Filed under: Art, Drawing, Illustration, Sketch | Tags: pencil, portrait, Sketch
This will be the last post for my blog at this location.
The new blog is surprise surprise guthriewatson.wordpress.com. I know I can tell your all shocked!
Anyway here’s a quick sketch that I’m going to us as a basis for a digitally painted portrait of the late Lux Interior. It’s a composite of about fifty photo’s and my memories of the pasty white boy rocker!
Before and after shots of my flat mate’s photo post card, a bit off topic but I am quite proud that I have managed to restore this image to the extent that I have.
Still some things to consider but it’s very close now!
Tried out a number of techniques but it does come down to just methodically going at it with the clone and healing brush for a lot of it. There is some creative use of dodging, burning and a smidge of the sharpening tool.
Filed under: Art, Drawing, Sketch | Tags: lux interior, pencil, portrait, sketchbook
Lux Interior (The Cramps) sketch for facial features
Sadly Lux Interior, the singer for the Cramps and an inspiration in my younger years, passed away in February. I’ve decided that a good tribute would be to do a painted illustration.
Lux and the Cramps draw upon trash horror, rockerbilly and Vegas glitz as their visual hallmarks entering the seventies punk scene with a raw and unique sound.
Lux is the perfect character study for me and looks much like my Funeral Director with a long pale face, often dressed in black, although no Victorian would’ve heard of PVC!
I’ve collected a bunch of photo’s and have been copying them to try and get into his look before coming up with my own composition for the piece. Initially I thought Lux on a thrown as the king of Psychobilly with ghouls as his subjects but on reflection a more staged piece with him crawling or screaming mic in hand would be better. Something with the movement and energy of his live performances!
This sketch was one of the more successful perhaps because it was larger or maybe that the photo was somewhat better. It would have been a dream job to paint an actual portrait while he was still alive!
Filed under: Art, digital art, Painter, painting, Photoshop, Sketch | Tags: black and white, fantasy, monster, science fiction, the ranger, work in progress
Still a work in progress I’ve gone back to black and white to get the values right and fix some of the compositional elements right.
I cropped the piece tighter to give the compositional more impact. The gun still isn’t quite right and the right arm looks a bit odd but I am learning a lot from this experiment.
Painter is great for textures but I’m just not happy with the accuracy of the brushes, they just don’t work Iike I want them to. Overpainting in Photoshop has been brilliant though which is where all the recent work has been done.
Just for a laugh here’s the sketch I did after a few difficult weeks.
I started with the claw hand and the rest just came from there with a little inspiration from the Cramps album artwork and psychotic hill billy rock’n tunes! Go Lux!!
Filed under: Art, Illustration, painting | Tags: acrylic on acrylic pad, in progress
This is my first acrylic painting in many years. In fact in my be the first one since I left school. So not to shabby an effort although the background is still in progress.
So we’ll see how it stands up next week against where other part-timers are at.
I know very much that the background colours need to be more muted and pushed back to create a less flat perspective.
Scan of the painting in progress
I used an acrylic pad at the suggestion of one the crew on the course. It’s not too shabby as a medium for painting having quite a good texture. Here you can see the stage before I started painting in the red curtains. Acrylic paint is very unforgiving but I kind of like that, it forces you to make creative decisions about what your doing. I also found I had to stop to let the piece just sit before charging on.
Acrylic dries quite quickly but not so fast that you don’t get time to consider where to next. I did want it stay wet longer at times so I could work it in a bit more but maybe that’s what oil paint is for!
I will post another version of this once I get it back and fill in the background more completely.
I noticed when I was preparing this piece for print today that the distribution of tone was very even making the image very flat.
This was not my intention so I worked it over in photoshop some more to try and create greater variation in tonality and give it a darker feel.
A photoshop technique I’ve learnt recently worked well. Basically you use the dodge and burn tools – so quite a photographic approach – to darken and highlight your image. I pushed quite extensively at the whole image to give it greater contrast. It’s definitely less flat and a little less friendly, but not really as menacing as I’d like.
Overall I think it’s an improvement as the previous version was a great deal flatter and a bit lifeless for it.
Filed under: Art, painting | Tags: competition, east london, graffiti, marker pen, secret wars
Secret Wars is no your usual graffiti battle and is like watching to comic artists go head to head. So something a little different to report on today but it’s really interesting to me especially the possibilities for my creative practice.
I really think this would be a lot of fun to do and although these are a hybrid graffiti/drawing/painting style some of the other competitors go for almost a straight literal illustrative approach.
Secret Wars is no your usual graffiti battle and is like watching to comic artists go head to head.
Competitors have 90 minutes to complete there piece with black markers, brushes and rollers, many opt for the marker for the battle but on the other wall they were using brushes.
The competition hots up and the ladder is out again in the Secret Wars battle.
In a very close call the winner, whose piece you can see behind him on the right is selected. There are two judges and a crowd choice made by a decibel reader.
