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!

Song of Myself part 1

"I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"
Walt Whitman

Ink drawing and Photoshop colouring
(Click on image to enlarge)

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

Tobiyokogeri graffiti

For this kick I started from a couple of pictures of Elena, I wanted to work from a model (with some trick to make her fly...).
I made 3 versions of this drawing: the paintbrush and Indian ink sketch, a Photoshop colored line art, and this digital graffiti. I am posting the latter because I think it looks better, and it is also another attempt to use digital painting in a non-canonical way.

Photoshop digital painting
Click on image to enlarge

The tiger in the background is the classic logo of shotokan karate, painted by Japanese artist Hoan Kosugi.

Elena with double swords graffiti

Another Photoshop graffiti, this time with Elena soloing with double katanas.
The "inspiration" is a drawing of Psylocke by Jim Lee from an X-men graphic novel, which I modified to reflect Elena's face and body.

Photoshop digital painting
Click on image to enlarge

As always when copying a master this was a good learning experience, I really saw how complex and sofisticated is the graphic work contained in these comic books.

I applied almost completely the instructions of Melissa Clifton's tutorial on Colouring Line Art. I am quite happy with the final drawing, although I think that for the purpose of making digital graffiti I'd better use a less refined picture to provide a more spraycan-like feeling.

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: 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)

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.