Google Art Project Gets Even Better

Google Art Project must be another of those things that I discover after everybody else.
It happens sometimes: I had never seen a tumble dryer before moving to England (in Italy we use, you know, The Sun to dry our clothes). So one day I announced triumphantly to all my friends “I have just bought an amazing device! It dries clothes! It’s called Stumble Drier or something!” and everyone looked at me in silence, a bit awkwardly, as if I had just announced I discovered tap water.

Anyway, it’s not that I have just discovered Google art projects, it’s that the first time I looked at it there wasn’t much stuff on, and now it’s amazing.

The pictures are all high res (you can zoom in impossibly close) and, as I just found out by chance from this blog post, you can save your own art collection, which is handy if your reference folder is already as massive as mine.

You can browse it by collection, by artists and by artwork.
Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem possible to download the images to your machine, which sucks just a little bit.

But really, just a little tiny bit. Good job guys.

The Djinn

A Djinn is one of the most prominent figures in Arab folklore and, currently, number two on my list of things to do, once again inspired by the people from Reddit.

I suspect the iconic Djinn exported into the Western tradition is but a washed out version of the more complex one of the original mythology.
Where I assumed Djinn were some kind of humanoid guys with vaguely demonic faces, by what I get from Wikipedia there’s a lot more than that.

Together, jinn, humans and angels make up the three sentient creations of Allah. Religious sources say barely anything about them; however, the Qur’an mentions that Jinn are made of smokeless flame or “scorching fire”.[1] Like human beings, the Jinn can also be good, evil, or neutrally benevolent.

According to traditions, the jinn stood behind the learned humans in Solomon’s court, who in turn, sat behind the prophets. The jinn remained in the service of Solomon, who had placed them in bondage, and had ordered them to perform a number of tasks.
“…and there were jinn that worked in front of him, by the leave of his Lord,” (Qur’an 32:12)
“And before Solomon were marshalled his hosts,- of jinn and men and birds, and they were all kept in order and ranks.” (Quran 27:17)

A few traditions (hadith), divide jinn into three classes: those who have wings and fly in the air, those who resemble snakes and dogs, and those who travel about ceaselessly.[14] Other reports claim that ‘Abd Allāh ibn Mas‘ūd (d. 652), who was accompanying Muhammad when the jinn came to hear his recitation of the Qur’an, described them as creatures of different forms; some resembling vultures and snakes, others tall men in white garb.[15] They may even appear as dragons, onagers, or a number of other animals.[16] In addition to their animal forms, the jinn occasionally assume human form to mislead and destroy their human victims.[17] Certain hadiths have also claimed that the jinn may subsist on bones, which will grow flesh again as soon as they touch them, and that their animals may live on dung, which will revert to grain or grass for the use of the jinn flocks.

Reading this I was quite tempted to come up with something crazy. Unfortunately I’m afraid that a guy with a dog’s head and perhaps wings would be, albeit undoubtedly interesting, scarcely recognizable as a Djinn, whose iconic representation in our culture is that of a muscular guy with bracelets and a vaguely middle-eastern look.
I’ll stick to this for the time being, but I’ll certainly explore the Djinn myth some other time.

In the meantime, here’s some sketches.

A Beast Carrying People Around

Beast of Burden Carrying People Around took longer than expected (as usual, Life happens in the meantime), but it’s finally finished.
Thanks fellow redditor woodwife for the inspiration.
I doubt this will look like she envisioned, but here it is.

On with the others from the list now. I already have quite a few work in progress, so I’ll be quicker, hopefully.

The National Gallery of Art Publishes Online Its Collection

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has recently made available online, free of charge for download and use, more than 20,000 works of art of its collections:

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 20,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.

It gives me the shivers to think of the effort it must have taken to shoot all those hi-res photographs (I presume as consistent as possible with the original colours), filing them, and uploading them in such a massive database.

Well, as an artist the word “database” alone kind of unsettles me already.

Anyway, all for free, for anyone to enjoy, as art should be. How cool is that?
It was even better noticing that they had quite a few pieces by John Sargent, a couple of which I didn’t know yet.

As usual, thanks to the awesome Lines and Colors for always being the first to share these amazing discoveries.

As a side note, why do I always get slightly depressed every time I see anything made by Sargent?:(

Drawing Pencils and Beasts of Burden

Drawing pencils are still my favourite media.
Whether because they’re the first thing you experiment with as a kid (apart from “food on wall”, which was my first attempt at making art apparently), or because it’s simply easy and immediate, I just love it.
So, since I don’t really have a deadline to upgrade my portfolio, I decided to take ut easy and sketch everything on paper instead of painting directly on screen.

This is the first sketch I have done from the list of suggestion I managed to gather from fellow redditors. The brief is, roughly, Quadrupedal creature carrying chilling out people, which is something quite fun to draw, I must say.

While looking around for reference I stumbled upon this post on The ArtOrder, (which I avidly follow) which in turn led me to this post on James Gurney’s blog, which for some reason I had missed (I avidly follow him as well).

The lighting in the first picture is pretty much what I had in mind for my quadrupedal creature carrying around chilling out people, playing with the contrast between cold and warm. I don’t expect the result to be as appealing, but I’ll try. Hard.
In the meantime, here’s the sketch.
I haven’t given much thought on the background yet, I guess I’ll think about it along the way.

Lilith

I’ve finally started updating my portfolio.
I have a list of things and ideas to work on, a folder full of reference, and some sort of schedule.
So, last week I started off the list, sharpened my pencils, put on the right music and promptly got stuck on the first set of thumbnails.
It happens.

Fortunately, I must say, never at work. Pressure there is quite high so, for some reason unknown to me, my brain dutifully works on what it is asked for, and shuts down only after five o’clock.
When I get stuck at home I generally have to focus on something completely different, leave the source of my sorrows in the back of my mind and go back to it after a few days. It generally works.
In the meantime, enter Lilith.

Lilith is possibly one of my favourite mythological figures.
First, she’s a demon, and I love drawing demons. You can put together a bunch of organs with some teeth sticking out of an elbow, or an anatomically flawless human with evil eyes and you can never go wrong.
Then, she’s old, like REALLY old. She was first mentioned in ancient sumerian poems, then in Jewish mythology and eventually in the bible (let’s not mention the fact that a book that allegedly puts together the word of god shouldn’t rip off pagan mythology, ok?).
Lilith used to be Adam’s first wife, made from the same dirt, before Eve was manufactured off one of Adam’s ribs.
In other myths she’s the one giving men all sorts of sexual dreams, during which she takes their seed to spawn a progenie of fiends, forever bound to her powerful will in hell.
Because of her nature of twisted “First Mother”, I decided to depict her with big belly and breasts, like some sort of evil Gaia, carried around by some of the minions she spawned.
So there you go, happy mother’s day!

Holiday thoughts

I’m on holiday. Since last Monday.

It’s not one of those holidays where you queue at the airport, drag kids and bags and boxes around and schedule every minute of your day so that relatives and friends can get to see your face.
It’s rather one of those holidays where you try and stay in your underpants for as long as possible, eat things straight from the can and possibly gain a couple more levels at Skyrim.
Christ, after level fifty the experience bar is just frozen solid no matter how many dragons you kill.

Anyway, it’s also one of those holidays where you try and get a couple of long-outstanding things done.
Reply to old emails, clean up folders and things like that.
At the top of this week’s to-do list, after “sell your violin” and “get rid of the brushes you haven’t used in a year”, there was also “upgrade the bloody portfolio”.
As a matter of fact, I grew tired of 90% of the images I currently have on my website.
Every time I see them I notice more things I’m not happy with, more mistakes, more changes I would make.
True, sitting on my Hard Drive there are some interesting things I recently did as freelance, but who knows when I’ll be allowed to publish them. So in the next few weeks I just plan on drawing new artwork and replacing the old one.

I haven’t done much about it in the last few days to be honest.
I’ve basically just complained about the old drawings while playing Skyrim.
Bloody game, someone should save me from it, I knew I should have never started it.
Anyway, I wrote a post on Reddit asking for suggestions. I figured the Hive Mind could come up with better ideas for subject matters than my own puny mind.
They haven’t disappointed me so far, some ideas are actually pretty cool.
So, expect sketches soon, hopefully.

In the mean time, since I’m also clearing my Instapaper archive of all the links I was supposed to read later, here’s some of what I considered worth saving in the last couple of months or so.

Arkive.org Really, save this in your bookmarks.

With the help of the world’s best filmmakers, photographers, conservationists and scientists, ARKive is creating the ultimate multimedia guide to the world’s endangered animals, plants and fungi.

It’s not only a bloody good cause, it’s also a HUGE archive of images artists can use as reference.

Lines and Color’s blog post about Sargent on Met Museum Website John Singer Sargent is my favourite painter ever, and the beautifully redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art features no less than 600 of his works. Just type Sargent in the search field and enjoy.

In this blog post on Muddy Colours you can see Syd Mead’s concepts for Blade Runner. Do I need to add more?

Then, emm, a gif I saved for some reason I can’t remember (lol it’s funny though)

and possibly the funniest image on the internet.

Badass Knight

After a few hectic weeks I’ve completed all my freelance jobs (woo-hoo!), so now I have more time to do some of my own stuff.
This is something that, as usual, I started without really knowing what would come up.
And since for some reason I had saved the early versions, I can post the first two stages.
If it were a tutorial, it would be something like “draw a silhouette first, paint shit in after”.

Some More Runescape Concepts

There’s a whole bunch of concepts I had been given permission to post.
Unfortunately I suck at Internet, so, despite my WordPress interface being fool-proof, every time I have to post anything I must get everyone out of the house, shut the blinds, put classical music on, pour a coffee and be prepared to spend the next couple of hours fighting with ftp and stuff.
This means posting things requires time, which I have an chronic lack of.

Anyway, now that I’m done complaining about my first-world problems, here are another couple of concepts I made for my favourite quest so far, One Piercing Note.
They are both for the clock tower. It was quite a challenge, the combination between quest requirements and engine limitations made the whole thing a mine field of issues to address.
Also, the drawing distance didn’t allow too high a tower, increasing the risk of something closer to a can of tuna rather than a graceful structure striving to touch the sky.

In the end I think we did a good job, so if you haven’t played the quest yet, do it now!

Artwork from Richard Robinson’s Workshops.

Richard Robinson is an artist I’ve been following for quite a while.
Well, he’s not only an artist, he’s an art teacher, and his videos about light and colour are amongst the best I’ve seen around.
He’s also a fan of Sargent and Sorolla as I am, so well, it has been love at first sight, so to speak.
There are plenty of painter’s tutorials on the internet, but only few of them have a style I’d really like to see in my own work.
If my colours were half as vibrant as Richard’s I would already consider myself an accomplished artist. In the meantime I try and learn what I can from his monthly workshops.

They work slightly differently from other workshops, in that there’s a monthly assignment, people post their work in progress, and Richard posts his comments and suggestions along the way.
Attendees can express their approval on fellow artists via the usual Like button forums often have.
The one with the highest number of Likes at the end of the month wins, a part from the mere enjoyment of peer’s approval, one of Richard’s paintings.
For the workshop he also paints his own version of the assignment and posts the video of the process at the end of the month. Which is great, because you see which choices a master would take in the same thing you tried to do.

The community is quite nice as well, there are some skilled artists there and they’re all really nice and helpful.
More often than not, other people’s eyes are better than yours, especially if you’ve been staring at the same things for a few hours.

Anyway, I had the time to work only of two of the four workshops so far, because it always clashed with some of my freelance deadlines (gosh I can’t wait to be allowed to post THOSE things!)
I was pretty happy with the first one, now looking back at it I realize it’s pretty weak.
Maybe I’m getting better already?