Daily Sketches Weeks 15-22

Are you guys ready for this?? It's been three whole months since my last one so I just want to make sure you're prepared.

That's right... it's a DAILY SKETCHES POST!!

Well, sort of. You will note that some days are missing. Many days, in fact. Life's been crazy busy for the past few months. Dave and I called June "pile it on month." (Now we're behind on everything, so July is "get our shit together month.") So, although I have no proof, I HAVE been drawing every day... it's just that some days, I only have enough time to scribble some random faces on a post-it note, or even just to do my circles-and-lines exercises from Viscom 1 class. So sometimes, my "daily sketch" isn't really worthy of a photo, and more often than not of late. But there has still been a lot of art in my life this year, and I've been continuing to learn and grow as an artist and as a person, and for that, I'm very happy.

Apr 7

Apr 8

Apr 9 - experimenting with digital painting

Apr 10 - Dave videogaming in funny positions

Apr 11

Apr 12 - The vision of this robot in a snowy wasteland was so clear in my head, then I tried to put him on paper and it all fell apart.

Apr 13 - completed dapper hippo digital painting

Apr 14 - more life studies

Apr 15 - Dave in WoNkY PeRSpeEctIve wOrlD

Apr 17 - the start of post-it-note faces

Apr 25 - more photoshop experiments

Apr 26

Apr 29

Apr 30 - studies from the Proko YouTube channel

May 1

May 2

May 3

May 5

May 7 - doodle in my mom's mother's day card

May 11 - watercolor practice on a hazy California day

May 19 - more watercolor practice

May 24 - airport sketching

May 29

May 30 - messing around with my oil paints for the first time

June 1 - more airport sketches

June 2 - an EDIBLE daily sketch.

June 2 - I am such a fantastic icing artist that I needed to add a caption so people could tell what it was.

June 4 - my brother's graduation ceremony.

There's so much to catch up on that I'm actually going to break this up into two posts - everything you've seen has been all before I started my Landscape Painting class. Next post will have some landscape paintings in it, as well as details on the class!

© Gina Florio 2013

Daily Sketches - Week 7

Had some time to branch out a little last week and experiment more with my watercolors.

Feb 11

Feb 12 - this is a building on my street that I've always liked for its interesting look

I've wanted to paint the cul-de-sac at the end of my road for a long time, because it's always a welcome sight to me - it means I'm finally home (usually after a long day of work). I photographed it when the sun was starting to set and the light was really interesting, and worked from that. I also decided to take pictures of my process. Please note that my level of knowledge about watercolor and painting in general is basically at 0. And please feel free to give pointers. I would love that actually.

This is my watercolor set. There are 24 colors, and I was originally using most of them, but then read that it's better to use less colors, and to always mix your greens from blues and yellows instead of using green paint. The test swatches on the paper with the dots below them are the ones I've been restricting myself to. And yes, I paint right in front of my computer, it's pretty bad. I wish I had the space for a separate traditional art desk.

I've been reading a lot about color and light and I knew that I wanted there to be a separation between the "warm" parts of the picture (everything the light was touching) and the "cool" parts (stuff in shadow). I decided to try to accomplish this by using a yellow underpainting in the warm sections and a blue underpainting in the cool sections, since watercolor is transparent and hence good for layering.

The painting with more or less all of the shapes blocked in, I had also started to do some shadows on the trees in back.

The final product.

I am happy with the way this came out - or maybe I should say, I'm happy with what I learned by trying it - but it definitely could be better. The colors need work - I don't think I achieved the high contrast between warm and cool that I was going for - but I think my real problem here is with value. In the original photograph, the stuff in shadow is noticeably WAY darker than the stuff in light, and that's not true in the painting. Everything's very midtone. I think it was Ty Carter (who has done a lot of great posts lately on color & light) who said, "Your paintings can work without color but not without value... if your values are off, everything is off." It's hard to get dark darks in watercolor though! I'm always afraid of going too dark at first because there's no way to fix it like there would be with a non-transparent medium like oils. But then I end up with a painting like this with no contrast. So it goes. Learning...

Feb 14 - trying a black and white watercolor to improve my values.

Feb 15 - I like turtles.

Extra for Feb 15.

Feb 16 - visited the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the LACMA and decided to attempt a still from The Shining with markers.

Feb 17 - monkies, which were much harder than expected.

I also made a few improvements to my desk this past week (most notably, my new clamp-on swiveling daylight-color-temperature lamp/magnifying glass which I'm in love with) and decided to take a couple pictures of my setup. The desk itself is actually an Ikea countertop, which I bought legs for & attached. I usually just push my keyboard and Wacom tablet back and draw or paint in that space. (My desktop background is by the amazing Khang Le.)

Eventually I'd love to move the printer somewhere else and put an angled tabletop drawing board in that area.

A reminder pinned to my bulletin board.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, an exciting bit of news - Dave and I and some friends FINALLY got tickets for the San Diego Comic-Con this year (the big one). I have been wanting to go for years now, we've even tried for tickets the past couple of years, but never gotten through. I know, I know, it's all big and commercial now, and it'll be super overwhelming, and there will be too many people, and we'll spend most of our time waiting in line, and our hotel was ridiculously priced and will probably suck... but I'm excited anyway. I would feel bad calling myself a nerd if I didn't go at least once. And hopefully I'll get to meet and buy prints from many of the artists I follow there.

Happy President's Day to everyone - I hope everyone has the day off (unlike myself... but I can't complain! It's good to have work).

Daily Sketches Weeks 4-6 and other stories

Let's dive right in, shall we?

Jan 21

Jan 22

Jan 23 - doodled during perspective class (no disrespect to the great Gary Meyer)

Jan 24

Jan 25 - trying to be more gestural

Jan 26

Jan 27 - just... ugh. The one good thing I can think to say about this is that it was an accurate representation of how tired I was at the time (drawing ability included).

I would like to state for the record that I am aware that a lot of these are, how do you say... bad. Shitty. Not worthy of the internet. But part of my daily sketch resolution is to post them all here (and on my Instagram)... for better or for worse. On the one hand, it feels like I'm humiliating myself every other day, which is a bad feeling... but on the other, the fact that I know my friends and family are seeing them every day makes me push myself to do better sketches.

Jan 28 - looks like perspective HW but isn't. A quick visual from my drive up to Art Center College of Design that day

 

Jan 29 - actual perspective HW (draw your room) in process

Jan 30 - completed perspective HW. This is Dave's and my office / guest bedroom / retro videogame area.

Jan 31 - super quick celebration of drawing every day for a month.

Unfortunately sometimes I just don't have the time to make great ones (or even good ones). Editing TV is a standard 10-hour day (10am-8pm). I run in the mornings before work and Dave and I cook most nights after work. And after that it's basically time for bed, rinse and repeat. Plus all the regular life stuff you deal with - grocery shopping, emails, friends. Weekends get crazy with errands and social engagements. Sometimes I try to draw at lunch at work, but I worry about that being company time. If I have time in the mornings post-shower I'll draw then. But generally it's 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there. I want to stress, I'm not complaining. I'm lucky to have a job I enjoy that gives me enough money to attend my art classes and buy my supplies. But time is valuable too. I listened to an audiobook of Bobby Chiu's "The Perfect Bait" over the winter break, and he stressed the need to MAKE time if you want to get better. So that's what I've been doing.

Feb 1 - practicing from classic movie still frames

Feb 2 - perspective HW #2 (draw an accurately proportioned building given only the measurements)

Feb 3 - puppy bowl recap, no photo reference

Feb 4 - puppy bowl recap, using photo reference like a good non-lazy artist

Feb 5 - This was after about a 14-hour day. Literally got nuthin.

 

Feb 6 - more classic movie practice

Feb  7

Feb 8 - getting back to my VisCom roots with some fluffy bunnies

Feb 9 - continuing the cute animals kick

Feb 10 - Completed perspective HW #4 - draw a building in 2-pt perspective given a plan (overhead) and elevation (front) view.

SO anyway - all of that was just a roundabout way of saying, when you see a shitty daily sketch - it was probably a really long day but I carved out 10 minutes somewhere to make SOMEthing.

In other news - I am now 4 weeks into my perspective class at 3kicks with Gary Meyer, who also teaches at Art Center College of Design. He's 78 years old and has a great sense of humor (this picture is a pretty accurate representation of his personality). He does go EXTREMELY fast though and it's a bit of a struggle to keep up. I'll try to gather my learnings into a post for everyone - but to be honest, many of the lessons / assignments haven't been terribly practical. However, even though the subject matter can be pretty dry, it's been helping me a LOT, I can already feel it affecting me when I'm drawing. I've started to keep the general 3-D-ness of a drawing in mind, finding the vanishing points - setting an object or a scene in space instead of just doodling flat with no background/context. (I've also noticed that almost all of the sketches I do from imagination are in 1-point perspective. What's up with that?)

Finally, I just wanted to draw your attention to some new areas of the blog - I now have a Favorite Artists page just to keep track of the great artists who influence me and examples of their work (I would like to update this sometime with links to all their personal websites soon). I also have an instagram feed on the right under my profile. I would love to make a header/banner soon too - but I feel intense pressure to make it AWESOME since it's the first thing people will see when they visit. Any suggestions?