Mood:
crushed outTopic: art in progress
When I start a painting I start badly. What saves the final work is rough draft after rough draft.
I wanted to do a picture of "The Lady" who I mentioned yesterday. She is an African woman dressed in white. Her dress is all lace and antiquated. Her posture is stiff, her deminor is grave and elegant.
Next, what was needed was a place to put the Lady in. She needed a background and perhaps another figure in the painting.
Imagining a male nude is one thing, to draw it I always use a photographic reference. I have a small art library at home. Usually there is never a photograph of exactly what I want so I use multiple photographs and rather morph them together; an arm from here, a back from there, a foot from somewhere else.
This pose was proving particularly difficult. So I asked Mike for help. On his computer is an artificial picture maker called "Poser". In Poser the human figure can be twisted and turned, mounted, muscles pumped up, pulled at with gravity, and the light source manipulated. Using this sketch I asked Mike to make the same pose in Poser and print it out on a piece of paper.
What I got was a great reference for correct proportion. Poser is a library of human anatomy ratios. While figures are turned in three dimentional space the perspective of the nude is continuously corrected.
It is rather like playing with a doll in your computer. Mike is particularly good at the program because it relies upon mathmatical instinct. The method of using the program is not like a video game where, as you move a stick, so the figure rotates and moves. There are a lot of numbers to be manipulated in the Poser program; and Mike is good at numbers.
Finally I was ready to put "The Lady" in an appropriate setting. What is appropriate for someone from the spirit world? This is what my imagination came up with. Beauty and wisdom in a savage place.
