We’re getting Older.

It was supposed to be “New Art Wednesday” here, at least that’s what I told myself, but I let it slip. Doesn’t matter, because here I am now, with another project. This one was finished Tuesday morning, the assignment was to use the power of Photoshop and Painter to take someones portrait and age that person. I started out with a picture of the spectacled, yellow-tied man on this webpage.

What I ended up with was what I have posted on this webpage. Originally I was going to do the extra work and make it a color portrait. But after doing the black and white value study I found that it looked pretty kick-ass that way. It also added to the “aged” effect of the project. So I saved the extra color work for never.

My process was to take pictures of three old men, and then with photoshop make a composite “old-man” mask on top of the original picture. I adjusted the composite so that the eyes, brow, width of the mouth, and nose were at the same place. When capturing likenesses, the eyes, brow, lips and nose, both their placement and size are very important. Then I opened the photshop image in painter and in a new layer painted the thing, referencing my composite in photoshop.

Shackles.

The bonus drawing is from my clothed figure drawing class. The bonus drawing started as the thumbnail you see to the right. Before I finished people assumed that I was going for some kind of S & M thing, they were in for a surprise. My mind isn’t always in the gutter like the rest of America. It’s in the sewers. Pardon the imperfect quality of the image, but since it’s “Bonus” material I did the best I could with a camera, which is not much but good enough.

What’s to look at?

When I look at the drawing I posted today, I smile, because even though I drew the thing I have to try and figure out where the details came from. Sort of like trying to find the meaning in a weird dream.

This is because even though most of the big elements of the composition were thought out in my sketches, which I have also posted, I came up with everything else as I tried to fill in the empty spaces in the composition.

Drama!

The houses, suburbia, are an image and concept that has been on my mind. I don’t like suburbia. The houses, hunched together yet isolated from each other and far from their food sources make me mad. The crevice that is expanding and eating away at the suburbs probably comes from watching a documentary on people building beach houses that fall victim to errosion, then building houses near the same place again. The penguins marching along, from who knows where, are cool. I like penguins, I think most people do, cause penguins just don’t give a shit.

B & W

The wild mouthed tractor going to fame from no fame is my depiction of a lack inhibition.

The flying ship is an homage to the MAD blimp thing that would float around the pages of MAD magazine, an artist and reader in-joke.

I don’t know if the blimp thing still makes appearances. I wanted to draw it though, and it took plenty of false starts to get it drawn convincingly in Isometric Perspective.

Where Ideas are Fleshed out.

The second part to this assignment was to take markers to the drawing and put in shading.

First shade it to like sunlight, then shade it to look like light is coming from one point within the drawing. The drawings I posted here do not look like the originals, these have had their contrast upped in photoshop because they needed it. Yeah, I still have a problem with value in my compositions, I’m working to fix this. In the meantime, Enjoi.