Think Draw - Picture

Title: Villain
created on 16 Sep 11

Please login to rate or comment:

Comments on this picture (51):
1. bluemoon wrote: great!
2. Hazer wrote: I knew this was yours as soon as I saw it! I find the way you draw fascinating...well done!
3. AFSOUTH wrote: Truly outstanding!
4. suzze wrote: :)
5. artdillon wrote: rembrandt has always been a favourite of mine,this reminds me of his last self portrait.a nice bold approach from the new gothic.
6. nancylee wrote: This is in a class of its own.
7. Renee355 wrote: a masterpiece!
8. mum23 wrote: You're just too good!! Geez... I wish I could do that...
9. priya41 wrote: very very good!wish i could do it too!!
10. Chrissyjoy wrote: excellent portrait!
11. clorophilla wrote: great!! I have so little time these days, but I definitively have to try a portrait with new gothic!
12. chelydra wrote: This is from a picture of a guy playing King Lear in a military uniform in style of 1830-1870 or so. Doesn't look much like him, so I guess it doesn't matter I lost track of his name.
13. Lizzi wrote: Doesn't matter who he looks like, it's a great picture!
14. mrozowski wrote: There is almost a story etched on his face, wrinkles in time...
15. hjjr wrote: the new colors have inspired you...another fabulous portrait
16. mebu27 wrote: well done!
17. Login wrote: He's not a villain ... he's my Grandad.
18. mum23 wrote: Competitive juices?? That makes me laugh! I do wish I could do this... the economy with which you position your pieces in exactly the right spots to make our eyes do the rest... it's brilliant!
19. mum23 wrote: Seriously... you inspire me to learn more... to see differently.
20. chelydra wrote: Well... It seems to be working! (It's all about eggs... You and Qsilv understand that faces are made of interlocking overlapping interpenetrating EGGS (by which I mean imperfect spheres)... eyeballs, cheeks, lips, noses, nostrils, chins, foreheads...
21. chelydra wrote: ... they're all EGGS, or at least they all have eggish qualities. Earlobes, knuckles, fingertips, shoulders, breasts, butts, knees, hips, bellies, biceps... all eggs...
22. chelydra wrote: and the reasons that each of us grows from a single fertilized egg-cell, and growing organisms have nowhere to grow but OUTWARDS, so every form that sprouts and blossoms and fruits as we grow is CONVEX, never flat or concave or sharply angular... bodily f
23. chelydra wrote: ...bodily forms that SEEM flat/concave/angular, on closer examination, are always arrangements of interpenetrating EGGS!!!) (That's the end-parenthesis from the first line of #20 above.)
24. chelydra wrote: Stereoscopic vision is the key... which is surprisingly elusive because we're all so involved in gazing at flat surfaces - pages of paper, screens of glass and plastic, hypnotized by letters and pixels swarming around in Flatland...
25. chelydra wrote: I meant to say that's WHY depth perception atrophies and requires a conscious effort. Presumably our ancestors used both eyes constantly, to judge distances for grabbing branches to swing from or leap onto, and for shooting arrows and tossing stones or sp
26. chelydra wrote: ...or spears. Those were the days my friends, we thought they'd never end, as the song says. But they did end, for almost all of us. Which accounts for plague of squashed noses and flattened eyeballs when most of us attempt faces (including me when I'm be
27. chelydra wrote: ...being careless.)
28. chelydra wrote: 28. An egregious example of carelessness being my "RS90" - portrait of Ravi Shankar turning ninety - in which I got the little forms about right, but the overall form of his head is a disaster. Okay, that's enough for now I guess.
29. chelydra wrote: I did want to add, though, that SPACE is what allows forms to exist three-dimensionally, and there's no one better than 'five' at conveying space (spaciousness, depth). Even though her forms are sometimes iffy (from doing too much conceptual art in her mi
30. chelydra wrote: ...misspent youth no doubt), but her space is pure poetry.
31. chelydra wrote: And finally, an important footnote to #24 above: I said IN flatland but I should have said ON flatland. That's the key. To place the petals and skins and candies and beads IN the picture NOT ON THE SQUARE where the picture goes. INTO - INSIDE - not ON, or
32. chelydra wrote: ...not ON, or ONTO the surface, but carved down into the deep space below the surface --- and building up from below, through the surface, towards the viewer. All drawing is sculpting.
33. five wrote: I don't know the Irish tale you referenced... more info needed.
34. chelydra wrote: Didn't mean to imply (in #30) that your youth was all spent (or misspent)! Plenty more where that came from.
35. five wrote: should have been more misspent! I sometimes get forms wrong -- hand/eye coordination is sometimes off -- but FWIW most of the time, I intentionally sacrifice form to space. An interesting footnote ... my depth perception in real life is not great, I fav
36. five wrote: favor one eye over the other (which means a tendency to shift between monocular points of view when I draw), and I see the world in shifting planes. Makes escalators lots of fun (not). Depth perception good enough for driving though :)
37. chelydra wrote: so far anyway... :{ a good friend (Rani Carson,googlable) lost most vision in one eye in a car crash and she paint beautifully, and part her paintings' beauty...
38. chelydra wrote: ... is their attention to the surface of the canvas, with a whiff of the Persian or pre-Renaissance... or Byzantine mosaics... all very Rastafarian, so there's the religious sincerity of the very very old masters too...
39. chelydra wrote: By the way, if anyone else ever reads this, Mum back up in #18 was referring to my note on my "kid (most important job)" picture.
40. chelydra wrote: Any further by the way, many thanx for the nice complements above, esp. Mum and Login!
41. chelydra wrote: But back to the space discussion... Maybe what I love about your space (five) is its shimmery ambiguity, it's searching/groping quality, as if you're struggling to create it out of your head (or heart?!) rather than just having it flow from eyes and finge
42. chelydra wrote: ...rs in an easy, confident (unadventurous, boring) way... and of course you create space with colors, which is the best way to do it... My own grasp of space is relatively overconfident - I just assume I'm 'getting it' but really don't get INTO it in so
43. chelydra wrote: ....involved and involving a way as you do.
44. chelydra wrote: #40 was supposed to start with And not Any.... #20 should start "And the reason is..." this is for the benefit of anyone who studies all this closely or creates a Collected Essays of All ThinkDrawers anthology (joke)
45. five wrote: Balance between seeing (really seeing) and knowing (really knowing, that is understanding). As for the conceptual bias... everyone should at least periodically go out and draw real things, even and especially live, moving things. No substitute for it.
46. mum23 wrote: OK... well, this goes some way to explaining something for me. Most of my drawings have been done from photos, which I keep reading is a bad idea because they 'flatten' everything out.
47. mum23 wrote: Conceptually, I know what they mean, but I just don't see it that way, and when I copy them, I don't have to work at seeing the depth... it's just there.
48. mum23 wrote: YES! to your comment @ #32.. "All drawing is sculpting". That's exactly how it feels, especially with pastels. The few people I've shown my pastel portraits to have all remarked at how 3d they look... to me I've just drawn it as I saw it.
49. mum23 wrote: There's much, much more to learn about technique, composition, etc, but maybe seeing like that has given me a 'head start'.
50. mum23 wrote: And... I'm hoping that you, Qsilv and five will have many more discussions about this sort of stuff in your sorely neglected "Discussion of non-digital media" forum thread... :)
51. chelydra wrote: (I've been trying to convince mum it's her turn to jump-start that discussion - better go see if it's happening.)