
Posted in art studio
05 Thursday Sep 2013
Posted in art studio
03 Tuesday Sep 2013
Posted in art studio
Pastel Lion
Pastel and ink on toned tan paper.
Our model lion is 79 years old now. We used his picture from the 1934 Chicago Daily News, shown below. Jimmy, they called him.
“Jimmy” got ruined by over-aggressive spraying of sealant, so we reworked him. We kind of like the second version better, below.
03 Tuesday Sep 2013
Posted in art studio
Pastel Werewolf
Pastel and ink on toned tan paper.
Not just any werewolf: Man-Wolf! We modeled our werewolf after a panel by George Perez in Creatures on the Loose #36 featuring Man-Wolf. Drawn in 1975, it represents some of Perez’s first published work at Marvel. About this time he was working on Avengers, outgrowing his role as an artist’s assistant to become a regularly published artist.
02 Monday Sep 2013
Posted in art studio
29 Thursday Aug 2013
Posted in art studio
You learn something new every day. They forgot to mention that some of the stuff you learn really sucks. Today we learned that white paper causes the scanner light to overpower much of the more delicate shading with our charcoals and pastels. But, it’s nice to know that before you do 100 of them or something. This portrait used a friend’s baby photo as a reference.
Check this out. You may know we’ve been frustrated with spray varnish, the way it makes our pastels and charcoal drawings look different once it’s applied. That was the spray varnish from the craft store, so we took a look around the hardware store instead. Where men go to make art and be men, etc. We thought polyurethane might work, but the guy at the paint counter suggested this Rustoleum product, shown below. At about half the price, it also gives us better results. It requires an optimum spraying technique. Spray too close and it soaks into the paper, leaving a darker area. Spray too far and it seems to dry in the air, covering the paper with a layer of grit. Spraying too fast or too slowly yields similar results.
22 Thursday Aug 2013
Posted in art studio
The Lightning Rod Salesman.
Pastel on toned tan paper.
It’s no secret Ray Bradbury made a huge impression on me and brought me hours of enjoyment with his stories. In the beginning of Something Wicked This Way Comes, a man selling lightning rods comes to town. He warns some boys, the protagonists, of an approaching storm. In Bradbury’s novel, he is friendly and entirely human – albeit a bit odd. It’s only his ominous warning about the storm that lends an air of creepiness to the scene.
This fanciful pastel rendering of him revisits one of my old Sculpey creations. Unlike the demons of 1998, he seems off-beat but not unfriendly. Maybe it’s the dreadlocks. Created in 2002 in Las Vegas, he incorporates several metal objects, pebbles, and glass found on desert excursions.
A big chunk of Ray Bradbury stories that appeared in EC Comics are available in the Ray Bradbury archives and EC Comics archives. Enjoy!
22 Thursday Aug 2013
Posted in art studio
Pastel Hellhound
Pastle and ink on toned tan paper.
Cerberus: the mythological hell hound guarding the gates to the underworld. Usually he appears with three heads. Hercules had to get past the hell hound on one of his heroic missions.
Our pastel version revisits one of our old Sculpey figures. Sculpey is a synthetic modeling clay you can bake in a regular oven instead of a standard kiln. Hippie chicks like to make beads out of it. We made some motherfucking demons. They had bits of scrap metal in them, usually from old electronics, nails, and wire. Sometimes just things we’d find on the ground. The metal not only acted as a skeleton for the Sculpey but also gave them features like spines, spikes, and claws.
We stopped using Sculpey as a medium because, well, it just doesnt seem wise to bake your food in an oven that smells like cooked plastic. Maybe if we had two ovens! Our small collection of Sculpey figures is long gone, but they had good lives. Here’s little Cerberus on display at a group exhibit at the Dreamland Theater gallery in Ypsilanti, MI, 2002. He wasn’t very big, maybe half a foot tall, the size of a hefty action figure. A scan of a print of a scan of a print of a crappy photo, it still makes a decent reference for drawing.
Mars Will Send No More 