I’ve been making some monster images lately. Here is another image in the Batcat series. It’s done in watercolor and ink, and measures about 5 by 7 inches, on watercolor paper. I drew this on Strathmore greeting card stock
This one is more of a Cthulhu cat, related to the Batcathulhu I created earlier. This iteration, like many of my pieces, came from a doodle. I was sketching more images based on my original Batcat, and wanted to change the look a little. Rather than it having tentacles in place of legs, I opted to have the tentacles as part of his head, much like the classic depictions of Cthulhu.
It’s been a long time since I posted anything on this blog. I’ve been involved with a lot of things since the last post, but just never got around to getting it online. Blogging is not one of my strong points. I intend to post a bit more. I’ve read that artists should blog more. People like to hear what we have to say, as well as what we create.
I have been making art using myself as a model for the last decade or so. I’ve created pieces in acrylic, oil, pastel and color pencil, on various substrates in various sizes. Here is the latest that I made. It’s a small piece, about 5 by 7 inches. I have a lot of this paper that I got some decades ago, when still in art school. Someone contacted our art teacher and said we could have all he had. I don’t know where he got it, but thought donating it to an art class was a good idea. I’m glad he did. I use it periodically to create drawings of various sizes.
This is a fairly quick study that made sometime last summer, I believe. I had taken a few selfies while I was sitting at my desk/work area. There’s window on the north wall, which is behind me as I work on my computer, or to the left of my drawing table. I like the way the light was hitting the side of my face in the original images. I chose this one because it’s a sort of three quarter facial view, and I liked the skeptical look I had. I used minimal marks to indicate facial features, as they are mostly in shadow.
I’ve been playing around with creating art digitally on a computer. I created some digital art years ago, and felt the urge to do some more. I liked the immediacy of the mark making, and the worry-free and unlimited ‘erasures that working on a computer provides’. I use the computer as another tool when I create art in traditional media, for layout or experimenting with color. One of my most grueling hinderances is that I don’t like to waste materials. I don’t want to ruin a surface by not making “just the right mark”. With a computer, I don’t have to waste pencil or paper, or paint and canvas. I can just erase any mark I don’t like and am free to experiment.
This is a piece I’m working on that I’m in the process of developing in digital format using Adobe Photoshop and a Wacom tablet and pen. It is inspired by an image of actor in fantasy tv series that I saw online. I created a pencil drawing based on that image, then scanned it to upload it to a computer. I flipped the image horizontally, because I felt it looked better in that position.
I’ve suggested form by adding values of gray. I like it at this stage, and can be considered a finished piece, but will continue to work on it and finalize it in color. One of the benefits of doing this digitally, is that I can output the art at any stage if I choose to, and changes can be saved to be used later. I can also change the layout, size or position of the figure, or anything on the canvas. I’ll post later on when I get to a more finished phase.
