Beautiful landscape paintings by Alena Aenami

I am toying with a Micro.blog

It’s interesting; a thin veneer over RSS that allows replying and following and replying to posts. You can host a blog at Micro.blog for a few dollars a month or point your own RSS feed at it

Discovery seems hard at the moment with no way to search

Metafilter was talking about Ugly Medieval Cats - but then I found this artist Teresa Duck and her work is fascinating.

It’s pop without being retro. It doesn’t feel weighted down with a box of art history. They’re fun without being frivolous.

Desk progress.

A still life of lime and avocado on a cutting board, waiting for lunch. Painted with Procreate.

This is the latest issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published maybe twice a week with small paintings and writing. In this issue I write about a diner that serves doubles.

This is the latest issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published maybe twice a week with small paintings and writing. In this issue I write about a diner that serves doubles.

The life-drawing session I attend has returned from an extended hiatus over the holidays. The people organizing models needed a break and it took a while to get going again. But now it’s back.

I missed these drawing sessions a lot. Having one night a week where I get to turn off my brain and draw is relaxing and restorative. I was worried that these sessions might not pick up again. There aren’t a lot of options in Tacoma. I found an online resource for artist’s photographic references and bought a few sets of poses in case I needed some reference material.

What a strange thing. There are lots of photos of naked people on the internet, but these photos aren’t for that. Art model reference photos are all well lit, set in a white room, and are deeply un-erotic. They’re almost clinical. And now this site sends me marketing emails with photos of naked people I might like to buy.

This is the latest issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published maybe twice a week with small paintings and writing. In this issue I write about a diner that serves doubles.

This is the latest issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published maybe twice a week with small paintings and writing. In this issue, Mommy needs a minute.

This is the latest issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published maybe twice a week with small paintings and writing. This issue talks about how we found our home in Tacoma and a view of the bay.

Last Sunday I found a little time to paint in between chores. My kitchen window faces north which provides lovely soft, white light on my kitchen counter. Every still life I’ve painted lately has started with me looking down at some food on my kitchen counter, bathed in that light.

There’s something there for me - looking at a single thing on the counter in the light. Maybe something about focus or domestic peace; Not sure. But I keep coming back to it.

I think these eggs will become raw material for another web painting I have brewing in the back of my mind. But for now they’re just eggs.

I found a nice trick for making perfect circles in Procreate. The app has several “airbrush” style brushes. They have hard and soft edges, really similar to the default brushes in Photoshop actually. There is one very large, very hard brush. I simply set the brush size to the size of the circle I need and tap the screen once (with a little pen pressure) and boop! A perfect circle.

  <img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/8ab888dd65.jpg" alt=""/>

On Instagram someone commented about the chip in the side of the bowl being a nice detail. Of course I chose the bowl with the chip. I spent a few minutes rotating that bowl around so the chip caught the light just so and then sloshing the eggs around so they were in the right spot. That little imperfection seemed to ground the thing in reality, breaking up the perfect roundness of the bowl and the eggs.

This is the 5th issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published maybe twice a week with small paintings and writing. This week I wrote about the weirdo restaurant in my neighborhood and the powerful branding of primary colors

I was a tiny bit worried last week. I got an email from the chap who organizes my Thursday night figure drawing sessions. He was emailing the group to see if anyone wanted to take over wrangling models as he couldn’t afford the time and the previous person needed to step down. Oh no! How would I get my practice in now? I’m in the same boat as most of the folks who come to these drawing sessions, I have a job, and a commute, and precious little free time. So I was of no use to help.

I went online and found some inexpensive stock photo resources for artists. A lot of the available poses are…dumb. Theatrical or overwrought. But I did find a few good portrait references. Now I can keep up my practice.

A couple of days later another email arrived and model wrangling had been solved. Figure drawing Thursdays are back on, starting in February. Lucky me.

I think portraits are some of the best practice you can get for drawing and painting. It’s immediately apparent when any thing is wrong or even just a little off. It’s difficult to capture a likeness, it’s difficult to capture light on skin. Faces have complex topology and heads are just shaped funny. When the results are good, though, they can be magical. You begin to empathize with the person in the picture, to connect with them as if they are real.

Here, this woman looks down and to her left. The pose and lighting suggest getting up early, before the sun, sitting in the light from a single lamp on a night stand.

  <img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/055c8f4a57.jpg" alt=""/>

I learned, or re-learned, or remembered, recently that value - the light to dark - is more critical than color for creating an image that feels solid and real. After creating a thorough enough sketch to map out the geometry of the model, I focused entirely on value, painting entirely in greyscale. Then I came back and painted in color on top. This is a very old fashioned method but it applies just as well to digital painting.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2048.0"]<img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/1d44d9d187.jpg" alt=" Painting, underpainting, and drawing "/>  Painting, underpainting, and drawing [/caption]

This is the 5th issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published maybe twice a week with small paintings and writing. This week I wrote about the weirdo restaurant in my neighborhood and the powerful branding of primary colors

This is the 4th issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published about twice a week with small paintings and writing.

Tech notes

Littleoverripe.com is a web painting written with current web standards. Naturally, therefore, this painting will not work in Microsoft Internet Explorer or Edge. I don’t care. It should work on all current major browsers on most devices.

About

I keep coming back to this idea that an artworks are slabs of time. I think this is particularly true of paintings, but it works for websites, sculptures, or anything really.

A raw, unprocessed, unedited photograph might capture 1/16 of a second of time between the open and close of the shutter. There might be hours of time in post processing and editing. A photograph still reads as an instant. The time involved gets flattened out. I think this is why we pore over thousands of Snaps and Instagrams instead of looking at a single photo for very long.

But an artwork that is made over time - paint, pixels, whatever - carries with it a record of it’s own history. We can see that the author was there doing something for some amount of time. We can feel the weight of that time when we view art. I think that expenditure of our only real resource - time - is what imbues art with its intrinsic value.

Arthur Danto, in “What Art Is“, defines a work of art as embodied meaning - art is about something. But art is also made out of something, and ultimately, when you strip away all the material, art is made of time. Time invested in learning media and technique, time in observing and understanding the subject matter, and time involved in execution. If I wanted to stretch that definition, I might include the compound time of an artwork’s audience.

“Little Overripe” began as a quick reference photo I took while making lunch. It was December 23rd, right before we left town for Christmas. We made tacos. I sliced up avocados. The light was cool and white from the north. I love painting avocados. I could make a career of it.

These particular avocados were still ripe, just beginning to turn, black spots emerging from the yellow-green flesh here and there. These fruits were very temporary. I sat with the reference photo for nearly a month until I had a solid day to work on something. I had Martin Luther King Day off from work, so I took advantage of the time to make art.

I beamed the reference photo over to my television and painted from the couch on my iPad. I recorded and saved a time lapse movie of my painting, as well as a couple of early, sketches. When painting on the iPad I’ve taken to creating a “palette” right on the picture where I can easily grab a color without leaving my work to poke around in a drop-down menu. I dissected the layers of the painting into on my laptop and assembled the website in ReactJS. I included the video, the palette, and sketches in the final composition. I realized I was creating a painting which acknowledged it’s own history. Because it’s a digital web-painting I can include an element of time. The painting’s own history lurks in its background. This work became about capturing a moment (and a mood) and then capturing the moments which lead to capturing the moment.

Also avocados are fun to paint.

This is the third issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published about twice a week with small paintings and writing.

This is the second issue of my 100 Doodles project. An art newsletter published about twice a week with small paintings and writing.

Artistically, I get hung up on “big” ideas. I should be working on a large series or a big project. I lose sight of the fun and value of creative work by building up big schemes and projects in my head. This is paralyzing and doesn’t lead to getting anything made.

In the last year, I finished a few “serious” paintings in my series of Tacoma landscapes, but I had more fun making still life paintings, turning those into scarves, or making wacky web projects. These fun projects have had more reach, more impact, and brought me more creative fulfillment then the thing I should be working on.

Clearly, I’m doing it wrong.

I want to be more creative more often. I want to make more art for more people. I live in the world, and the world lives on the internet. Living in the world requires commuting to a job on a train. I already doodle on the train. Why isn’t that creative outlet worth sharing?

I am inspired by this article as well.

http://mashable.com/2017/12/27/browser-bar-url-facebook-bad/

Their goal, as a company, is to keep you on Facebook—and away from everything else—as long as they possibly can. They do that by making Facebook as addictive to you as possible. And they make it addictive by feeding you only the exact stripe of content you want to read, which they know to a precise, camel-eye-needle degree. It's the kind of content, say, that you won't just click on, but will "Like," comment on, and share (not just for others to read, but so you can say something about yourself by sharing it, too). And that's often before you've even read it!

The moral of the story is to start using the web the way it was designed and push back against Facebook spoon-feeding you garbage to keep you on Facebook.

This resonates with me. I miss the open web. I miss web sites. I miss independent voices. I want to contribute to that.

I killed my Facebook “page” partly because of this, but also because it’s just a lot of work to get anything out of it. Facebook then emails constantly with tips and tricks and an incentive to spend money on advertising. Facebook a pit.

How do I reconcile the fact that the world lives on the internet with an anti-garbage social-media point of view?

I’m going to try a simple email newsletter. The first issue is here.

I’m using TinyLetter.com to run the thing. It’s small and simple and that’s enough. I’m working with this idea of painted blog posts. A regular sketchbook entry combined with written thoughts and ideas. I will draw or paint in Procreate as usual, then write in GoodNotes. GoodNotes is a ‘digital ink’ note taking app for the iPad. It has some clever Optical Character Recognition so my chicken-scratch handwriting becomes real computerized text.

This gives me searchable text with a human touch. I can export to an image or a PDF. From there I have raw materials to share on the slow internet.