Tag: art

Bridget Riley: It’s Not Art Without the Viewer

Bridget Riley is our artist this month. She made major contributions to the Op Art movement in the 1960s. It’s a style that we all recognize, but what is it really?

What is Op Art?

Op Art is short for optical art. Considered an abstract style of art, it became popular in the 1960s. There’s no mistaking an Op Art piece – trippy patterns, geometric shapes, and contrasting colors were often used to influence the visual perception of the viewer. An Op Art design might appear to move, draw the gaze deep into the piece, or create the illusion of an object. Black and white patterns are perhaps the best known part of this style, but the manipulation of perception and the creation of illusion were central to Op Art.

Blaze 4. Bridget Riley. 1964.

Seen as the successor to geometric abstraction, “its stress on illusion and perception” suggest deeper influence from the old masters who practiced trompe l’oeil (fool the eye). However, artists across the centuries have expressed interest in visual trickery through many different styles and Op Art simply another way of doing so. Bridget Riley herself is an example of a classically trained artist that used her skill to stand at the forefront of an instantly recognizable art style.

Bridget Riley’s Early Life

Riley was born on April 24, 1931 in Norwood, London. She studied at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art and began teaching in 1957.

Ever since childhood, she spent time looking at nature and the world around her. She had a natural talent for art that she demonstrated in her early work, comprised mainly of portraits and still lifes. She grew up in a time where “good” art was representational and so her creative studies began with a more classical training. This meant accurately representing life and copying works of the old masters.

Part of accurately depicting life is being able to create depth on a two-dimensional surface. Riley found this aspect very interesting well before she began her Op Art journey.

Her work eventually took on a somewhat Impressionist style, but in the late 1950s she began painting landscapes in the Pointillist style. Pointillism (painting lots of tiny dots to form an image), particularly the work of Georges Seurat, set Riley on the path to exploring the different ways she could use paint to play with perception. She not only studied it as its own form of optical illusion, but learned how to use color to create various optical effects.

Pink Landscape. Bridget Riley. 1960.

Style

Although Op Art is considered a form of Abstract art, Bridget Riley didn’t consider herself an abstract artist. First and foremost she considered herself a painter. Her goal is to include the viewer as a part of her work because it’s the audience that completes the work. There needs to be that interaction between the viewer and the piece in order for it to be considered art. She wants the audience feel like they are a part of the art – a direct attempt at breaking down the “elitist” impression of the art world and making art more accessible to everyone.

Because the focus is on the visual experience, the viewer is reminded that things are not always as they appear. Riley is “known for exploring optical experiences in her paintings.” She is inspired by her perception of the world she observed so intently throughout her life. All of these concepts are what support the geometric forms, high contrast, “dizzying optical illusions”, black and white shapes, and vibrant colors of her art.

Paintings

Riley painted her first Op Art piece in 1960. She began to play with geometric shapes and patterns, black and white lines, and other abstract forms. These are probably the most recognizable Op Art Pieces and what is most associated with the style.

Arrest 3. Bridget Riley. 1965.

During this time Riley grew to dislike the commercial side of art. There were no copyright protections for artists back then and she opposed the way many artists’ work (including her own) was stolen and exploited for profit. Ironically, she worked for an advertising agency in the early sixties. She gave this up along with teaching by 1964.

Riley started using color in 1967. Geometric forms were sometimes replaced by curved lines “which created a wavelike movement”. This was due in part for her disdain toward the commercial entities that stole her art. Her paintings held the same intensity, but with more nuanced treatment of “alternating color”.

Cataract 3. Bridget Riley. 1967.

Riley continued to paint through the decades, well into her 80s. You may even recognize one of her pieces from the 2012 Olympic Games poster.

Rose Rose. Bridget Riley. 2012.

Her use of color and form has varied over the years, but there is no mistaking a Bridget Riley painting.

Fold. Bridget Riley. 2004.

Have you checked the other Artists of the Month? There’s a project for each one too!

References

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bridget-riley-1845

https://www.artsy.net/artist/bridget-riley

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/dec/10/bridget-riley-at-90-a-master-who-can-leave-you-feeling-elated-liberated-and-even-seasick

https://www.thecollector.com/bridget-riley-op-art-optical-illusions/

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/op-art/

April 20, 2022
Androgyny for the Gods

Instead of doing a biography, we’re talking androgyny today. Documentation on Michelangelo Buonarroti’s life and work is plentiful (seriously good reading), so we’re going to look at one of my favorite topics: Why do his women look so masculine?

Three Examples of Michelangelo’s Women

Night

Michelangelo was commissioned to create sculptures for the Medici Chapel, which included Night. Night is often referenced as being very manly. The body is muscular with odd-shaped breasts, but a soft, feminine face. It does seem to be a strange representation, but were the design choices intentional? Some historians have pointed to this particular sculpture as evidence that Michelangelo didn’t know how to portray a the female body. The sculpture has even been called outright bad!

Night

Dawn

Dawn is another sculpture in the Medici Chapel with a muscular body and feminine features, although she is a bit softer than Night.

Dawn

Sistine Ceiling Sybils

Sibyls are female oracles from ancient mythology. There are five of them on the Sistine Ceiling, said to have foretold the birth of Christ. They all have imposing physiques, despite being mostly covered in robes. But in the case of the Libyan Sibyl, her twisted pose puts her broad back and muscular form on full display.

Libyan_Sibyl

Were the Manly Women Intentional?

Once upon a time in art history class, I remember learning about how Michelangelo only sketched from male models and that’s why his women looked like men. Case closed, next topic. Still, I found it interesting and tried it myself, gender swapping references here and there and enjoying the androgyny it often created. It seems that the end results will be more feminine if I draw from a female model and more masculine if I draw from a male model, but switching them always lands me somewhere in between. It’s a fun mix of intent with unintentional results.

So how much of Michelangelo’s androgyny was intentional? There are three general arguments you’ll find on the subject.

Michelangelo Didn’t Like Women

Some art historians have argued that Michelangelo’s sexual preferences played a role in how he portrayed women. He’s been described both as having an aversion to the female form and an “inclination” toward the male form due his homosexuality.

Others argue that he wasn’t gay because he had a lover. He wrote poetry for his lover Vittoria Colonna. While it’s unclear whether they had a physical relationship, there was likely a romance there. It’s also said that Michelangelo was close to his mother, so why would he hate women? (That’s a rabbit hole for another time…)

Regardless of Michelangelo’s sexual orientation, it’s unlikely that he had any aversion toward women. It’s also incredibly short-sighted to assume that this is the reason his women are rendered the way they are. I find the whole “his women look manly because he liked men” argument to be the weakest and I’m happy to toss this one aside first!

There Were Only Male Models

Did Michelangelo even know how to draw women?

I’ve already mentioned the point that female models weren’t readily available (it was considered inappropriate for women) and so artists would draw from the male form and use that for their female figures. There are surviving sketches that prove Michelangelo drew the Libyan Sibyl from a male model, but this isn’t the whole story.

There are two issues with this. First, to say that women didn’t pose because of cultural norms is only half the story. Those norms, largely an application of the upper class, would just as easily have been disregarded by a woman willing to pose nude in return for payment or favors. Even today you can make a few quick bucks posing for art classes.

Second, if turning drawings of men into finished artworks of women were an issue for Renaissance artists, we wouldn’t only be talking about Michelangelo right now. There would be many other artists to reference, but his contemporaries painted their women soft and feminine just the same.

Third, Michelangelo knew the human anatomy very well. His sketches number in the hundreds. He even went as far as participating in human dissections to study the musculature of the body. Given his ability to represent the human anatomy with such accuracy and beauty, it seems ridiculous to suggest that he was incapable of doing the same for the female body.

In fact, it’s been suggested that Michelangelo’s ability to render anatomy was so good that he represented Night with breast cancer. Her left breast has features of cancer that are recognizable by modern doctors and it was a disease that would have been known at the time the statue was carved. These abnormalities are not present in the right breast or in Dawn. If he intentionally included a recognizable illness, it adds not only symbolism to sculptures representing life and death, but lends further credibility to the idea that his androgynous depictions of women were deliberate.

While there may not have been sketches of women from Michelangelo, there are plenty from other artists. There’s no reason to believe that he didn’t know what a woman’s body looks like or that he wasn’t able to render one.

Renaissance Beauty Standards

During the Renaissance, it was believed that the female form was an inferior version of the male form. A woman’s body was seen as an “inverted” man’s body, and therefore men were superior. Further support of this belief came from the Bible, where man was created by God, but woman was created from a man’s rib, and therefore the male form was closer to God.

However, that didn’t mean that men were seen as more beautiful. Androgyny was seen as beautiful during the Renaissance. You will often see depictions of effeminate males and masculine females in art from this period as these were the most “attractive states for both men and women.”

Not only was androgyny the beauty standard, it was considered godly. According to some interpretations of the book of Matthew, there is no gender or sexuality in Heaven. Also, the concept of God being androgynous was popular in the intellectual circles of the Renaissance that Michelangelo was a part of.

Now we know that women ~~are~~were seen as inferior, but a mix of male and female traits was considered beautiful and godly. Since women of the Renaissance were not supposed to perform strenuous activities, a muscular woman like the Libyan Sibyl should not make sense as a representation of a woman.

BUT, the Sibyl is not just a representation of a woman, she is a divine being. Because of this, she was depicted with more masculine traits to reflect her godly powers. Therefore, thanks to his deep studies of anatomy and his participation in scholarly circles, the Michelangelo’s masculine depictions of women are most certainly intentional and meant to add to the symbolism of his works.

Sources:

https://artsexualityren.wordpress.com/2018/01/13/first-blog-post/

https://www.romaexperience.com/post/women-of-the-sistine-chapel-divine-androgyny-and-god-s-right-hand-woman

https://medium.com/counterarts/why-michelangelos-women-were-so-manly-e65cc309c8b1

https://renresearch.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/men-with-breasts-or-why-are-michelangelos-women-so-muscular-part-1/

March 19, 2022
February Artist of the Month: Franz Marc

What is Expressionism?

Expressionism began around 1905 in Germany and Austria. Recognizable by its bright, artificial color palettes and simplified forms, it introduced distortions of reality designed to elicit an emotional reaction from the viewer while simultaneously taking inspiration from and rejecting art movements of the past.

German Expressionism was a response to two things. First, there was the prevalence of Impressionism. While the style was modern, it was still representational in both the color palette used and the subjects rendered. Expressionism thus became a sort of Anti-Impressionism in that it placed substance over style.

Second, the rapid urbanization occurring around the world coupled with a series of international events that lead to Word War I added an undertone of anxiety and looming danger. It became more apparent as the outbreak of war approached and the world anticipated the impact of global conflict.

Over time many Expressionist artists incorporated other styles into their work. They experimented with Cubism, Dadaism, and more as Expressionism was more about evoking a raw emotion than anything else.

Franz Marc’s Early Life

Franz Marc was born in Munich on February 8, 1880. His father was an amateur landscape painter. Although he received instruction from him, Marc didn’t pursue art as a career until after completing military service. He enrolled in the Munich Academy of Art in 1900, but the focus placed on natural realism there didn’t suit him.

Portrait of the Artists’ Mother, Franz Marc, 1902

In 1903, he studied in Paris for six months, returning in 1907 to see the art of one of his favorite contemporaries, Vincent Van Gogh. He made several trips to Paris during those years where he took inspiration from some of the biggest artists of the time. He also gained an appreciation for Matisse while he lived in Munich.

Marc loved nature. He suffered greatly from depression and nature had a calming effect for him. When he lived in Berlin he studied animal anatomy extensively and made money by offering anatomy lessons to other artists. It is said that he “spent countless hours studying and sketching animals from every conceivable angle.”

In 1910 Marc had his first solo show in Munich. That same year he met August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky and they formed the group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).

Large Blue Horses, Franz Marc, 1911

Der Blaue Reiter

When Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and August Macke formed Der Blaue Reiter, they were “united by an interest in exploring spirituality and a belief that art is more than meets the eye.” Individual colors had meaning and forms were simplified. Most importantly, the group shared a common philosophy that artists should be free to express their ideas as they saw fit.

Indeed they had a lot to contend with as global events escalated. It contributed to their apocalyptic view of “the toxic state of the world.” Marc himself believed that war would bring about a cleansing of the natural world.

Style and Subject Matter

Influence of Other Styles

Early on Franz Marc experimented with Naturalism and Realism due to his academic background. But in order to break free of the confines of realism, he also played with styles such as Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, and Cubism. It was Fauvism that perhaps had the greatest influence in those early years as he combined the “intense, symbolic color palette of the Fauves” with his interest in anatomy.

The Red Horses, Franz Marc, 1911

Color Theory

As Marc’s palette became more intense, he developed his own color theory that added meaning to his work. Blue was a masculine color, “astringent and spiritual.” Yellow was a feminine color, “gentle, happy, and sensual.” Red represented the physical world, which was at times violent and dangerous. Marc said himself, “Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color to be opposed and overcome by the other two.”

Animals

Complementing Marc’s color theory was the way he perceived and represented animals. He considered them the ideal subject – “pure, truthful, and beautiful” – unlike people that rarely featured in his work. To him, animals represented what the modern world was missing and “animals in a landscape were… a bridge between man and nature.” They were spiritual, innocent creatures that brought him a sense of peace.

Tiger, Franz Marc, 1912

Late Work

In 1912 Franz Marc met Cubist artist Robert Delaunay, whose work greatly influenced his. It was around this time that Marc’s work took on a more Cubist flavor, evident in paintings such as Tiger. Marc’s work also became darker and more apocalyptic and his view on animals changed. These once pure creatures in his eyes were now “as impure as human beings.” By the time World War I broke out in 1914, his work became completely abstract, thus completing his transition away from realistic representation.

The Tower of Blue Horses, Franz Marc, 1913

Fate of the Animals, Franz Marc, 1913

World War I

Marc immediately enlisted in the German army when WWI broke out in 1914. The German government attempted to remove notable artists from combat, but for Marc they were too late. He died in the Battle of Verdun from shell splinter to the head in 1916.

During World War II, Hitler classified Marc’s work as “degenerate” and attempted to censor it. Most of his work survived the war and can be enjoyed in museums around the world.

Sources

https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-expressionism/

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/franz-marc-horses/

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/marc-franz/life-and-legacy/#biography_header

https://www.franzmarc.org/

https://artincontext.org/franz-marc

February 12, 2022
Expressionist February

Our artist this month is Franz Marc! I chose him because despite his short life and career, he was a major influence in the German Expressionist movement. His work is instantly recognizable – if you’ve seen the painting of blue horses, you’ve seen a Franz Marc painting. Marc’s work was so avant-garde for the time that it was censored by the Nazis – even after his death in World War I.

Die grossen blauen Pferde (The Large Blue Horses), 1911

That means this month we’re diving into Expressionism! Last month we explored Impressionism. So what’s the difference?

Both the Expressionists and Impressionists used loose, expressive brushstrokes, and both were somewhat antithetical to previous art movements. In fact, Expressionism stood in stark contrast to Impressionism, choosing unnatural colors and distorted compositions to evoke the feeling of the subject rather than representation itself.

As such, there are no special colors or palettes we need to use this month. We’re capturing a moment in a different way than we did with Impressionism. The colors will be all about evoking a feeling rather than being representational. So what should the project be?

Last month I painted my son and our dog. As it turns out, I kind of did the Expressionist thing in the way that I used the colors. But Franz Marc had his own personal color theory, so whatever I end up making will absolutely build off of that.

Stay tuned! We’ll be talking about all of this a lot more in my next post about Franz Marc and German Expressionism!

February 1, 2022
Impressionist Art – Did I Do It?

When I started my little digital Impressionist painting, I made sure to go in with no expectations. If it came out great – great! If it came out bad – also great! The whole point was to try it out and hopefully learn something along the way.

It was definitely a rough start at first, but by the end I found a sort of rhythm. Somehow this blobbly colorful thing I was making started to look like something and I’m really happy with the result! Could there be improvements? Absolutely. Did I approach it the way an Impressionist would? I’m still not really sure about that.

However! I feel like a better artist having done this. I had to work against what I normally do (Blend, blend, blend! Make it darker!) and I think I really started to see my subject. When it was done, I didn’t really care that it’s a little off. I captured not only a moment, but all the things I felt about that moment in the movement and energy of the (digital) paint.

So who did I pick to paint? Chewy and my son! It wasn’t my original idea, but on the day I was thinking about the picture I took of my son laying with the dog on the couch. It’s one of my favorite moments and even though it was a few years ago, they still hang out like that to this day. As my aunt said when she saw the picture, “There’s nothing like a boy and his dog.”

And so without further ado, here’s my little Impressionist experiment: A Boy and His Dog

My one regret with this is that I forgot to turn on the time lapse recording. It would have been such a cool playback! At least there’s still the stream. You can watch it here.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in February for the next Artist of the Month!

January 3, 2022
January Artist of the Month: Berthe Morisot

When I decided to do the Artist of the Month project, Berthe Morisot was one of the first artists I thought of. Her talents as an artist could have easily been tempered by the male-dominated art world and societal norms of her time, but she was in a unique position to contribute to the rise of the one the most recognizable and well-known art movements – Impressionism.

What is Impressionism?

The founding members of Impressionism are names most of us know – Monet, Degas, and Pissarro to name a few. Although their individual styles varied, as a group their work rejected the established styles typically shown at the annual Salon de Paris. (The Salon was an exhibition that was considered to be essential to the success of an artist.) From its beginnings in the 1860s, Impressionism brought new ideas, genres, and advancements in the art world.

The style is comprised of loose brushstrokes, described by conservative critics of the time as sketchy and unfinished. Others saw it as a modern take, noting the bright, unblended colors that stood in contrast to the more traditional contemporary works seen at the Salon. Shadows were rendered in color rather than neutrals, and old yellow varnishes were traded in for unvarnished works that allowed newer, brighter colors to shine.

This new way of painting also changed the way the subject matter was viewed. Earlier works were carefully composed, static images. Impressionist pieces captured a moment, as fleeting as each brushstroke that created the composition. The subject matter itself was also different. Where contemporary pieces were often religious-themed, Impressionism depicted everyday life and traded the controlled environment of the art studio for plein air (open air, or outside) painting.

By Theodor Josef Hubert Hoffbauer – This image is available from the Brown University Library under the digital ID 1189455725390625., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24755293

Berthe Morisot’s Early Life

Berthe Morisot was born on January 14, 1841. Her father was a wealthy civil servant and her mother was related to the well-known Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Morisot and her sister Edma showed a talent for painting and studied at the Louvre under painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (women were not allowed to pursue a formal arts education). Although Edna gave up her artistic ambitions to marry a naval officer, Berthe continued to paint. She met Édouard Manet during her studies at the Louvre and they formed a lasting friendship.

As a result, she was uniquely positioned to pursue her art career. She was not able to frequent the cafes and studios where male artists could congregate and exchange ideas because women’s roles in society were so strictly defined. However, her friendship with Manet and eventual marriage to his brother Eugène gave her access to the art world and connections with other artists that most women didn’t have. She became friends with some of the major players of the Impressionist movement including Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Monet.

Berthe Morisot With a Bouquet of Violets. Edouard Manet. 1872.

What Set Berthe Morisot Apart?

It wouldn’t be fair to reduce Morisot to her status and connections. She was a talented artist that went under-recognized even until the last few years. Much has already been written on how gender and society shaped her career and how it’s been perceived over the years. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll do it the justice it deserves in this little blog post. Rather, let’s look at the work itself.

Under the tutelage of Corot, Morisot learned to paint landscapes and earned herself a spot in the Salon starting in 1864. Despite having this prestige for the following decade, she ended up destroying many of her works dating before 1869. (If trashing old work isn’t relatable as an artist, I don’t know what is.)

The Mother and Sister of the Artist. Berthe Morisot. ca. 1869

In 1874, Morisot participated in the first independent Impressionist show along with Degas, Renoir, and Monet. By this time her work had become looser, with the short, quick brushstrokes that came to define the style. The show was described by a critic as consisting of “five or six lunatics of which one is a woman…whose feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind.” She would go on to show at the Impressionist exhibition every year, except for the year her daughter was born, for the rest of her life.

Hanging the Laundry out to Dry. Berthe Morisot. 1875. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., online collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3732827

Subject and Style

Female artists of the time tended to paint depictions of what they had access to – daily life. Women were not allowed to work from models in studios as men did. Berthe Morisot was no exception. While this was limiting, the female point of view offered an intimate look into the domestic lives of women. Whether it was a mother cradling her child, women taking tea, or a girl brushing her hair – the Impressionist viewpoint such personal scenes was the perfect application to capture the moment. It implies the movement of the sip of tea or a twinkle in the eye, sometimes with a single stroke of color.

Morisot was particularly talented at capturing energy of the fleeting moment, where the thick strokes of paint create additional depth with their texture, still appearing wet – something that can only be appreciated in real life.

Woman at her Toilette. Berthe Morisot. 1875-1880.

Over the course of her career, Morisot worked with oil, watercolor, and pastels. Her start was in drawing and she gravitated back to it later in her career, experimenting with colored pencils and charcoal. Her work as a whole also began to take on some of the definition seen in her early work. In 1894 she painted a striking portrait of her daughter Julie that stands in stark contrast to the loose brushwork of her other paintings. The definition of the young woman’s face is made all the more apparent by the simple background.

Julie Daydreaming. Berthe Morisot. 1894.

There’s no way to know what direction Berthe Morisot’s work would have taken next. She passed away on March 2, 1895 at the age of 54. It would be over 100 years before the public would begin to truly recognize her contributions to the art world, and even now she is still written about as a “female artist” rather than simply an artist. While the impact society had on her progress as an artist cannot be ignored, the truth is that even critics of her time acknowledged her work as being better than her peers.

Sources:

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/berthe-morisot-who-is-she-why-is-she-important-1234581283/

https://www.biography.com/artist/berthe-morisot

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. https://www.amazon.com/Women-Art-Society-World/dp/050020456X/

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm

January 2, 2022
New Year, New Projects!

Happy New Year! Whether celebrating or sleeping through it, I hope we get an amazing start this year. The bar may be low, but we can clear it!

Now that the holiday season is over, some of us will be making resolutions and plans while others will be saying to hell with it all. I did a post last year about all the stuff I was going to do. I’m not going to go back and read it because I don’t think I made it very far into my plan…

This year will be different! Maybe. At least there will be more of a plan?

At any rate, it’s something I’ve talked about on stream here and there and I’m super excited about it! Are you ready? We are doing:

Artist of the Month!

(pause for effect)

I know right?? For each month this year I’ve picked an artist born in that month. I’m going to put my Art History degree to work and write up a little something about each artist.

But wait! There’s more! Don’t worry, I’m not gonna make you *just* read and learn stuff.

There will also be a project for each artist of the month where I make a piece related to their work, whether it be in their style, a similar subject matter, or maybe a portrait of the artist.

To kick of the new year, we’re going to start with French artist Berthe Morisot. She was a pioneer of Impressionist art during a time when women were still heavily constrained by social norms. Her contributions have only begun to be truly recognized in the past few years – more than 100 years after her untimely death.

Photo of Berthe Morisot. Source: Wikipedia

I plan to paint a digital portrait in the impressionist style using a custom color set and custom brushes to capture the dynamic strokes and colorful shading that helped define the style.

It was hard to choose artists for the list because there are so many directions to take a project like this. I ultimately decided to pick names that people may recognize without going so big that’s it’s been done to death. Sorry, Van Gogh. Not sorry Picasso. Maybe we’ll talk about them another time. Maybe someday I’ll be able to do more than one each month (that’d be so cool!).

January is Berthe Morisot month. I’ll talk about her more in the next post and do another after the project is done. I’m pretty sure I know what I want the painting to be, but I’m not going to say yet. You’ll have to tune in to see.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for going on this little adventure with me. I can’t wait to see how this turns out!

January 1, 2022
Promptober was a Success!
Success! We did it! Every drawing done on the day! Not one missed! Considering past years where I’ve ended up several days behind (or the one year where I dumped over a week of drawings at once), let’s just call this year a big win.

I also took the opportunity to try some different techniques for lining, coloring, and adding effects. The colorize feature in Clip Studio Paint was a quick and dirty way to get a drawing done when time was short. When used in grayscale it contrasted really nicely with a pop of color.

There was also the a-ha moment where I finally accepted that I can’t draw digitally the same way I draw traditionally. The first few drawings I tried to “stay true” to the traditional versions of the Inktober challenge – sketch it, use the ink brush, don’t erase because you can’t erase ink. Well that was dumb, because all it did was make the art take longer! By the end of the month I circled back to some sketchy, inky drawings and they went much quicker and still had the same style. Again, success! I’m better at what I do now! 🙂

I’m debating whether to make the prompts a little simpler next year. The challenge of making things that don’t go together work is fun, but maybe not 31 days in a row. There’s a whole year to think about it though, so let’s have a look at all 31 drawings together! (If you want to see the time lapse videos of them, they’re all on TikTok!)
November 1, 2021
Prompt, Draw, Ink!

Inktober. Drawlloween. ~~Promptober,~~ Prompt O’Ween! (Wait, what??)

The season is upon us! It’s time for the best drawing challenges of the entire year and I’m 100% on the bandwagon. Not only am I putting a full list out ahead of time this year (last year I posted the prompt each day), but I made it all kinds of FANCY!

So why is it Prompt O’Ween and not Promptober this year? WELL… when I was making the graphic that’s just what I put on there. Seriously. I completely forgot it was Promptober last year. Anyhoo, I like them both, so I’ll post it with all the tags!

The one thing I haven’t decided yet is if I want to do these traditional or digital. Last year I think I said I was going full digital this year, but I truly love scribbling away at these in black ink. This is the time of year to finish off those old microns and bring on the fresh ones! Sling. That. Ink.

We’re less than two weeks away – What are you gonna draw??

September 21, 2021
Shifting Art Gears

October has just flown by! After the past few weeks of doing Inktober and Drawlloween and staying (roughly) on track, I realized that I haven’t done anything with jewelry, painting, or the site. Sorry about that!

It also got me thinking. I’m really loving drawing again. Not that I ever didn’t love it, but I’m rediscovering all the “behind the scenes” things that happen in art that make the experience of creating so robust. It’s deciding on concepts, looking at reference images, quick sketches to see if something will work, and starting over again when it doesn’t. It’s all the things that happen before the final piece is even started.

I’ve also been thinking that I don’t miss the fluid art. There’s only so much time before and after work and in between family activities. Every day is a choice of what to make – if there’s even time (or energy) to make anything at all. For me, fluid art was a stepping stone to bring art back into my life. It was something I could just make without having to worry about it too much (plus I learned how to make videos, which was super fun!). Then I started working on an old painting again. That got me thinking of ways to revamp old pieces and ideas for starting new ones – so the “fluid art phase” did what it was supposed to do.

They’re everywhere!

They’re here, too!

And here!

Now that my walls are covered in trippy paintings, I’m ready to move on. Of course, with Inktober I’m drawing every day again. So the natural progression seems to be to shift gears and focus more on that. I’m not going to make any more fluid art videos, but I do want to start recording my drawing and painting.

As for jewelry, I know I haven’t posted much about that here, but I’m going to keep going with that. I won’t be making any more Pebeo pieces, so I’m working on using up the Pebeo paint that I have left. For jewelry I’m going to focus on copper pipe necklaces and the “doogle” pins. There’s been enough experimenting and wasting supplies “in the name of science!” And it’s time to get the craft table under control. Seriously, it’s a mess. Time for some fall cleaning!

So. Embarrassing.

All of the Inktober stuff is coming as soon as the month is up! I feel like this year is miles better than last year, but we can talk about that in a few days when the pics go up. 🙂

But for now, thanks for reading! Until next time!

BTW, if you want to check out last year’s Inktober/Drawlloween fiasco, click here. 🙂

October 30, 2018