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

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?

Cat's Defense

Playing chess is fun, yet this can be a tricky game for most grownups.
And when you are going through your early matches the help of four eyes to spot the consequences of your move can be a real blessing - four eyes see better than two, don't they.
What better help then than a skilled hunter like Felicia, with a proverbial, superior sight, to set up an unbeatable defense?

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

Mindgames

An exercise on bichromy, based on a ink drawing made this summer.
The idea of restricting the palette to just two colours - black and yellow - come from "5 is the perfect number", an outstanding graphic novel created by Igort.

Ink drawing and Photoshop Coloring, 33x24 cm
Click on image to enlarge

The fun of drawing

Hats off, this is the most creative game of the year!

Line Rider is a little Flash game, created by fsk as a project for an illustration class.

It is a magical balance between semplicity and cleverness, and it is a great fun to play. I showed it to the kids, and I could not get hold of my laptop for almost the whole weekend, while they were playing it again and again and laughing almost to fall off their chairs.

The game, like fsk says, is really "all about drawing", which is way I wanted to write a post about it instead showing my stuff as usual.

Just draw a line with a pencil and click the start button: a tiny man on a sledge, complete with a hat and a red scarf, starts sliding on the line, following the peaks and troughs, accelerating and decelerating and jumping over the moguls when he is fast enough.

Carefully, though, because riding the line is riskful, and it takes the slightest glitch of the track to crash dramatically.

But you can change the slope drawing a landing ramp to accompany the jump, adjusting the trough to make it shallower, so that the crash is avoided and then the ride can continue adding a new line to the track. And then add a new line, and then another one. Then start over again, testing the idea you just got about a new slope or a new jump (all right - Line Rider is really addictive - try it yourself).

It's the art: gloomy Marco

Probably it is the long time I need to obtain a decent resemblance, but when I am drawing a portrait from a real life model instead of starting from a photo, I always obtain a sad and gloomy look, completely unlikely the mood of the subject.
Fortunately the only model I can keep still in the same position for a couple of hours is myself, although the result is an odd face like this where I look as if my cat just decided to leave this valley of sorrow.
So instead of taking it as a basis for a brilliant self-portrait like the ones of Albrecht Durer, I used this drawing to play around a bit with Photoshop and see if I could learn something about layers and colouring.
I think that Photoshop and the like will represent for the visual art of the 21th century a dramatic change in medium as oil painting was during the Renaissance, we just need another van Eyck to show us how to.
Pencil on paper and Adobe Photoshop layers, 24x33 cm
(Click on image to enlarge)

It's the art: portrait of Clara

This sketch was the basis for an oil portrait that kept me busy for many weekends.
The grey tone of the paper is not quite right (it should be white) despite my efforts with Photoshop.

(Click to enlarge the image)
Pencil on paper
33x48 cm

I am back!

After a few years of leave I went back to the tatami (and so did Elena).
As we are getting back into martial art shape I fancied that my old pages should be refreshed a bit. The logical decision was to turn everything into a blog.
A sketchblog, actually. I also got back to the drawing board, this will be also my online portfolio.



I kept the links to the old material still carrying some interest (the early keyboard instrument collection, san da and the shaolin temple) leaving the pages unchanged. The pictures are rather low quality and their size is appropriate to the bandwidth of the 90s. I will scan them again and will add some video clip.