Shodan!

Yesterday I received my shodan black belt in karate!



It was a long journey, started as far as 1981. When I gave up with karate long time ago I thought it was for good. But as they say, karate-do no shugyo wa isssho de aru, it will take you entire life to learn karate.
And Oscar Sensei got my name embroidered in katakana on the black belt!

Felicitas 2008

A portrait of my favourite model, in her usual morning stance.
The print in the background is M.C. Escher "Earth" woodcut, that he made on commission for Eugene & Wily Strens, friends and print collectors, as holiday gifts for New Year 1956. Actually the writing behind Felicia is "Felicitas 1953"

Indian ink on paper, 24x33cm
Click on image to enlarge

Sleeping Elena

Elena drifting peacefully in a sea of calmness.

Watercolors on paper, 33x24cm
Click on image to enlarge

Etretat

From the time we went to Normandie and Bretagne.
Elena standing on the chalky beach of Etretat in a sort of Hokusai-c atmosphere.

Ink drawing and Photoshop painting, 33x24cm
Click on image to enlarge

I fiddled with a pencil drawing of this since last summer, then boldy decided to ink it "so to stop changing it", then scanned into Photoshop and painted with the Old Man Mad with Painting in mind. Does not really feel like it. Maybe it's old Photoshop being a medium too cold?

A manifesto for postdigital art

I placed online the manifesto for postdigital art, the new frontier, the break-throught that will change visual arts like oil-painting did in the 15^th century.

Not simply using digital tools to draw and paint, but to find the new artistic value beyond the doors that these tools are opening.

For this purpose I created a dedicated site www.not-oilpainted.org, which so far contains only the manifesto; and will be my gallery for the explorations in the uncharted territories of postdigital art. As soon as I find the time ...

100 Photoshop Tutorials

I try to use this space to discuss only my own material, but the collection of Photoshop tutorials I found while browsing Charley Parker's blog Lines and Colors is so interesting that I need to link it.



This collection of 100 Photoshop tutorials (for Creating Beautiful Art) gathers a number of techniques that can be applied when painting in digital, keeping in a single place enough knowledge to give me ideas and keep me experimenting for the rest of 2008 (thank you Charley!).

Chromatic Warming #1

An exercise on Sierpinski carpet and Klee's "Pedagogical Sketchbook" from the Bauhaus years.

Digital collage, or sampling in drawing

I was not too happy with this drawing of Anna casting a glance of challenge I made months ago, the colours of the background were too soft and Felicia's tuxedo fur not black enough.
I am also curious on exploring the path of digital collage, and keen of learning more on my new Wacom Tablet. So I cut out Anna's portrait, and drew again the background complete with Felicia practicting Taijiquan with the tablet.

Armony in 4 colours # 1

One of the many reasons why digital painting is superior to any traditional media is the ability to assign colours to the exact hue, shade or tint that you want to use.
While getting used with my Wacom tablet I wanted to try some of the colour armonies that Johannes Itten described in his book on the Art of Colour.



This is a combination of Photoshop's Pen Tool, a 4-colour armony of complementary couples, and Elena's profile raising the saturation of the drawing.

The revolution will not be oil-painted

After a long discussion with the Master of the Temple I decided to get a Wacom tablet to explore the prairies of digital painting.

I chose a Wacom Bamboo: not expensive like the professional Intuous serie, and with good technical specs to try some serious step into digital illustration: The drawing area is about a half A4 sheet, the pen has 512 levels of pressure and an accuracy of +/- 0.5 mm.



I played with it a bit, and I decided to create a new site dedicated to my digital paintings. In these days I am designing the layout, and I am writing my art manifesto: because the revolution will not be oil-painted!