That was Wednesday. For some reason the best of these I do is with this specific model.

It was a good session. I got this out of it:

And the main piece with her is really shaping up. To give you the lead in, the first time I showed it to you it looked like this:

After Wednesday it looks like this:

Soon it will be something else.

I took the day off work Wednesday because I was starting to crack. I needed the sleep, and the space, and to draw. All three were accomplished.

Tonight’s work. Let me walk through my process.

When working with a model, I’ll generally schedule a 4 hour session. Starting with very quick poses, like a minute or two minutes, I draw over and over quick scribbles to get a sense of shapes and weight and movement. I call these things scribblesheets – they don’t look like much to anyone but me, but I find bits in them.

Then I’ll move on to five or ten minute poses and use botches of watercolor with ink to do slightly more realized sketches. These also are not usually for public consumption, but they help me start to get a sense of features, the unique quirks of presence in bodies. These I call splattersketches.

Finally, I’ll turn to full pastel drawings. These are generally done in a sequence of 20 minute poses, often doing 20 minutes, and taking a break, then going back to the same pose. Sometimes I’ll alternate and do two or three different poses, and thread them so the model doesn’t cramp up keeping the exact same position over and over. It can take multiple days of sittings to get these to come together. Here is the very rough beginning of one of these. This is about a half hour’s attack.

The first picture in the post is another one from tonight, a little further along, probably a bit more than an hour or so of work.

So that’s the way it works. By late summer I should have another set of 6 or so finished pieces.

These are the first completed drawings I’ve done for 2012. It is artwork done for a CD cover for my friend Thomas Hornig’s upcoming release. He is DIYing his album. I know him because he worked as a contract software developer at the company that currently employs me, as an Application Support manager. Our lives are faceted. The world is complex. It can’t be helped.

A lot has happened over the past year, but not in an obvious way. Not in a way I can show you. That is likely to change as 2012 progresses. 2012 is shaping up to be the Year of the Gorgon, when then serpents grow out of my brain.

Last year I moved to a new apartment:

And started using it as a figure drawing studio again:

Which led to three things. First, a new friend, the model and artist Push, who I started off drawing and ended up renting an art workspace with:

Second, the space, which is a very cool loading dock with a semi trailer permanently parked at it:

Having that space allowed me to complete six new pastel pieces in time for a group show in December:

I didn’t sell any of them, but at least I got over the barrier of never having shown work in public.

Other things that got a start this year; I met a potential partner in the LofiSciFi Film Festival/Community project, and we’ve started the ball rolling on that, though it’s not rolling in a straight line at the moment. I spent the money to get a real camera, the Canon 60D, and have begun learning to use it, along with adobe’s suite of video editing tools:

So there will be more video coming in 2012.

I took a trip to Toronto and Manhattan and got caught in the hurricane. I met and made several friends, met a filmmaker I admire and watched his newest unreleased work.

Late in the year I painted a glow in the dark skeleton on a burlesque dancer, which resulted in this:

It was a fun year. Groundwork was laid.

That’s as much of a retrospective as I can manage. Stay tuned for new things.

I drew a portrait of someone:

And another sort of diagrammatic portrait of someone else’s tattoos and bodymods, arranged in graphic symmetry:

Started a 365 project on Flickr:

And had an interesting conversation about gender:

So, keeping busy. More to come. Happy New Year!

On the drawing board tonight, some letters.

These are going to be the font of the logo I’m designing for the big web-presence remake, in anticipation of transforming my online identity next year.

Self-reinvention is a thing I can’t stop doing. I’ve never really figured out how to be myself. In many ways I don’t know who I am at all. I keep refining the character, like an art director with an impossible brief.

2011 will be defined by activity and outward directed engagement. Maybe I’m out there, somewhere.

Here is what’s on the drawing board today. This creature is probably about 5 hours of work so far, but spread out over a year. It’s been accreting. Persistence is over half the key to getting anything done for me. Some day this will be done, and it will kick ass.

Or, I guess an octopus can’t really kick.

Some day it will slap ass.

My contribution to the Jenny Everywhere character design challenge over at Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel forum.

I’m enjoying playing around in a cel-shading style. Hope I can manage another one of these before my vacation is up.

The Augmented Reality Event 2010 – Keynote by gaming legend Will Wright from Ori Inbar on Vimeo.

It’s about a half hour long, and there is a lot of meat in it.

What it has done to me though is make me anxious. All of this cool AR engineering, and the converging of technologically enhanced social creativity, that is unfolding all around us.

I listen to talks like this, or I read the squatter-futurist pamphleteering of Cory Doctorow, or Kurzweil’s boy’s-own singularity, or Aubrey De Grey’s mad attack on mortality, and these ideas excite me, they are fundamentally exciting, and I want aspects of all these futures so badly I can feel my ego bleed, but the basic act of even thinking about them also fills me with dread.

When the dread creeps in, they seem like children whistling past a cemetery. Every frivolous technological wonder described in these sources now gets this caveat appended to it in my head as I read:

If civilization doesn’t collapse before we get there.

Everything is very fragile, and all the best that we could make dangles over a chasm by a thread. I feel this more now than I ever have. Nuclear annihilation never seemed quite real, but a cascading collapse in global trust exacerbated by uneven suffering in the coming climate tumult, nation states withholding or encumbering trade as a weapon of retaliation to the point that the economy stagnates, fueling panic and depression, and grinding all technological progress to a halt over an excruciating decade or two… I do not find that hard to imagine at all.

I’m afraid that when I am old, we’ll be dependent on machinery that we have lost the skill or the will to build, and everything will slide into violence and parochial bigotry. And people will look back at the beautiful world we are losing now and see it not as beauty but as decadent weakness. In my lifetime.

We will never go back to the moon. We will never set foot on Mars. Our lifespans will shrink, our children will be poorer than we were, and because we keep better historical records now, everyone will see it happening and our confidence as a species will wither. We will never be what we might have been.

Then beautiful dreams like AR seem silly, and I worry about what we aren’t seeing.

The only way to combat this is to get out and do. Be doing. Civilization is nothing more than a mutually assured confabulation, an impossibly complex layered mesh of just-so stories dressing up the absurd miracle of empty space vibrating into a planet covered in monkeys wearing hats for no good reason. It rained on our heads for seven million years and it rains on our heads today, and the hats aren’t much, really, after all. But they sure are natty. And that one looks fabulous on you.

Hello new readers! I’m Bill, and I get like this sometimes. Do stick around!

ArtMash posts are quick blasts of imagery, probably from other people’s Deviant Art or Flickr accounts. I like them. So I show them to you.

I love looking at pictures in this kind of dynamically flat geometrically caricatured style. It’s something I’ve never been able to do well myself, a way of seeing shapes that is a lot more difficult than it seems. Eighty percent of drawing skill is learning how to translate the three dimensional world you see around you into a two dimensional abstraction. Even representational drawing is an almost unbelievable abstraction, when you think about it. As Magritte reminds us, this is not a pipe. But the extra step of extracting raw geometry from living shapes and deploying it with personality and dynamism is a form of genius not well enough respected.

Look at those lovely angles up there! Just look at them!