Last Semester

Last semesters best work from my painting class with Fiore Custode. Say what you will about his as a person(believe me, I say plenty) he's a damn good teacher.

Process on a project

From this..





To the final product..

Hands

So I thought I was going to get soooo much work done over winter break...yea that didn't happen. In an effort to not be completely lazy Ive been going through my references on the compy while watching Mad Men or Arrested Development. I like it because I dont need to think about it, yet I feel productive as a result.

Moving forward there are still positions that I haven't quite gotten the hang of certain gestures...eventually I'd like to do a variety of ages too. Old man hands would be a bitch to gesture draw right? I guess I'd have to try that out with a pencil first rather than a cheap ass pen.

New Blog!

I just started a blog up with a friend

http://welldressdrawings.blogspot.com/ ch-ch-check it out

Rene Gruau

I can totally see the model Claudia Schiffer in a photo version of this for Chanel..



For my x-mas haul I got two fantastic fashion books. One that dealt specifically about fashion history and the other that was an index of working fashion illustrators. Although the latter was very inspiring there were too many fantastic illustrators in it for one post.

Instead I'll focus on the former which had a small biography of the legend Rene Gruau. Although I've seen some of his work here and there, seeing it an entirely different context was something else.
I wonder if Yoshitaka Amano has see the above picture...I got a sudden reminder of Amano's erotic series when I saw this.
Although he seems to be considered to be very traditional I think overall he is still a very modern artist. The piece above could have been painted in the last decade of the 19th century, it has a great Toulouse-Lautrec vibe to it..

Yet here is a beautifully abstracted woman in a playsuit. I love his boldness and how his considerable drawing abilities allowed him to get away without looking sloppy or accidential

Degas, Lautrec

Was flipping through one of my art books and came across some amazing unprimed oil paintings by Degas and Toulouse Lautrec. I normally love a liquid-y surface for painting but the idea of incorporating the natural texture of the canvas seems brilliant to me.

I am drawn particularly to using carboard as a surface, especially since I have a shit ton of in the garage.
This is the last painting I've done that I think is successful. Next semester I'd like to do a series of portraits on cardboard of friends. I had wanted to do it this semester but never had the discipline to do some. Now looking back at my last successful painting, I am embarrassed at how little I've progresss...

Genius

Motherfucking Genuis