condenstion

totally not a word. 

but what i've been doing (more) of is condensing. i've put the novel on hold. and i'm going to get to a stopping point with the illustrated book. i'm considering still moving forward with the illustrated one, but i need to make more room for painting. i think i actually need to wipe everything out that isn't painting. i just feel like it's what i need to do, like i'm ordained or smth. and i'm all about the gut, following the instinct. and i'm afraid, lol. like if i don't follow it, that i'm going to be guaranteed to fail. i've had this problem for years, multiple interests and nothing getting done. a little work here, leave it alone, work on smth, come back to it, etcetcetc i gotta concentrate. 

here's a link to my deviant page:

http://jt-hendrix.deviantart.com/

Fine-tune Sketching

Catching up has been hard to do! Not too hard, just challenging, and from the looks of it, lengthy! But maybe this is just how it is, and that's not bad at all. 

I started by doing some sketching.

I just went online to find a figure reference, and one of the first images was this guy there. You can probably find the original picture of him online pretty easily lol. I chose him because he had a good form, but also because he was male. Most figure drawing tends to use female references. I wanted a guy, I wanted to draw a guy who could be sexy too. I felt that it would be a lot more interesting.

The second one is kinda gross, but it's true. I went for whatever was in my head at the time. And I think I had just taken a piss, and this was it. My thoughts about my piss. lol. I think it turned out to be pretty interesting. 

Most of my sketchbook has pretty "finished" sketches. One of the things I'm working on now is to do quick sketches. Ones that take 5minutes or less, of things, without much additional detail. It's totally stuff I've done before, but now my approach has become more focused and concentrated because the way I've set it up, is to go into each piece with very many studies and to sketch daily along the way in hopes of tuning my existing skills further, and in hopes of learning and applying new techniques. 

So, I have a painting that I've had in mind for a while. The way I'm going about it is to sketch the painting, in different compositions quite a few times. So from this, composition comes up, so I do some quick-refreshing on composition. YouTube videos, articles and practices. 

Then I take each component and do studies on it, with pencil and or with pen. And then I take that study and then paint it. Through these practices I think about the things that go towards this thing that I'm studying. Color theory? Shading? Perspective? Things like that. Then I go and study a little bit about the things involved, and then I go back to making small bits of progress towards the final painting. 

My weakness is speed. And dedication. I find that days can go by in between painting sessions. Painting is my primary focus, but right now other things, literary things, are being finalized, and once those things are finalized and get to being sent out, I'll be able to free up more space for painting every night. Hmm. Sounds like an excuse. lol

I'll talk more about those "literary things" in the next posting, along with a few more pictures from my sketchbook.