Flashback - My fantasy phase

Okay, I will admit that these drawings are a little strange.  But, they are part of the story, so there you go.
I have a hard time remembering when I did these drawings. I am pretty sure I did them during high school. Strange how we can't remember things like this. I believe that it was shows like The Dark Crystal and The Labyrinth that inspired these.  I showed these to my kids and now they think I am weird. But, I decided one day I wanted to try drawing strange creatures. I think at one point I was going to make a story about them, but it never got further than drawing these few. So, I played around with some ideas, and this is what my mind came up with:

 I think this guy was supposed to just be a nice friendly guy, though he isn't smiling.

 This one looks worried to me. He actually reminds me of someone I know.

 This is a warrior or something.

And this is supposed to be the wise old leader. Except that recently I noticed that he has something (blood?) dripping from his mouth. I have no idea what that is supposed to be, because I have always thought of him as this kind wise creature. 

So there you go, a chance to see into my strange teen-age mind  :)

Trying new faces

Now that I have done portraits of my children, I wanted to see how hard (or easy) it would be doing faces of people I don't know as well.  It started with this portrait:

This drawing is of a dear friend of ours who passed away in October. I debated even putting it on this blog, because I SO don't want this particular drawing to be about me (hey look at me, look what I did) but since the purpose of this blog is to document what art I have done, and this blog is primarily for me, I am putting it. I was SO nervous about giving this to them - what if it didn't look like him? I think I spent twice as long on it too, trying to get every last detail in, and have it be accurate. They were very happy with the gift, and that made me happy. I realized I like doing art that has some meaning for people. 

So, having tried a face of someone who doesn't live with me, I offered to a friend of mine to try drawing her children, making no guarantees, but I wanted to try other faces. I learned a few things.

1. It is very nerve-wracking to draw someone else's kids (family members, etc) because I just don't know if I have it right

2. Blond hair is really hard to do on a white background (though I like this "clean" look on these portraits)

3. I want to keep trying, because I really like doing portraits.

My friend has four children, but I have not done the other two yet. I will post them when they are done.

Mr. Brushwood

In High School, I had two art teachers - Mr. Brushwood (yes, what a perfect name for an art teacher) and Mr. King, which fit him too. I felt that he believed he was God's gift to mankind. More on him later though. I really liked Mr. Brushwood. Unfortunately, in our high school, art was where you put the potential dropouts and people who couldn't handle anything too terribly academic. Then, there were 3-4 of us who sat at one table and actually did art. The rest of the class goofed off, got in trouble, and made life difficult for Mr. Brushwood and those of us who wanted to learn how to do art.  One time, I was doing a very intricate drawing of a seashell - a very fragile shell - and a boy in the class picked it up and threw it for no reason. It broke. I had to try to glue it back together to finish my drawing. I did manage to finish it before the shell fell apart. It is one of my favorites from school.

Mr. Brushwood actually taught me quite a bit and let me try various mediums. He was very patient with me - sometimes I was a bit stubborn. For example - this drawing here:

I think this might have been one of the first drawings of people that I did (it was done in April of 1988). I know it was the first one I liked. It came from an ad in a magazine - send 5 cents a day to help this poor starving child.  I drew the picture and signed it and told Mr. Brushwood that I was done. Well, he said that I did a good job, but that I needed to put some kind of background, or at least A ground for her to stand on. Otherwise she was just floating in the air. Nope. I wouldn't do it. Now I know that he was right and why he was trying to teach me this concept, but at the time I would not draw one more single line on this drawing. I argued with him a lot over this silly drawing. It seems so dumb now, but I was SO scared that if I added anything to this, I would surely ruin it, and I really liked it the way it was, so I stubbornly refused to do anything to it. I still laugh when I look at this drawing. What is even more stupid is that I covered it with contact paper "to preserve it" which made it turn yellow and now nothing at all could be added to it, even if I wanted to. I covered a few drawings with contact paper, much to my teacher's horror (and mine now). But, I didn't know about fixative and other forms or preservation, so that seemed like the best thing to do. My shell drawing is covered, but with it is a fingerprint that I didn't see in time (you can't see it in the above photo, but you can probably see the glare). I didn't cover any more after that. :)

I am glad I had Mr. Brushwood as a teacher though. Especially when, later, I ended up with Mr. King. He wasn't as helpful to me, which made me appreciate Mr. Brushwood even more.

Yellowstone Falls

Flashback - Some of my stranger pieces

I am not a big fan of modern art. I can respect a modern artist if I know that they had artistic skills, but I have a hard time with certain types of art work because to me, anyone could do it. They just had the idea first, and got to make tons of money off of it. But, I suppose everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I know there are people who disagree with me on this.
That being said, I did like to try things that were atypical. I really liked Salvador Dali (until I found out what a creepy man he is). He did the paintings of the clocks that look like they are melting over corners and stuff like that.  I like the idea of taking something usual and doing something unusual with it. So, I came up with this idea. I still think it is a fun painting, though the quality is somewhat lacking. (It is cracked and lumpy in places and the cloth isn't very accurate).  But, the idea is kind of fun. I was just thinking of the transition from night to day and day to night. Really, it could go either way on this - it all depends on how you see it.  Though, I was (am) a huge fan of sunsets, so this is probably more of that than a sunrise. Really, it is up to you.

 

 Also, the more I got into art, the more I realized that I saw things differently. Ordinary things became a potential drawing. I saw light and shadows that I hadn't noticed before.  I have found this happening again recently, more so than usual, because of the drawings I have been doing. I see color and shading and shapes that I hadn't really paid attention to before. So, I decided I wanted to do a piece that showed the world from an artist's perspective. I took an ordinary picture - it was actually a photo from an outdoor mall in San Diego, and I portioned it off into sections that represent how different artists might see the world as they look at it. 

I had a photoshop file that labeled all of the parts, but the file was too big and I would have had to redo it, so I will just explain the probably obvious sections.  The top left, done in abnormal colors and abnormal shapes, including the abnormal people on the balcony, is a Picasso-esque view.  The top right is supposed to be the "just as it is, realistic" view.  Just below that, still on the right, is how it would be viewed broken down into simple shapes.  The black and white  middle is supposed to be how  either a photographer would see it (who likes black and white) or how one might see it with lights and darks and shadows, not paying attention to color so much. To the left of that is how someone might sketch it.  The bottom left is also supposed to be realistic, and then the bottom right is more cartoon-like. I titled it "Artist's World"

These were both done while I was in high school. Unfortunately, I do not have accurate dates - I just remember doing this at my home in my bedroom.  I am pretty sure the bottom one was done in 1989 or 1990 because I know when the picture was taken (that I drew from).

Flashback - well, that's one way around it

From time to time I am going to post some of my old art work on here. I do this mainly for me because there are stories that sometimes go with them, and it is fun for me to look back at the things I used to do. So, this first post is about one way I solved a dilemma.
I like drawing people. I had forgotten how much I liked it until I looked through my old art and found many, many drawings of people. I will post a couple of them in here at some point. But, most of them are not good. Really. I am completely serious and honest here. They are disproportionate and just look.. weird. But I like the subject of people. One of my favorite artists ever is Norman Rockwell because I love that his paintings tell stories about people's lives. He puts so much emotion and words into a wordless picture.
At some point along my journey I decided that I just couldn't draw people. Sure, I still dabbled in it a bit, but I never had any formal instruction and didn't know what I was doing, so it was pure guessing. The biggest dilemma with people was getting the face right. I could never get them to actually look like the people they were of. So, I came up with a solution. I don't know that this was a fully conscious choice, but I started drawing or painting people whose faces were not showing.  These three below are my favorite.
 I will be the first to admit (and see) that the body proportions in these works are not all correct either, but they do look like people and there is no distorted face messing up the picture.(I believe these were all done in High School, though the one of my Grandpa may have been my Freshman year at BYU)

This first one is from a photo of my brother. I love the clothing - it is my favorite part. The grass was, well, tedious, and I got tired of it after awhile. Patience is not my strong point when it comes to art.  But I mainly picked this because I thought it would be a fun one, and it reminds me of when we went fishing with my Grandpa.
Which leads me to the next piece.  This next one is of my Grandpa fishing. I made a "print" of this and framed it for my grandparents and it hung in their house for a long time. (There is a reason why I didn't give the original, but that is for another blog entry - it has nothing to do with my sweet grandparents) I love this painting because it totally captures the essence of my sweet Grandpa.  He loved fishing, and he always had those overalls and the hat and the long sleeved shirt that he wears in this picture. Yes, these two fishing pictures happen to be from the same trip, but they were done at different times, I believe.


The third picture has a story too.
These are cousins - Kurt and Dylan. I babysat for their families for years - especially Dylan's family. Dylan's mom took this photograph and framed it and it sat in her living room. I looked at it all the time - I thought it was such a great photograph. So, one day I got up the nerve to ask her if I could borrow the photograph to make a painting. This was the result. Again, no faces. The bodies are a little distorted, and that has bugged me to this day, but I love the cousins hugging each other. I love the ocean, so this was a perfect subject for me to do.

I did actually draw a lot of faces over the years. I wish that I had received better instruction on faces and bodies when I was in high school and college, because so many drawings didn't turn out due to lack of experience, knowledge, and training. But, it is still fun for me to look at them and remember when and why I did them. And hopefully now I can get more experience and training and do people better.