Vanitas 27 update (04-22-2021)

 Just finished working on peaches (well, almost). Now moving onto the fabric.

Vanitas 27 update (03-27-2021)

This is what the drawing looks like today. I finally made up my mind about the treatment of the background. The original reference photo has just a plain gray background and I found it kind of boring. Then I discovered another photograph of a wall I took in Venice that will work perfectly with this piece. It is very similar to the one I have used for 2 of my Vanitas drawings but from a different location. What would I do without Venice?

New Vanitas drawing started

I started a new drawing for my Vaniras series. This is Vanitas 27. This is another mixed media drawing of graphite and colored pencils just like Vanitas 25, only there will be more colored pencil elements in it. This is the 4th piece coming out of a reference photo shoot with a model. As far as the number of art works coming out of a single photo session goes, this is very unusual. It just proves that my model Ms. M was so inspiring. I am visualizing this drawing to be about 16" x 18", and it will take another month or so to finish.

Vanitas 25 update (12-27-2020)

I have been working on this newest piece that is going to become "Vanitas 25". I am reusing the background I had used for "Vanitas 22" for this one. I just love the texture of the wall and I thought I could take an extra mileage out of it. I was also inspired by the fact that Kent Bellows used the same backgrounds for multiple pieces.

New Vanitas drawing begins!

I started this new drawing yesterday. The original photo reference was a B/W image on a medium format film I took over a decade ago. I intended to use this image for printing on sheet metal using liquid photo emulsion back then, but I never did. With that process in mind, I intentionally over-exposed and over-developed this negative 2 ~ 3 stops in order to increase the image contrast. When I test printed this image, the highlight (her face) was unfortunately way too dense and I could not see any textures in there at all. I thought about using this image as a reference for a drawing a couple years ago, and I tried my best to bring back highlight textures in Photoshop with not much success. So I almost gave up on using this image. I reshot its new versions with different models a couple of times and tried to recreate the shot but I could not get the new images close enough to this original which was truer to my vision. So I finally decided to use this old original image as a reference with its warts and all. I am thinking about not drawing her eye at all, and am hoping, by doing so, I might be able to make her face look luminous. Will see...