New Moves

Hey all,

A few updates to share.

First, I’m in between projects at the Natural History Museum and working on getting some other things off the ground (or out of the mud!).

Eastern Market is a big flea market opened every Sunday, 12 months a year west of Capitol Hill between 7th & 8th Streets SE. It’s a great raucous, colorful, noisy, inspiring place to spend a Sunday morning. Filled by artisans, food vendors, musicians and just a few blocks from the Capitol and the DC Mall, it’s where I’ll be setting up shop and selling some artwork, mine and another artist’s. Come by if you can – you may even see a senator or one of your representatives perusing the stalls!

I’m excited to say that I begin training in 3D modeling and animation at Cosmocyte this week alongside some very talented individuals. Cosmocyte is a small company in Maryland that makes Science/Medicine/History animations and illustrations for places like Standford University, the University of Notre Dame, Science Magazine, National Geographic Explorer, and Food Network. www.cosmocyte.com

Things are moving. Come along for the ride!

~Zel

Bit o work and a new toy

I just received the medium Intuos4 Wacom Tablet in the mail this Friday and now having used it a bit, I’m sold. It is a thing of beauty. I used it for the self-portrait painting this evening in Photoshop and I’ve used it to do some edits on this deer skeleton for the Museum.

Working Sketches

I’m always after more an better sketching but sometimes I find myself forgetting sketching’s purpose. It is not meant to make something beautiful, not always anyhow. A practiced artist, I think, uses sketching as a shorthand for working through form, connection points, composition, lighting, textures. It can be fast, loose, and messy. There is a beauty captured in the gesture sketch that can’t be found any other way. It’s only by rolling up the cuffs, forgetting precision, attempting accuracy, working fast, and moving on.

Here are a few artists that seem mindful of this fact:

http://www.debbykaspari.com/SketchbookPage.html

http://www.justinsweet.com/GALLERY/INDEXES/Drawings1.html

Two very different techniques represented in Debby’s and Justin’s work. Debby is a wildlife artist and her sketching is all about figuring out animal and vegetation form, changing lighting conditions, and you can see that she always has an eye for composition as she’s working. Justin is a character and concept artist working for video game companies like EA. His sketches are less polished and more exploratory. He’s searching for that form and most likely learning oodles in the process. His final color and black & white illustrations keep something of that dynamic that you find in his sketches: a beautiful thing, I think.

Better use of your Time

Hey, I ran across this site (link below) a while back; I think it’s just fascinating. I tend to lose many minutes of my life when I log on. I’m  thinking about what our generation will leave that artists in the future will pick up on. So much of art in the past (and present, of course) has been influenced by religious imagery/allegory. Will our post-secular era leave something else that artists will pick up on: Scientific progress, multiculturalism; internationalism; something else entirely? The below site is a mix (a blend) of interesting movements but steampunk and sci-fi is definitely at it’s core. Steampunk is a sub-genre of art that takes influence from fantasy and pre-industrial/industrial europe when industry was just taking off and steam/coal were king.

I’ve heard it said recently that there is a surprising lack of good art made at the behest of science. For instance, one of the seminal moments in our past, the moon landing, has inspired very few artists to make great works in the vein of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, or Leonardo’s Last Supper. The question of course, why? The site below highlights at least a few artists who seem to take quite a lot of inspiration from science (although quite a bit is fantastical as well). What do you think?

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/

Microraptor gui is the picture that I’m working on now. This little dinosaur flew! Two sets of wings, the normal wings that we usually associate with birds, as well as a lower set of wings that were held extended for extra lift (as pictured). Aerodynamically it served the same purpose that a second set of wings served for bi-planes. This painting has kept me busy this week. There is a dragonfly just in front of him. Will he catch it?

Notes on Science

Big news. Science Notes 2009 has been published. Science Notes is the annual collaboration between the science illustrators and science writers at UCSC; a unique collaboration between the two graduate programs wherein the illustrators teamed up with a writer and illustrate one of their articles. This year I was co-illustrator for an article on parasitic diseases. Take a look at it as well as the other articles and illustrations produced by my fellow graduates at:

http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes

And here is my most recent project from Carnegie. A diplodocus from the Jurassic (in style something of an homage to one of my favorite illustrators, James Gurney). It is nearing completion.

Bats

This is a 40 x 60″ painting that I’m doing for the education department to be used to teach school groups about bats. This scene is from somewhere in the SW at dusk. Mexican Free-tailed bats come out in flocks that number in the millions. I’m trying to invoke some feeling of the magnitude of these events.

On Doing Things in Order

A lesson I’ve learned over and over now, is to do the preliminary work first. That is, before the ‘real’ work. A preliminary sketch, a preliminary drawing, and a color rough. Those are the things that I need to know which way a painting is going to go. This week I am working on a 40 x 60 inch painting of a flock of bats. Since the painting is about bats, it’s easy to think that that is where to spend the time, on the bats. But the bats need to live in a landscape and that landscape doesn’t find someone else to paint it. So, this morning I worked up a smaller color rough to work out my color scheme, vanishing point, and actual technique. Even though those color roughs can seem inconsequential, they should be done. It’s a bit like a cook tasting the chili as he cooks it.

High Security

July 16th has seven six minutes left to it’s name. In my world, July 16 is day number two as an intern at Carnegie. I’ve had a good times so far. I’ve painted a chameleon cast and I’m working on a bat painting. But I’m just thrilled to be working underneath the Dinosaur exhibits. I went up there during lunch today and snapped a whole memory card’s worth of pictures. Here are a few of them. We’ve got an Apatosaurus being chased by and Allosaurus, and two T-rex squaring off over a carcass.  Also, I’ve biked around the city a lot and I have some pictures of that as well. the bike trails go along the rivers but there are a few spots where they stop and you either have to turn around or pick your bike up and walk (along the train tracks). And I’m very proud and nerding out over of my ‘volunteer’ badge. It opens all of the locked “employees only” and “authorized personnel” doors.

Some Pictures

Here are a few pictures from my walk around Pittsburgh yesterday. I am just north of the main campus of both Pitt and Carnegie. One of the most striking features of this area is the Cathedral of Learning (as close as I’ve come to feeling like I’ve entered Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry), a 42 story structure that is the second tallest in use academic building in the world. I climbed to the 36th floor, as far as I was allowed. From the top I could look down on the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.