It's the art: Felicia

This is the smallest oil painting I made since I went back to the paintbrushes about 5 years ago. It is a portrait of Felicia, our cat. For some reasons I tend to look down on small formats, as if they are not worth the effort. So it takes me forever to complete a painting, I am not able to finish more than 2 or 3 per year.

Oil on cardboard, 18x24cm (Click on image to enlarge)

Then I read Karin Jurick's "One paint a day" blog, which struck me with its freshness and original perception of everyday event. Karin's paintings are of a small size - in general 15x15 cm, and they have a zen-like immediacy that make them look as if they were painted with a few, spotless strokes. And they are done in few hours!

So I decided to test myself with a smaller format, still it took me about 3 days to complete it and I am far away from Karin's level. Quite an interesting exercise though, I will experiment more on this.

Sanda basic takedowns

Another interesting video clip on sanda takedowns. It is clearly taken from a Chinese instructional video and it shows all the fundamental techniques, performed with different speeds and seen from different view angles.

Caveat: some of these will not really work unless there is a significant technical gap between the opponents.

Sanda takedowns from the World Championship in Macau 2003

Martials arts cannot be described by text, they are inherently a performance that can be captured only (and still only partially) by a video. This is one of the reasons why when I begun training around 1981 the only "real" things available were judo and karate, the rest being quite made up from cheap kung fu and ninja movies. There was no way to assess the reality of what passed for kung fu, and nobody could go to China to check.



Nowadays video clipping services such as Google Video and YouTube contain a lot of interesting footage that can be immediately shared. For example, this clip from the World Championship in Macau, 2003 is a good collection of sanda takedowns performed by top level athlets

It's the (martial) art: Elena vs. Marco virtual spraycan

While I fancied about drawing another virtual spraycan picture on the facade of my house like this, I decided to experiment with Photoshop instead of going through the lenghty preparation that watercolors or oil painting nee. With the little free time I have, completing a watercolor takes me at least 3 days and an oil painting almost 3 months.

This time I was driven by 3 ideas:

1) doing graffiti - the truly postmodern art - without looking silly at my age
2) learning more Photoshop, that I believe can be the new leading medium in visual arts after 6 centuries of oil painting
3) drawing Elena and myself fighting, always a funny subject

Photoshop digital painting
Click on image to enlarge

So I made a quick, rough sketch, took a snapshot of it with my Nokia camera, and fired up Photoshop.

Then I followed a great tutorial by Melissa Clifton about colouring line art. I read a few tutorials, but Melissa's is the best because it gives a concrete and practical approach, without leaving out the details and supporting difficult points with accurate, step-by-step explanations.

I also discussed with the Master of the Temple the results, and he gave me useful suggestions on how to tune the lights and the shadows. In deed, the blending of the graffiti with the background picture was a bit odd because of the different reflection given by the metal framework and the glasses.

I quite like the final picture, Photoshop graffiti is an interest subject to investigate. But it is not a shortcut - it took me about 3 days to complete.

It's the art: Clara's portrait

This time I wanted to study the techniques that Albrecht Durer used in his painting, following the instructions I found in Joseph Sheppard's "How to paint like the old masters".

Albrecht Durer is one of the great masters I like most, and the picture begun from a solid, accurately sketched drawing in Indian ink, to be coloured with layers of colors. This increases my confidence, because when the layers of colours start to grow and the underlying sketch is gone my painting gets a bit messy.


Once the portrait was completed I was not satisfied with the yellow ocra background, and decided to add Pimpa, the comics character that Clara liked most. But still, despite my efforts, this is quite different from Albrecht Durer. What will be his secret?

(Oil on Canvas, 40x50cm - click on image to enlarge)