I noticed there aren’t many places for people to talk about art outside of games on here! There’s a great thread for completed art, but I’m not sure if it’s the right place to discuss the process. So, I’m making a thread for that! I would most likely use this for sending WIPs and talking about different mediums I’m interested in. I don’t mind what gets shared here, if you’ve got the urge to talk about art but no thread to put it in, put it here
Working with color can be pretty frustrating for me. I love color and feature a lot of it in my photography, but when I have to create a cohesive palette on canvas I start flailing. I’ve been working on a pastel still life recently and I was stuck for like a week. Emulating colors accurate to my reference photo felt impossible, so I went for a more saturated rendering. The photo I was working off of wasn’t edited at all, and I slowed down trying to translate the colors into a more saturated version of itself. I ended up ignoring the project until I couldn’t anymore.
I felt so silly when I came back and had the epiphany to edit my reference photo similar to what I want to create. Now I’m cruising..kinda. I’m not too familiar with pastels, and the paper I’m using isn’t good for pastels. It stops taking pigment after a few layers, which is really cool I think. I only just considered changing the colors halway through loading the shit out of my paper with pigment. It’s fine!
Here’s my reference and where I last left off, please ignore the stubby boot I did NOT check my proportions
Now that I have a better idea of what I want the final result to look like, it’s pretty fun again. While I was working on the wood/dried plant object with all the holes, I felt like pastels were starting to click. I’m not sure when I’ll be done with it, but currently it’s the only thing I like in the piece so I’ll just keep trying to do that I guess!
I’m going in later today to work some more, a friend from my class left a practically brand-new pastel kit for me to keep. I am very excited to have more than like 12 colors to work with lol
Do any of you use chalk or oil pastels? I can see this being a favorite medium of mine so I would love to hear some IC experiences
I hated oil pastels when I was expected to use them in school lol. I respect anyone who can tolerate media like that that only allow tiny and skinny marks at a time (ok I guess you can put them on their side and shade that way).
I do use a mix of conté and FC pitt pastels when I’m drawing a live model but I dunno if that counts?
I have this curiosity about oil sticks and to a much lesser extent encaustic.
It’s a good thing I live in a time where I can treat painting as a self-indulgent toy. I find even acrylics too slow to dry. Would get so frustrated I’d die if I had to work with oil, like, for real.
Maybe it’s because I would draw really small as a kid but I almost exclusively work in media like you’re describing. I think I just like the control
I’d say both count, I’ve never used the pitt pastels but I assume they’re similar enough, just not as messy (seems nice tbh). I’ve tried conte and it made me certain I’d like pastel lol
Saw the trailer for Peter Greenaway movie The Draughtsman’s Contract and wondering what the name is for the viewfinder device at 0:09 (seen throughout the trailer).
Googled “artist’s viewfinder” and similar terms but all it brings up is these cheap plastic things the size of your hand.
A better alternative to those are camera lucida It’s a prism and mirror that allow you to look down at your drawing surface and it over lays, what is in front of it. Similar to tracing layers in photoshop. It’s a little fiddly and moving your head will shit the image from the page but it’s far better than those kinds of grids. I’m also fairly confident that a laser beam splitter would also work just as good.
I’m of the opinion that it’s generally a fool’s errand to try and replicate a photo anyway. It’s more important that the relationships between the colours/values are accurate, which you ended up doing anyway.
I don’t even work in “real” media much anymore, but I use acrylics and spray paint on props I 3D print and it’s agonizing how long it takes to dry. I just wanna go go go.
Man I used to think acrylics dried too fucking fast to work with. I never bothered with mediums but I did pack a spray bottle I think? But once one of my profs encouraged me to try oils I fell in love with them. They’re so thick and buttery it’s like sculpting as much as straight painting. I haven’t been able to touch them in a long time but I have space to actually set myself up for painting again. I should really seriously think about what that would take/look like.
Lately I’ve mostly been printmaking, by hand, and more recently I learned how to use a press and have gotten into typography.
A big moment for me was when I bit the bullet and bought some fancy oil based ink to start printing with. My prints have lots of overlapping bits and huge blocks of ink, they have a lot of texture there, and I vastly prefer how the more expensive ink looks. Unfortunately, it literally takes weeks to compeltely dry.
Now I’ve got a tab open for the NeoLucida. I love this part of the website description: *As someone who likes to draw, and has drawn consistently since I was little, I was surprised by how many people were drawn to (pun intended) these tools I make. *
Last year, I learned about and got enchanted ruminating on David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge and his hyper-realistic portraits of security guards.
I didn’t know those were options and it’s fair enough if you prefer them, but “better” doesn’t really factor into my interest here (if it can even be quantified in the first place). I like drawing outside but yeah if you have to keep holding the thing up you could distort the drawing over time. I’ll keep looking, maybe get my friend Peter Greenaway on the phone
They’re inconsistent. I’m only using a couple colours, and was turned onto them by Karl Gnass who uses the black and dark indigo. But I hate sketching in blue. I resented that there was only a non-photo blue in animation. I even hate writing in blue and the blue ink is the least used on my hobonichi pen. Would much rather a warmer colour closer to sanguine, but the cores were so much harder and scratchier on the colours I tried—and I brought a strip of newsprint with me to the art store to test everything they had in stock.
The dark indigo is so smooth though, and the way the material builds up turns it nearly black with an indigo tinge. I can see why he uses it. I still wish it were red lol.
Hockney has so many different phases in his career. I just recently learned about his series of photos he called joiners. It’s such a midwestern kind of naming that I had to look up that he was actually British.
EDIT I also highly recommend this documentary about a guy who invents a kind of lucida in order to go on a quixotic quest to paint his own Vemeer. He has a background in visual effects and the device he makes is simple and brilliant.
I’m trying so hard not to take this thread over but artists and their lesser known art is my jam. Seurat’s conte drawings on arches Ingres paper are among my favorites. Such impossibly soft and fragile images. I’ve tried hard to reproduce them but they’re beyond my skill.
