Still in progress... now on canvas

I tweaked the drawing, adding some more interesting elements to the piece, then brought the drawing onto canvas. So far I've painted an hour session and will allow the oils to dry up a little before I continue onto the next step....

Nude Figure Drawing

I found a pretty awesome figure drawing tool online. It gave me the feeling of being back in school in my figure drawing class again. You can set up your time intervals and the website cycles through a variety of figurative pictures to draw. After a couple quick drawings I ended up pausing this particular picture and spent about 45-60 minutes creating a more finished piece. If you want to do an at home drawing session I recommend trying it, here: Figure Drawing Practice .

Ripple Effect

I decided to break out my old pencil rendering skills and see what I could come up with for this new card. When I first started out making art I only drew with graphite for years. I swore back then that I was happy drawing super realism in black and white and didn't have the desire to dabble in color or paint... I find that very funny now. It turns out that I love painting more than anything, and drawing in pencil is more tedious than I remember, but still enjoyable. I'm glad that I can combine my pencil work with my digital painting like above. So I used color pencil (who needs erasers?), scanned and combined the two drawings in photoshop, then digitally colored.

See the meaning of this card and others at: Intimacy Without Responsibility -The Conscious Evolution of Love  facebook page

Drawing Time

Reminding myself I can still draw with a real pencil. I've been doing too much digital work and felt like I was loosing my touch. I left my sketch lines in these, didn't do any cleaning up this time. I also have been using some old watercolor pencils that I've let go unused for years... it also makes me be more confident in my mark making since there is no erasing with them.

watercolor pencils in sketchbook

©Sam Nagel

Ephemeral Gaze

©Sam Nagel

This painting started out as kind of a rough pencil drawing. I didn't bother to clean up the pencil much at all and painted right on top of it in photoshop. Some of the traditional linework is still visible in the digital version. I had fun painting in a messy and careless way... sometimes that's the best way to do it. Took me about 2.5 hours.

©Sam Nagel (not for use or altering in any way) thanks for looking!

Sketchbookin

 These are some drawings pulled out of my sketchbook. The top page is my most recent stuff, the second page is actually kind of old, like last year or later... Well I don't sketch enough and have been trying to get myself into it again. I managed to go through four years of art school without filling up even half of one sketchbook lol! Don't ask how I got away with that! I think I was still rebelling from my sketchbook assignments in high school, and in college it kind of turned into a fad, every art school hipster kid slaved over filling up their sketchbooks... and I being myself, did the exact opposite.

Process

thought I would share some of my process. so basically it is a crappy sketch to refined line. Yep that's about it. I don't do thumbnails, but because I'm drawing directly in photoshop I work in a lot of layers so I can easily select and move elements around until I'm happy. I was messing with that hand in front of her chest for a while and it just never looked right, then I realized it was not anatomically correct, her thumb would not be on the outside unless someone broke and twisted her arm D: ...Anyways, this is very Mucha inspired, very very, + Tibetan mandala thrown in. Color comes next... I have no plan.

Sketch Faces

Portraits I've recently made in my sketchbook. top is watercolor, bottom two are gouache...

playing in my sketchbook

Mastercopy sketchbook pages

So for my very first blog post... these are my mastercopy studies from first semester junior year figure painting class. For the most part they were a pain to get started, but as soon as I started with the paint I seemed to fall quite nicely into completing each one very quickly. All but two are done in acrylics, the other two are a mixture of charcoal, acrylic, and other stuff... I painted from old masters to contemporary painters and some of those I discovered online.