People Watching

James Gurney has a great series of posts about plein-air painting going on his blog, Gurney Journey. The more popular posts deal with the people who come up to you while you're drawing in public.

Image credit: James Gurney

Curious Spectators Part 1: The Problem
Top Ten Ways to Deal with Curious Spectators

I'm always friendly, but I'll admit, I really hate people watching me draw or paint. My least favorite experience was with a 12-year-old girl who made me reconsider my condemnation of violence against children. Watercolors apparently come really easy to her and she made it her life's duty - for a full half hour! - to tell me how to mix my paints. There was also a guy who complemented me on the houses in my painting. There were no houses in the painting.

Aside from these two encounters, everyone who's ever come up to me has been overwhelmingly thoughtful and respectful. But it just takes me out of the zone completely when I know someone's watching. And I have to admit that the question "Are you painting?" is hilarious the first time and less hilarious the next 300 times.

Someone responded to the post with this quote which I decided I'd share. I think it sums me up better than any other quote I've ever heard.

© Gina Florio 2014

Self Portrait, Helen Chen style

I Helen Chen'd myself.

I've wanted a cartoon self-portrait to put in my Blogger profile for a while now. After I read Muddy Colors' recent post on Mingjue Helen Chen, I fell in love with her style and decided to try illustrating myself in that way. Ultimately it's not a style I'll be keeping (mostly because it's not mine to begin with!), but it was a great exercise in texture and I definitely think I will be adding more texture to future paintings.

Read the Muddy Colors post, Mingjue & Me, for insight as well as a real-time video of her process (I LOVE real-time videos!), and check out her blog for some truly great art. She also put up a post with links to the brushes she uses. I know it's not the brush that makes the artist, but as someone still building and experimenting with their Photoshop brush library, these helped me a lot - they handle very nicely.

Here's my favorite recent piece of hers - I love the idea of reinterpreting comic book costumes into casual outfits! Anything that appeals to my fangirl side and my "omg, clothes" side is a win in my book.

© Gina Florio 2014

Studies, Still Lifes, and Semester Review

How to pluralize "Still Life"... Still lives? Still lifes? Livfeszzs?!? I'm gonna go with the second one since the first sounds like I'm proclaiming the status of a dying monarch.

Here's some of my work from the tail end of Digital Painting class.

In-class exercise - costumed model

In-class exercise - still life with different colored lights

Homework still life.

I call this piece "I'm never painting a football helmet again"

I had my FINAL class session this week! So sad. I owe a big thanks to all of my teachers, Jason Scheier, Toby Shelton, and Louie del Carmen for giving me such great feedback and guidance, and also to all of my classmates for helping me to learn and grow as well.

From start to finish, I think I have had 12 weeks total off of work to concentrate on art. (I go back to reality TV editing work full-time next Wednesday, although right now it's only for a month-long gig.) I started this 'semester' very unsure about what I was doing, worried that I was wasting time and money, still very insecure about my own skills, but the way I feel finishing out these classes is almost completely the opposite. I feel like I've broken through some huge artistic and personal barriers. I know I'm not making great art yet, but I feel... on the verge. Like I've just got to keep pushing and grinding and learning and it'll happen. I don't beat myself up for my shortcomings anymore. I just push on. I've come so far that there's really nothing else to do but move forward and make more art.

When I originally started the semester, I was thinking I'd attempt to break into storyboarding, but after having had two storyboard-centric classes and one more design-centric class, I've discovered my real passion lies in concept design for characters, props and environments. I don't know why I wasn't aiming for this from the start - I guess I just figured it'd be too hard or I wasn't good enough - but it truly is what I love. I love thinking about the different types of plant in a particular environment. I love swapping out noses on a face. And I plan to do a lot more of it from here on out. 

In my final review for Digital Painting class, Jason said that I clearly understand the mechanics of drawing and painting, but what I need to work on is my design - and he's right. Way back when I first started taking classes, I SO BADLY just wanted to skip ahead and take the character design class first - but I knew I wasn't ready yet. So I took Viscom, and Perspective, and Figure Drawing, etc. etc. I have gotten to a point where I feel like my foundational drawing and painting is on somewhat solid footing. So now! On to educating myself about design.

I'm in the process of putting together a portfolio (which you can see the beginning makings of on the new tab above, My Work), but will need to create a lot more concept-design-centric art in order to do it (as opposed to filling it with still lifes and Viscom sketches). I'll continue to post stuff here as I do! For anyone reading who is also putting together a concept art portfolio, I've gotten a TON of great advice from the various internet outpourings of Chris Oatley - 

• Paper Wings Podcast - Ten Steps to a Winning Portfolio Part 1 and Part 2
• 5 Common Pitfalls of Concept Art and Illustration Portfolios
• Is Your Concept Art Portfolio Versatile or Just Confusing?

- Just to name a few! Good luck to us all...

© Gina Florio 2014

Material Spheres

Whoops - forgot to post this! Material Spheres for Intro to Digital Painting class. Apparently this is generally regarded as a tedious assignment in art schools, but I actually really loved doing it. Painting is fun, you guys.

Classes are almost done now - I wrapped up Intro to Story Development and Figure Invention class this past week, and I only have one more session left of Digital Painting next Monday! It's gone so fast...

© Gina Florio 2014

Treehouse Magic

No April Fools' pranks here - just a quick art update!

Here's a digital painting I did a few weeks ago. (You may also recognize it from the new banner at the top of the blog.)

I know this isn't the best painting in the world, but when I finished it, I felt a great sense of accomplishment. It was almost exactly two years ago when I saw some random guy's blog post with a digital painting he'd done and said to myself, "I have to learn how to do that." It wasn't like one of those offhand thoughts you have when you look at a singer or a dancer and think "Wow, I wish I could do that..." It was a life-changing shift in my mindset and goals: I must learn this.

Of course, the farther I come, the more I realize how far I have to go, as is always the case with learning any craft. But I let myself feel good about it for an hour or two.

Here's my Digital Painting teacher's paintover.

This might be sacrilege to say, but I actually don't like one thing about it - the change of the light from within the cabin from purple to red. I really liked the contrast of the purple light to the green forest. But the composition is obviously much stronger, and the other changes to color and light are spot on. Much to learn still...

© Gina Florio 2014

NoHo Park - digital plein air

I've always liked North Hollywood park - it has lots of huge old trees and nice big swaths of green grass. I used to run there when I lived up in NoHo in my first apartment in L.A. This was done for week four of Digital Painting class, in which we were asked to do a digital painting of a landscape from observation. It's also my first painting done entirely in color from start to finish.

Process shots:

© Gina Florio 2014

Digital Painting work so far

Here's what I've been up to for my Intro to Digital Painting class with Jason Scheier!

We started out with some basic-shapes-from-observation-in-grayscale paintings... like ya do.

Then we moved on to a greyscale master study. The original is by Anders Zorn. I fell in love with it while creating my copy; it's a beautiful piece.

For our third assignment we did a master study in color from Mian Situ's "Chinatown Delivery". I wasn't feeling so confident in color yet, so I started in greyscale and then added color later using a layer on the 'color' blending mode. I saved some process shots from this one.

Overall I've really been enjoying and learning a lot from this class. I wasn't unfamiliar with Photoshop, I've used it to create art and even a few paintings before, but I haven't had an opportunity  - or a reason - to learn it this well until now. I have to say, I enjoy it more than traditional oil painting, for the sole reason that it's an extremely forgiving medium for a beginner. Also it doesn't involve 40 minutes plus of setup and breakdown (which went to waste all too often when I would make a single bad stroke that I couldn't undo). And thus I'm more motivated to sit down and, you know, actually make art than I was during my landscape painting class. Whatever gets me to do that is OK in my book.

© Gina Florio 2014

Daily Sketches Weeks 28-35

Really quick post since I am currently in New Jersey on phase one of my epic 2013 trip!

July 6 - unfinished painting from week 6 of class, on the CalTech campus

July 9

July 11 - sketches from The Drawing Club

July 11 - more

July 12 - coffeeshop sketches

July 13 - unfinished painting from week 7 of class

July 21 - Thadd and Jack passed out on the train back from Comic-Con

July 22 - very frustrated this night.

July 23 - this is an example of what I do on the days where I don't document what I drew. Mostly viscom exercises and head/form practices. Boring!

July 24 - more viscom exercises and a concept sketch for a painting I want to try...

July 27 - my favorite painting from class, week 8, at El Matador State Beach

July 31 - eyes

Aug 3 - unfinished painting from week 9 of class, Eaton Canyon

Aug 10 - unfinished painting from the last week of class, at the Getty

Aug 11 - getting ready for the trip by sketching some PARIS!!

Aug 14 - a house in Amsterdam, from a photo by my cousin Kelly

Aug 15 - completed house

Aug 21 - this took a while! watercolor of some houses in Florence, also from a Kelly photo

Aug 23 - just doodling

Aug 25 - starting a picture of Neuschwanstein, which we will be visiting at the end of September

Aug 28 - Neuschwanstein almost finished... when I dropped a big drop of ink right in the middle of the castle. Oh well..

**it seems like some of these are really pixellated for some reason, so I'll try to fix that when I get home...

Okay! That's it from me for a little while! I've got a Comic-Con recap post scheduled to go up while I'm gone, but other than that, I won't post here until after we get back, at the end of September. Hopefully I'll have lots of awesome Europe-y sketches and paintings for you!

Until then, keep calm, carry on, and MAKE ART.

© Gina Florio 2013

Daily Sketches Weeks 23-27 - Landscape Painting class

So this semester at Concept Design Academy I tried and failed to get into Environment Sketching with Ed Li (I was about 10 minutes too late to the signup website and it sold out). In a last-minute panic I signed up for Landscape Painting with Leighton Hickman instead. I have never painted in oils before, and I've NEVER painted outside. I was very nervous, and rightly so, because boy have I churned out some stinkers. BUT I actually think it was a blessing in disguise, for reasons I will go into later...

The teacher, Leighton, is a visual development artist at Dreamworks. This is one of his paintings that he had laid out on the first day for us to look at. Isn't this an amazing painting?

 The man himself, painting at our first location. You can see his subject right to the left of his head there.

For this class I bought a pochade box (this one, in fact), which attaches to a tripod for plein air painting. I also bought water-soluble oil paints so that I didn't have to deal with turpentine (I use gamsol for thinning and cleaning).

We started off painting in 5 values, using only titanium white and burnt umber.

June 5 - Week 1 homework. My first outdoor painting, in my neighborhood. Wooooof.

June 8 - Week 2 in-class painting. Double woof.

June 9 - Week 2 homework. Cheated a little and painted indoors this week. But it was my first painting that actually looked like what it was supposed to look like.

June 15 - Week 3 in-class painting. Even *I* don't know what it's supposed to be, and I painted it.

June 16 - Week 3 homework. The view from the top of my building.

At this point in time I was feeling very frustrated with the class and unsure of why I'd even tried. Everyone calls oils a "forgiving medium," but I will debunk that for you right here and now. Oils are extremely expensive, messy, and difficult to get used to. You try to use too little and it won't even take up 1/3000th of the canvas. Then you try to mix more and you can't mix exactly that same shade again. The paint glops up on your brush and you try to put some on the canvas and it ends up taking previously laid down paint OFF the canvas instead and you are just like "Paint, WTF, why you gotta hate."

HOWEVER - I got some unexpected time off that week and was able to go out for a second homework session, which I think of as my first successful painting session. With the whole day ahead of me, I was able to slow down, find a spot I liked, and take my time, and I think that made all the difference.

June 21 - semi-success at Griffith Park.

photo of my subject

A second painting to use up the rest of my paint. Not as successful but still not terrible.

Photo of subject #2. I'd love to tackle this again actually, I love the composition.

In week 4 of class, we started color!

June 22 - Week 4 in-class painting. Same palm I drew back in Viscom 1 class last October.

Our homework that week was to do a master copy - not worrying too much about the style or brushstrokes, just trying to match the colors. I decided to do this painting by Edgar Payne. (What a beautiful painting, don't you think?)

I tried to knock this out one night after work - painting under a plain old yellow lightbulb instead of a daylight-temperature lamp. See for yourself (this is what it looked like in the morning under natural light).

June 24 - COMPLETELY off colors.

In the hour and a half I had before work, I kicked it into high gear and tried to fix the colors. Leighton pointed out that the bottom half of the cliff is way too high in value, and he's right - I definitely got tunnel vision on the cliff and heightened all the color and value variations in my head. I've had trouble so far juggling both value AND color in my paintings.

June 25

Last week we were at Vasquez Rocks, in 100˚ heat, with no shade in sight. I had to leave about 2/3 of the way through class because I felt really faint. So I mostly worked off of a photo for this painting.

July 5 - Week 5 in-class painting AND homework.

photo from Vasquez

We're halfway through the ten-week class now, and I have to say, as frustrated as I was at first, I'm really happy with my progress. I still don't feel totally comfortable in oils, and it's CRAZY annoying to lug all my painting supplies all over Los Angeles and stand out in the summer heat, getting all sweaty and squinting at my subject and squinting at my palette and wondering what I'm doing wrong. I don't think I'll do too much landscape painting after I'm done with the class, or really much oil painting at all. I hate setting up, AND cleaning up. It really makes me appreciate the ease of a pencil and paper, or digital painting. And I think I have more of a mind for drawing than for painting. They're definitely two different things.

But BECAUSE of all that, this class has pushed me SO far outside my comfort zone that I think I've made new strides as an artist. Painting outside forces you to stop and really LOOK at what you're trying to paint and really THINK about how to accomplish that with paint and a brush. This has sunk in to the point where I'm starting to approach all of my art this way - not just paintings. And as a result, I think my two most recent pen-and-marker sketches have come out better, and more painterly. See for yourself.

June 11

June 20

I think I've already mentioned this, but just in case, if you'd like to keep up with my daily sketches on a more, y'know, DAILY basis, you can follow me on instagram, where I post everything that eventually goes on this blog. You may get some wayward non-art-related posts, but for the most part, it's all sketches and paintings.

WHOOF - that's all for now. I'll try not to have it be so long before my next Daily Sketches post. In the meantime though I've got tons of potential entries lined up in my "Stuff to Blog About" folder! So stay tuned...

© Gina Florio 2013