I have the good fortune to work with an old friend. He works remotely from Portland - but we still chat quite a bit over Slack and see each other when he visits Seattle to work out of our office. He has a deserved reputation for knowing the answer to most questions. We were joking in Slack about how he is a human search engine. His name is Majid so I started suggesting ridiculous web addresses for his human powered search engine - like [majid.majid](http://majid.majid) - or perhaps more Catch-22-y [majid.majid](http://majid.majid).majid - I started posting screen captures of silly domain names available on Hover.com - and found majid.coffee - so naturally I registered it. I have a job; domains are cheap.

Later I popped into my team’s private channel and asked what we should put there. Majid does love coffee. One of my teammates remembered that he was fond of alpacas after seeing some kind of alpaca show in Portland,of course.

So I settled on Alpacas drinking coffee in a coffee shop. I looked at some photos of Matisse’s paintings. I missed that mark by a mile. I ended up somewhere south of David Hockney I think. But it works. I wanted something whimsical and loose. I think I got it. I also wanted to crank this out on a Saturday.

I knew I wanted this to be more than just a JPG on a web page. I found this great parallax effect library and knew just what to do.

I painted my coffee alpacas in ProCreate on my iPad - quickly and loosely - on a few layers. I exported that out as a Photoshop document to my iCloud drive and then grabbed that file on my Mac where I opened it in Pixelmator. I used Pixelmator to export each layer as either a PNG or JPG depending upon where in the stack it was. Some layers didn’t need full 8-bit alpha transparency, so I could save a few bytes by saving those as low-color 1-bit transparency PNG files.

Then I pulled down a copy of the parallax library, created a new Git repository, fired up Visual Studio Code and built a tiny web site. For my small static projects I’ve been using Pug templates - because it’s just a quicker way to write HTML and I can easily include and compile markdown files for blocks of text. I still tend to use Gulp to compile my templates and things - and also to run a little server. I could have probably used https://webpack.github.io for this too, but Gulp was fine.

Once I got everything put together I stacked up all the layers, got the parallax library working, and made some little adjustments. For example, I needed to tweak the scaling and the parallax effect so the edges of the layers didn’t show.

I’m hosting the page using GitHub Pages - which is a fantastic feature. It’s intended to host project documentations, or static blogs. Whatever. It’s an art gallery now.

Ever since I came across Rafaël Rozendaal’s work I’ve been thinking about how to meld my web stuff and my art stuff. This is a good trial run.

Breakfast
Painted with ProCreate for iPadPro

I think I am liking this faux modernist desktop wallpaper thing. I drew the above on my morning commute to Seattle. For all of my desktops I use the same color palette and the same canvas size. It’s an opportunity to play with shapes and styles and colors. Since I’m on a train, I can’t get too complicated. I only have an hour - and the train is not a smooth ride.

One of my co-workers saw this on Instagram, then demanded I print it. I did. She hung it up in the office kitchen.

I have given up on reading Gene McHugh’s “Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art”.

This book was once a blog. This blog was once at [www.122909a.com](http://www.122909a.com). I don’t suggest you follow that link. It is a dizzying array of advertising and copyright infringement. It’s probably not safe for work or your computer.

The book is the blog, collected and published. I love this idea. Write small short essays on a theme, publish for free as a blog, sell as a book later once there is established demand. Creative. Smart.

“Post Internet” is McHugh’s term for our period in history after the internet has become mainstream. He writes:

“On some general level, the shift of the Internet to a mainstream world in which A LOT of people read the newspaper, play games, meet sexual partners, go to the bathroom, etc. necessitated a shift in what we mean when we say “art on the Internet” from a specialized world for nerds and the technologically-minded, to a mainstream world for nerds, the technologically-minded and painters and sculptors and conceptual artists and agitprop artists and everyone else. No matter what your deal was/is as an artist, you had/have to deal with the Internet – not necessarily as a medium in the sense of formal aesthetics (glitch art, .gifs, etc), but as a distribution platform, a machine for altering and re-channeling work. What Seth Price called “Dispersion.” What Oliver Laric called “Versions.”

Summary: The internet is a thing now and you can’t avoid it. Embrace it or deny it, you are reacting to it and informed by it.

Since I’ve made a living making things on the internet, this is an obvious statement. But everything is new for someone, and it’s an idea worth exploring. McHugh is an art critic and is therefore talking mainly about art, but this idea is true of everything from newspapers to banks.

After establishing this premise the author spends several chapter-posts talking about works of art from internet aware or engaged artists. He shares bits of interviews with others. He writes about works of internet art with genuine love and interest. He is not disaffected or ironic. He really likes this stuff. This is why I stuck with the book-blog as long as I did.

Performance

Bewersdorf is an important post Internet artist because he realized very clearly that the quality of art on the Internet is not measured in individual posts but in the artist's performance through time, through their brand management. On Facebook, a user is judged, not by one status update, but rather by their style and pace of updating. The same is true for post Internet artists

This is the other big idea in Post Internet. (There may be more, I’ll never finish it.) Artists use the internet to share their work as it is made, shown, evolves. They share their inspirations and their failures. This amounts to an ongoing performance, as in Performance Art.

This is an interesting idea - and I think it’s an accurate idea as well. But similarly - this is also true of all bloggers, Instagram stars, weird Twitter accounts, and everyone who lies about how much they love their life on Facebook.

And so?

With these two points made - the rest of the book-blog just rolls around these ideas and discusses other works of art and artists. None of these works can be seen because the author includes no links. Attempting to find them or even the artists other works is useless, as all of this work has been expunged from the internet.

“Cortright makes work that is often indistinguishable from vernacular forms of culture. There are lots of videos of young people using a default effect and then acting silly. She does it with a style, humor, and somehow very human sincerity that makes each of her works a very good example of whatever cultural form she is working in. This piece is a good example. For someone who doesn’t look at it as art, it would be a pretty good example of an amateur video. By putting it in the context of art and the context of her larger body of work, though, the video takes on a different meaning. It works as a readymade almost, demonstrating for the viewer part of the visual language of the moment so that the viewer can see it. What is more powerful, though, is that it doesn’t do it in an academic way. While being a work of art, it is also a work that is not “of art.”

Here, McHugh, is describing a bit of video art that is indistinguishable from any amateur video on the internet. Here is the important bit again:

For someone who doesn’t look at it as art, it would be a pretty good example of an amateur video. By putting it in the context of art and the context of her larger body of work, though, the video takes on a different meaning.

Why must I put it “in the context of art” in order to derive a “different” meaning? Why can’t I put any old weird Tumblr in the context of art and derive a different meaning? Why is this video special and worthy of the context of art? He doesn’t say.

This is where I am let down. “Post Internet” is not a celebration of the weird, wonderful, awful, and strange creative stuff that happens all day, everyday on the internet - but just more cultural gate-keeping of via the “context of art”.

Portrait study painted with ProCreate for iPad Pro

I am working lots lately which prevents me from getting in any good practice drawing or making it to my life drawing studio. The other day I found some time to draw so I parked with my iPad in front of my television and used some album art as a reference.

Drawing from a television takes the “you shouldn’t draw from photos“ cliche to exciting new places. I can save a photo on my phone, and view it on my AppleTV. Now the photo is bright and big and across the room. It’s fun and slightly weird.

I am getting a little better with color selection and stronger with my drawing, despite not getting as much practice as I’d like. I’m starting to see the pinks and grays in skin and I’m doing a better job blocking in big forms and not getting lost in the details.

Work, coffee, work
Digital painting created with Procreate for iPad Pro

A new wallpaper.

I keep coming back to this “wonky” pseudo-modern doodle style on the train. There’s something fun about it. It also takes some of my natural “bad” drawing habits (elongated forms, exaggerated details) and just makes them prominent features of the drawing. Here I imagine myself working and fueling myself with coffee. Nearly lifelike.

I realized that I’ve been doodling on the train for nearly a year now. Not daily, but lots. I hate my commute, it steals precious time from my life. But in retrospect I have a lot of work to show for it.

A while ago I was catching up with an old friend. We graduated from undergraduate school together. We had shiny new art degrees and headed off to find graduate programs.

We both had slight detours before grad school. I was missing an art history requirement and one philosophy requirement. I completed those during the first summer session after the spring semester. Since I wouldn’t make it in time for the fall semester I lucked into a job painting murals and faux finishing fancy homes around Charlotte, NC. On the weekends I worked as a gallery attendant. I rented a share of a garage from a rock band who never practiced and two artists who never worked and had a giant studio to myself. I put together a show and got my name in the paper.

My friend moved off to Austin with his new wife - at 21 that seemed so advanced to me - and she attended a graduate program for music while he worked and made artist friends and made art. Austin is much cooler than Charlotte.

In another year I was attending University of North Carolina at Greensboro for their Master of Fine Arts and in two years my friend and his wife had relocated to Houston to attend the University of Houston’s MFA program. By the second year of my friend’s program we had both read enough Arthur C. Danto and Dave Hickey to be done with all of it. He had the bravery to quit outright. I muddled through my second year, working in the computer lab and part time in an ad agency. I left art school with a job that paid money. Take that establishment.

He and I had rage-quit art-with-a-capital-A by this time and it was liberating. Outside of the just-grimy-enough art school and the white cube of the museum you knew your work was good if you got paid for it.

Now, years later, both of us are coming back around to making art (with a small ‘a’) because it’s nice and human to have a creative outlet. It’s also fun. But it’s hard to shake all that indoctrination. It keeps showing up in the back of my mind and saying dumb things. “But what should I do with this work. What am I getting at?” and other boring thoughts. The only thing you need to say with a painting is “hey, look at this”.

When we caught up the other day, we were grousing about our education and how it led us from things we loved and how rotten and false all of it was. I blurted out the phrase “Museum Industrial Complex” to describe it. My friend texted “omg copyright that”. I registered a domain nameinstead.

A silly fake web site

This was a good opportunity for me to build http://museumindustrialcomplex.com. (There should really be a good name for silly fake websites.) I host the site using the GitHub Pages feature of my GitHub account, and I’ve made the repository public.

It’s a straightforward static website. Large blocks of content are written in Markdown which is included into a Pug (formerly Jade) template. This is all put together with a simple suite of Gulp tasks which build styles and compile HTML into a single page website. I had played with flex box layout and writing super minimal JavaScript without a framework. I played a little bit with the window.requestAnimationFrame api. It felt good to stretch my web design legs for fun. All the imagery are SVGs which are my very-favorite form of internet media.

Error 601: Wrong part of town

I wrote the site imagining a cabal of art historians and curators meeting at a large conference table. They would sit under the conference table instead of at it because, you know, artists. This shadowy group would conspire on how best to spend donations from the rich and tax dollars from the government while persuading the potentially art loving public that they should never buy or love anything. Because that would be wrong. I imagined this group selling their services to the ultra rich, guaranteeing their social and cultural status for a price. These folks would need a website.

I included a snarky contact form which only rejects you. I needed some other effect. I thought about having the text become unreadable on mouseover, or the “arty” graphics obscure your view. Finally, I had the text fade away slowly leaving nothing but a tombstone.

Shawna
ProCreate for iPad Pro

Last Thursday our figure model was just excellent. She came to the studio with a clear vision in mind of the pose she wanted to, and held it, rock steady, for 20 minutes at a time, over the entire three hours.

She laid across one arm - the studio lights on her right caught the underside of her jaw and neck, illuminating the orbits of her eyes.

I started out intending to do an hour of warm up drawing. I chose the soft pastel brush and a palette of grey. After an hour went by I kept drawing the entire three hours. I guess I wanted a break from color.

I nailed down the placement of her features fairly well early on, but it wasn’t until the last 20 minutes or so that I really got the tone of the mouth correct - where the upper lip is lit from beneath, casting a shadow upwards to the nose.

A timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly doodle created in Lina for iPad

A couple of weeks ago I was my morning train to work, tired and stressed. I didn’t want to nap on the train so I decided to close my eyes and try to focus on my breathing. It is very hard to keep random thoughts from trespassing your mind. I did ok for a bit. As I was starting to feel more rested, I recalled an image from a Nova series called Fabric of the Cosmos. The host, Brian Greene, had this great visualization of space time. He showed space time as an expanding loaf, pinched to a point at one end. The point is the Big Bang. The loaf expands forward into the future away from the Big Bang. His loaf visualizes space in two dimensions - across the width and height of the loaf, while time traverses the length.

One point of this exercise was to demonstrate that the past and future are all "real" or "there" just like all of space is real and there). This a sobering and somehow comforting idea. Moments I experienced are not gone. They’re just behind me in a 4th dimensional space time loaf.

I thought about the concept of a light cone. This is the idea that a pulse of light radiating away from you can only potentially affect things ahead of you in a region space time reachable at the speed of light. It sort of carves out a region in space and time that you can influence causally. This is hard to visualize. Imagine space and time are reduced to only height and width (2 dimensions, x and y) and now time is depth or your 3rd dimension. Now in three dimensions, the light cone points at you, and opens away from you to the future. Everything inside the cone is everything you can potentially experience, see, touch, or change. You also have a past light cone behind you which defines the region of space time in the past which could have had an affect on you now.

I thought about time travel and the grandfather paradox. The idea time travel to the past is impossible because it breaks causality. If you can return to the past, you can prevent something from happening that allowed you to get you to the past. For example, you build a time machine and go back to stop yourself from getting into the time machine. How did you get back there if you never left?

Steven Hawking illustrated this by hosting a time traveler party. He planned a date for the party in the past. Hawking sent out invitations to future time travelers (to attend the party in the past). So far there are no reports of time travelers at this party.

I realized that in Brian Green’s space time loaf a light cone might be more like a ripple in a four dimensional pond. Events in space time ripple forward as water does when a pebble is dropped. If you drop a pebble into a pond, it makes a ripple. If you drop a second pebble into a pond in the same place you make a new ripple,which never catches the first.

So what if a time traveler went back in time to Stephen Hawking's party? That event would ripple forward, affecting change ahead of it. But the leading edge of that light cone will never catch up to the ripples caused by the previous version of of the time travel party. The past is changed, but it can never interfere with the present, because the present is riding a light cone of the “original past”. There are no paradoxes, no multiple universes or “timelines” - just concentric ripples of in space time that never touch.

I’ve been bitten by the minimalist bug. I am trying, here and there, to get rid of things that I know I don’t use. I have a lot of art books. I have either read them all, or I have flipped through and soaked up all of the pictures. They have laid unopened for years. They are no longer a source of inspiration. I am not a historian, so my books are not reference materials. They’re just trophies which I carefully pack and lug each time I move. They are so unused that in one I found a ticket stub from “Jurassic World” from May of 1997 serving as a bookmark.

I traded in one old art book on Amazon - but the others are so old or have been replaced with subsequent editions that they have no value. But books store guilt between their pages and I can’t imagine dumping them in the recycling bin. Perhaps my local used bookstore would want them?

For a moment I had a clever thought. What if I just bought digital copies of the books I really like and recycle or donate the rest? I could “keep” the books without keeping them. Digital things take up no space and weigh very little.

So I went searching at Amazon and the iBook store and found…very little. You can find some works by critics (at absurd prices) but very few catalogs of artists’ work. Strange. I searched the Apple App Store and found very little there as well. I found a few opportunistic apps which collected public domain images and sold them as a bundle in an app. There is the beautiful App-edition of “Interaction of Color by Josef Albers” - but really it’s an art desert otherwise.

This makes some sense when you consider the complexities of copyright law. A museum might love to make their collection available in App form or on the web - but while the museum owns the art, they rarely own the copyright. Or the copyright is held by a donor. Securing authorization to reproduce piles of art work in an app has got to be an expensive and daunting task. So they just don’t do it. There may also be some snobbery at play too.

So why don’t contemporary artists publish the app store? Technical limitations? The lack of a universal ‘content management system’ for apps? I did some more searching for art on app stores - and I stumbled across this “ArtApp” project: [www.artapp.org](http://www.artapp.org). They have published a few open letters to Apple executives on (of course) Medium here and here.

The gist is that they want an “Art” category in the Apple App Store to bucket all the art things together. The Josef Albers app I mentioned above lives under “Education”. The ArtApp website lists some art apps (apps as an artwork) - and they find themselves under “Entertainment” or “Games” or even “Health and Fitness”. Sure, why not?

I suspect that post-internet artists making zany health apps have no interest in being dropped into an Art category because that’s not the point. Read the history of Apple, and you’ll find that Jobs and company saw themselves as artists. The Mac is a work of art from their perspective. I’d bet Phil Schiller considers every app on the app store a work of art. How is Kim Kardashian’s “game” (where you simulate her rise to fame) not art?

Well the answer to that question is of course, that the art world hasn’t sanctioned it as such, so it doesn’t count as “Art” even if it’s indistinguishable in any meaningful way.

Acrylic on birch panel 10” × 8” July 8, 2017

There’s a great little cocktail bar and restaurant on J Street in Tacoma, in the Hilltop neighborhood. Rose is a bartender there and she is mighty. She is blonde and striking. Tall and intimidating. She’s a Tacoma native and makes a good martini. One night in April, Caroline and I walked to the bar on J street, through the Hilltop neighborhood, about one mile from our home.

As we left the sun was just setting and clouds were rolling in. I snapped a couple of photos. Next to the bar is a great, empty lot. Maybe three lots. From J Street you can see all the way over to Martin Luther King Way.

There are a lot of empty lots in Hilltop. If we were walking down that same street in 1984, we would have been taking our lives into our hands. This Wikipedia entry vaguely refers to real estate development efforts as part of why Hilltop is a safe place to live again. I’ve heard from locals that drug dens and buildings owned by delinquent landlords were seized by the government and bulldozed. This forced the criminal element out, to the north and south.

Today you will often find a driveway cut into the sidewalk, or a staircase leading to nothing. These empty lots are eerie but they open up views across the neighborhoods. As Tacoma gentrifies - and it is - I’m sure these lots will just get eaten up by terrible condos and other heartless architecture.

Process

This painting was a do-over. I had started another image on the other side of this birch panel. Another image that I had lost all love for and was plodding along like it was a homework assignment. I got wise, flipped the panel over, and made this painting instead. Art should never be a drudgery unless you are paid handsomely for it.

Birch panel is a great surface to paint on. Leave it un-primed and it takes up paint like a water color - but then you can build density and thickness on top.

Laying in the clouds. My new palette on the left.

I’m using a new Masterson Palette - a magical device which keeps your acrylic paints mixed and workable for a very long time. This is a game-changer. I was able to keep a palette mixed and workable over two painting sessions. This makes my work process so much faster. So much less clean up and rework. Just snap off the lid and go.

Sky and grass - blocking in the buildings.

I sketched the scene from my reference photos right onto the panel and laid in clouds first, followed by the empty field, then laid in the street and details last. I tried to imply a tiny bit of graffiti on the far wall with a few dabs of color. I left out some superfluous cars and trees in favor of windows and doors - human elements.

How big is a digital image? Yes.  

I have been thinking about scale in art. Not within a picture, but of the picture itself. All of my recent paintings have been very small; each under 12" in size. Drawings or paintings which I make on my iPad really have no scale. If I view an image on my phone it is tiny, but on my TV it is huge. I could project them on a wall, or print them on a billboard. Their scale is arbitrary.

There is an old art school joke: “if you can't paint it well, paint it big. If you can't paint it big, paint it red.”

Making a big thing is always impressive no matter how terrible it is. Like the portion sizes at Denny’s, bigger is better even if it’s garbage. But if that fails, you can use the color of blood to trigger an emotional connection.

I think this is still true in gallery circles. But those circles are tiny dots when viewed from street level.

In America, the smartphone has redefined pictorial scale. Height and width is now approximately 3" by 5" inches. But depth! Depth is infinite.

Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, are all infinitely deep. There's alway more that you missed, there's always more when you refresh. Always.

Artists who have successful Instagram accounts never stop producing. It's a constant stream or an infinitely deep well you can lose yourself in, one tiny square picture at a time.

When art lovers go to a museum they capture what they see and share it with their phones. The grand scale of a Pollock is reduced to an index card flowing by in the infinite stream.

Anything an artist creates now must work on this new scale or it won't be seen.

Breakfast
ProCreate for iPad Pro

When I’m awake, and the train is not too crowded, I like to doodle desktop wallpapers on my iPad. It’s a good excuse to play with different styles of making images. Mostly I’ve been making abstractions - either from repeating shapes or motifs or from big geometric ideas.

After reading an article on Modigliani forgeries, I was feeling very modernist. I was thinking about leisurely, sleepy breakfasts. I created the above sketchy piece with all of that in mind. I like how preserving the geometry of a thing makes it readable - the circular plate, the round eggs, bacon is a rectangle. They are flat to the picture plane, as if drawn from above - but still read as “on” a table and “in front” of the figure.

Out
ProCreate for iPad Pro

The next was less geometric but more bold with color. I didn’t follow strict geometries, instead sort of just following an instinctive composition. I realized after I was done that this reminded me lots of a musician I drew as a teenager. It also looks a lot like drawing “errors” I would make when drawing from life - elongated features and heavy emphasis on edges and lines. I suspect that people have an intrinsic, natural, way of visualizing things by hand, much like a signature or handwriting.

Houseplant
ProCreate for iPad Pro

Finally I took inspiration from a house plant with long dangling runners which are seeking the floor and a possible escape route. I’m not as happy with the composition here - but I am happy with the color and texture. This desktop makes my phone look like lush atrium in a hotel in the 1970s.

It’s so easy to get distracted. We had a vacation We left town for Mother’s Day. We left town for Memorial Day. Our office moved from one floor to another. My job quickly cycled through two bosses leaving me as newly minted, untrained manager. I missed two Thursday night drawing sessions in a row. I’ve drawn and painted so much less in the last month. My work table is set up and ready to go with nothing started. I have lost momentum.

My family arrives in town tomorrow for a visit. But today, I am free. The studio which hosts my Thursday night drawing session has a model session this afternoon. I will go. I am finally getting back to the blog with an anemic update.

Once you’ve fallen off the horse, the horse keeps moving. It gets farther and farther up the road and harder to catch.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2048.0"]<img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/790ab74d53.jpg" alt=" Painted with ProCreate for iPad Pro  For this image I built most of the image using the fat, square "paint roller" brush. This force me to think in large sculptural shapes, instead of fiddling with tiny paint strokes.&nbsp; "/>  Painted with ProCreate for iPad Pro  For this image I built most of the image using the fat, square "paint roller" brush. This force me to think in large sculptural shapes, instead of fiddling with tiny paint strokes.&nbsp; [/caption] 

In my last two figure drawing sessions I had decent success. I am starting to see color and form a bit better. I have started strategizing my color early. As the sun goes down, the light in the studio shifts dramatically. The blue-white light from the north-facing windows disappears and the yellow-orange incandescent spotlights take over. The two color schemes do not merge gracefully in my mind. So I try to begin early by selecting a palette of colors - then I try to ignore color and focus on value as I paint. I am trying to be a little more daring in my color choices - choosing a bright blue for highlights. Human skin is quite reflective and will pick up the color of any strong light shined on it. It’s counter-intuitive to think of blue skin - but it happens.

I follow a concept-artist on Instagram, Steve Jung. He works in the film industry. Recently he posted this excellent short tutorial: [www.instagram.com/p/BVO-PpV...](https://www.instagram.com/p/BVO-PpVFYXP).

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2400.0"]<img src="http://abouthalf.micro.blog/uploads/2018/fa00bde465.jpg" alt=" Painted with ProCreate for iPad Pro  Here I created a limited palette for the skin tone with one bold choice, a bright blue for the highlight on his left. There are some drawing problems around the eyes, and overall it's a poor likeness - but I'm happy with the color lighting effects on the hair and skin. "/>  Painted with ProCreate for iPad Pro  Here I created a limited palette for the skin tone with one bold choice, a bright blue for the highlight on his left. There are some drawing problems around the eyes, and overall it's a poor likeness - but I'm happy with the color lighting effects on the hair and skin. [/caption] 

He expertly demonstrates the sculptural nature of painting. From my better teachers in art school I was criticized for not actually painting - but filling in a drawing. I finally understood that recently and I’ve been trying to do a better job of thinking more sculpturally and less graphically. I think it’s starting to click.

Portrait of Gigi Procreate for iPad

Before the 10,000 hours cliché, one of my college painting instructors taught us that we have 50 bad paintings in us that we must expunge before we can get a good one.

If your portraits trigger facial recognition software, is that a good thing?

I think the statute of limitations on that runs out after about 10 years or so and you have to start over. I think also that it’s 50 per medium or style. Say you make 15 landscapes and 10 portraits; you’re not half way there. Just over a third.

8 skin tones and smudgy lips

I recalled that lesson last Thursday during open studio. I realized I’ve gotten about halfway to 50 with portraits on the iPad - and I can sense that I’m starting to turn the corner and reclaim the skills that I let atrophy.

This time around I focused on value and shape. I didn’t do a detailed sketch first. I just built up shapes and values. I started by building a palette of 8 skin tones. I took advantage of blending layers to bring in subtle reflected colors and reds. Better. It’s a solid C+.

Human beings have struggled long and hard to create a world with where you can stay dry and warm and look at kittens on the internet. But for some reason some people think it's a great idea to go sleep in a humid tent in the forest. The forest has no internet. It does have bugs.

My wife is one of these people who like camping. I love her, so I camp. I don't hate all of it. I like campfires and drinking wine in the dark. And I do get to take nice photos.

On Tuesday I tried to put my realization about digital color to work. I pulled up a photo of Caroline from a camping trip and referenced it to practice.

I spent several minutes just selecting six neutral skin tones that seemed to match what I saw in the photo. I chose desaturated colors for the highlights and richer browns for the shades. I didn't use these to paint directly, but I plucked out a pink and blue which I could see in reflected light and blushing skin around the cheeks and ears.

When painting I first concentrated on value and shape with my six skin tones. I used ProCreate's airbrush brushes for most of the blocking in, then switched to textured brushes to build up detail.

To get subtle colors, I painted on a new layer, set to the ”color” blend mode. This allowed me fold in tings and hues without making mud. I tried a similar approach to create highlights in the hair.

I'm looking forward to applying see techniques at my next figure drawing session.

I've been collecting photos to use as reference material for painting studies. I follow the website Shorpy which is a treasure box of old photos. Some are official photos taken of newly opened office buildings. Some are old vacation slides. Some are normal people doing normal things normally, just 50 years ago. It's pretty great. Most of the photos are black and white. Without color as a distraction, they make good subjects for training your eye to see shape, form, value, and line.

On Monday I pulled up this photo of a woman leaning from her apartment window for practice. I'm trying to break myself of needing to draw an image before painting the image. Drawing first does give me a good sense of structure, but the painting on top tends to feel flat, like I'm just coloring between the lines. A painting should really sculpt an image from blocks of color. Not there are no lines, it's that lines largely become edges. Shape is sculpted with value and color.

I'm pretty happy with this result. A strong likeness and a loose style without overworked fiddly details. In this painting I tried a new trick I learned from an artist on Instagram - when painting eyes, fill in the entire eye socket as shadow. This defines the overall recess which cradles the eye. Then build the eyelids on top. This makes it much easier to build out the roundness and depth of the eye. It's amazing how the eyes just pop out with this technique.

Egg study Painted with ProCreate for iPad Pro

Eggs and skulls. Artists need difficult subjects to train against, so along with figures painters will often study skulls and eggs. Interesting parallels between those two things. Hard shells protecting the gooey life within. Where’s my research grant? I’m pretty sure a workable thesis could come out of a study of artist’s images of eggs alone. Throw in skulls and you’ve got a whole career.

A while ago I stumbled across Scott Conakry’s work (via Metafilter). Later I remembered “eggs!” and added that to my pantry of still life doodles.

Eggs are so strange when you think about them - a giant, single cell. The yolk is the nucleus. When heated the entire thing sets into a translucent, semi-solid, quivering mass. Without the magic of eggs, we’d have no custard, no quiche, no crepe, no pancake. We’d have no meringue.

Eggs are difficult to capture - the egg shape isn’t really an oval - it’s rounder on one end - pointier on the other. The surface of the white is both reflective and transmissive of light. What you read is “white” but what you see is the color of the light in the room bounced back at you.

Also? Here’s an internet egg.

A sketch and a painting created in ProCreate

I shared some recent work from my Thursday night figure drawing session with a friend, explaining how I have been struggling with color.

ProCreate - and really most every digital painting or drawing tool - features a big color picker which allows for you to select a colors from a wheel or sliders and add them to a palette. This can be overwhelming. So many colors to choose from. It’s hard to reach in and simply pluck out the right color. Especially for skin. Skin is weird. Skin is translucent. So when blood is close to the surface the color changes. Think of cheeks and knuckles. Skin is reflective. Colors in the room bounce off skin creating unexpected highlights.

More colors pls.

Digital color pickers offer you millions of color choices - but the palettes themselves are limited. ProCreate’s palettes hold a mere 30 colors. Why not 50? Why not let me keep adding rows until I’m satisfied?

I was explaining to my friend that I find the physical process of building up color to be easier. Starting with a base color or tone and adding and adjusting till it’s correct. It’s an constructive process.

I’ve tried to do the same thing lately by having a separately layer free for smooshing around color. This works OK - you can’t really “blend” colors like you would on a palette - but you can overlay them with varying transparency to build up better selections.

I almost want my “palette” to be a separate ProCreate file, right under the color picker, with layers, and what not. Where I can select pure hues from the color picker and layer and blend them together.

The funny thing about explaining to my friend the problems I’ve been having with building color in ProCreate is that suddenly I realized one thing I have been doing wrong. (This is called “Rubber Ducking” in software development - explain the problem to a rubber duck and in the process of walking through the problem you often find the solution.)

I am treating pixels like paint. They are not not paint. Pixels are light. I am not taking advantage of the ways that light blends. I’m trying to force a paint-like approach where it doesn’t fit.

Digital imaging express color blends mathematically, by performing calculations on the numeric representations of colors, resulting in new colors. I have been thinking in analog. When blending paint, you lose saturation and color as you add more paint. Pigments are imperfect and contain impurities. The more physical colors you blend together, the more grey or brown the color becomes. You can use this to your advantage to create subtle grey and browns by adding a touch of this or that color. The same approach doesn’t work digitally. Because it’s not paint.

This is a stumbling block that I created for myself by doggedly pursing paint-like thinking in a world with mathematically calculated light.

Brussels Sprouts Digital painting created with ProCreate

Last week I posted a still life of Brussels sprouts to Instagram (along with work-in-progress).

My local grocery store had these usually pretty sprouts with a bit of purple in the leaves. I arranged a few on my countertop and took a reference photo for a still life. I completed the digital painting over the course of two train commutes to Seattle. As a caption I included my typical technique for cooking Brussels sprouts:

I like to brown them in butter then add a little salt and chicken stock, then finish in a hot oven.

My old friend Todd was a QA Engineer at a previous job and a culinary school survivor before that; Todd left a comment with his approach to Brussels sprouts:

I blanch mine - roast garlic first in clarified butter - strain the Brussels till they are dry (ya don't want steam) then salt em with the said butter and into the broiler - done in a flash with crispy edges!!!

And then Todd schooled me on cooking greens in the French fashion:

Blanching greens in general will make for even cooking and will brighten up veg - it's the French method I was taught in culinary school - I do the same with asparagus - but secondary cook on the grill or cast iron skillet - you can serve them hot or use cold on top of a green salad - pretty versatile really

I love that a simple, a picture of a vegetable triggers passions and memories.

“The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty” by Dave Hickey was originally published in 1993 - this would have been my first full year of college - and was reprinted not too terribly long ago in 2012. I just finished this edition.

Last week was a crummy week for being creative. I made it to my Thursday night drawing session, but tax season, work concerns, and just regular old life took precedence. But I did finish this book.

Finishing a damn book seems like something deserving of a gold star and a pat on the head anymore. I involuntarily squint and glare when I think of my train buddies who all sit together and chatter on loudly when I’m obviously reading. What’s wrong with people that they prefer noisy human interaction to an hour of quiet solitude?

I knew of Dave Hickey. I recall reading some of “Air Guitar“ a million years ago and found it resonant. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t become a Hickey disciple in college or grad school - I would have had critical ammunition for my angst and given my professors ulcers.

Once in a while you find someone who can express what you feel, what you know to be true, but lack the vocabulary to articulate. And what a vocabulary! It’s not often I find myself looking up multiple words in a paragraph. I like to think I’m pretty smart. (Just ask me). But it’s humbling and inspiring to read Hickey.

“The Invisible Dragon” opens with the accidental blurting “beauty” in response to a question at a panel discussion and concludes by framing the American principle that the self-evidently true right to the pursuit of happiness, in the form of beauty, is itself fundamental.

Here’s a quote:

The beaux-arts agora that provided a site for arguing about our likes and likenesses is relocated deep in the wilderness of popular culture. The beaux-arts historical project of saving everything we ever loved just stops. We lose the object, our sophistication, and the pleasure we once took in outfitting official virtue in the clown suit of folly—the very emblem of civilized sedition. Word walls arise to water-board works of art with verbiage and stunt their life expectancies. The amateurs who built those halls of culture, who filled them with treasures, are relegated to the dark past, their passions relinquished into the custody of philistine colonizers for use in outreach projects to the skateboard community.

Hickey drew me in with his mockery and dismemberment the tedious, preachy, prescriptive, art-school nonsense which sucked all the joy from being a creative person. He keeps me by appealing to my patriotism, democracy, and freedom. This is a book I need to re-read.