Art Show Opening

Ball point pen gestures in my sketchbook.

Its been a long time since I posted. I have been very busy with prepping for a big show coming up. I will be participating in a great show with three other artist in Minneapolis. The show is on May 9, 2015 from 5 - 10 pm. You can find out more details on http://www.neartshowcase.com/ . I am very excited for two new paintings I have produced for this show. I am showing a total of 6 pieces and 4 - 5 collaboration paintings. I have been experimenting a new approach to painting with the new direction I am going for. I have wanted to do narrative paintings for a long time and have finally dove into it. Doing this has slowed down my production with daily paintings, but it is something I needed to do in order to progress my artistic voice. I will go into depth more of the technique I have been exploring with and the reasoning why once I upload photos of the paintings after the show. The paintings for now are under wraps until the show. For now I sharing my gesture drawings from my figure drawing class I teach and some gestures I have done in my sketchbook.

Gesture demo's for my figure drawing class. These were done in graphite.

Drawing of the model while she was on a break between poses.

Thanks for stopping by and hope to see you at the show. Here is the info again,  http://www.neartshowcase.com/ 

Rupert Brooke

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"Rupert Brooke"

9 x 11 in

Ball Point Pen 

I wanted to thank you all for your nice comments from my last post, I really did not expect all your responses. Especially being gone for so long, thank you again everyone!

I did this Ball Point Pen drawing of Rupert Brooke, a famous English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War. Rupert Brooke was not photographed often and there are rare photos of him. He was an amazing poet for his time and even till today. I can't imagine if he would of lived beyond the age of 27 what other masterpieces he would of produced. I usually do ball point pen drawings in a really small format, but this was way out of the ordinary. I wanted to try something different by going bigger. I'm glad I did but it was a lot of work. When building up layers with ball point pen you have to be very careful by not pressing to hard with the pen or you'll get blobs of ink. It was a challenge to build up these subtle layers in such a large format.  I had a lot of fun with this one, not sure if I wanna go this big again but won't turn it down if it came my way.

Drawing and painting are relative, if you know how to draw then you can paint. I approach a painting the same way I do with a ball point pen. Always think about form, and how light wraps around the form.

"Bacchante & Satyr"

"Bacchante & Satyr"

9 x 6 in

Ball Point Pen

This is a ball point pen drawing I've been working for a while now, its from the collection of the M.I.A.  I usually don't draw multi-figures with ball point pen but loved the challenge of it, especially since I wanted to capture the texture from the marble with ink.  The draw back is that I did not have enough space on my paper to get the right side of the satyr's thigh, but that is the price I pay for drawing directly on with ink without any preparation.  With all my ball point pen drawings that's how I start with light short lines indicating where shapes will be placed.  I'm working on another piece right now and taking process photos, I've been getting a lot of questions on my process with these ball point pen drawings and hope with the process photos you can get a better idea of how I execute them.  Thanks for stopping by and viewing! 

If you notice the yellow tint on the right side of the drawing, that's oils from my hand another lesson to put something between your hand and the drawing.