A slightly bigger format

Bit cramped, innit?

Just a bit. 50cm x 65cm (don’t know how much that is in old money) instead of 30cm x 40cm.

The bigger (if you pardon the pun) problem is that I did not take the necessary amount of attention when I bought it. It is good paper, no question but I oversaw the little note that said that it is pure cellulose paper not pure cotton as I am used to. The colours run different, if you know what I mean (probably not, if you do not do watercolours yourself, just say you need to get used to it).

But the first one is always for the bin, as the old saying goes 😉

And I really f’d up the hand, what the…? The foot, too, looks a bit, how shall I put it…curious. Oh, my…

Will add final picture when it is finished. If I don’t dump it in the aforementioned bin because it is a failure, I don’t know if I can repair it. Oh, and still no model release needed, build again out of several of my anatomy sketches together with a generic European face. Why European? I thought I start with motives that are a bit more familiar to me. The only differences are in the skin colour (which all get mixed from the very same three colours, btw!) which would be no problem but there are also slight differences in some facial features which I need to train first before I get public. Even though no actual women are depicted it is just a question of good manners to keep some standard.

OK, after ruining the shadow even, I gave up, here is the final picture.

Well, one sheet wasted, nine to go

This is not a Ready-Made

(As if anybody would get that pun 😉 )

Ascending nude

There she goes. What is her destination, what her intend? Well, the bathroom is upstairs, so…

But lame jokes aside: no model release necessary, it is all “from imagination” as Leonardo Pereznieto would say, some lessons in “Human Anatomy for Artists 101” (although I seem to have missed the part about how to make human hair look natural), and some vague memories.

Mmh…too much cadmium red for the labia minora?

Does somebody have a screwdriver? Anybody? Buehler?

Somebody—and I don’t want to look at anybody here—thought I would have massaged a photo with a Photoshop watercolour-filter and sold it as if I did it myself, manually, with a brush. I did not know what to make out of it: feel insulted or flattered? I did not use a Photoshop-filter, for I do not have Photoshop in the first place. On the other side: my watercolours are bad, some are even really bad, I’m pretty sure the Photoshop filter would have done a better job.

So what shall I do about it? Do it again, this time with a camera running along? The only one with a HD camera is my sister and it’s not really a camera just a cell phone which you can’t screw on a tripod for lack of a screw hole in the camera. I could improvise something with some wires, rubber bands, and tape. Nuh, way too much work. A couple of stills will do, too. And the very same thing again? Nuh, boring!

The original was a screenshot from Google Earth, so I “traveled” a bit around the world and found another nice place, this time in Greece. So let’s do it. Well, actually: I’ll do it and all you can do is to helplessly watch the catastrophe building up 😉

Why you should check first if you can still comment on a threat

I wanted to revive an old threat elsewhere but did miss the fact that the ability to comment has already expired. I blame the bad UX, they really could have printed somewhere in big bold letters that you cannot comment anymore! 😉

I had it already written at that time and, although it looses a bit without the context of the aforementioned threat, I have put too much work into it to simply send it to /dev/null, so here it is:

The Disadvantages of a Good Reception

Two elderly people in very old-fashioned tracking gear together with large wooden walking sticks, walking along a marble quarry.
In view but still in a distance of about 2km are some earth-coloured houses huddled in a dense, autumnal broad-leaf forest.

“Looks a bit, how shall I put it stale, hu?”
“What?”
“This thread here.”
“Oh, that thread, yeah, okay. Good reception here, I s’pose? And what do you want me to do about it?”
“CPR?”
“How do you applicate CPR to a threat that is not only purely virtual but seems to be quite dead, too, since last summer?”
“Dunno, it’s something about art, so do something artsy.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“You are the artist! Scratch your head, stroke your beard, get heavily drunk, or whatever artists do to get an idea and do something…”
“…artsy, got it. Any wishes?”
“Dunno, paint something?”
“I’m a sculptor and really bad at painting.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Hey!”
“Ow, c’mon, I saw what you did to the walls of your kitchen! Is it so difficult to paint something white? Just plain white?”
“Seems so…”
“So what do you need for that sculpting thingy?”
“A mallet, a set of chisels, and…do you want it quickly?”
“Yepp.”
“So something softer, sandstone? No, don’t like the color, it’s always so beige! Marble maybe? Yeah, marble. I’ll take that block over there.”
“Isn’t it nice that we stand, just by chance, near a marble quarry—although not that unlikely, as close to Casette as we are—but the block you are pointing to is a bit large, don’t you think?”
“Nuh, medium sized. At most. I would say about 1m x 1.5m x 2m. At least that’s what’s written on it.”
“I’d call that big! And how much does that stump tip the scales?”
“Density about 2.7 tons per cubic meter according to Google, so…uhm… a tad bit more than eight tons.”
“At least it’s not an eight ton stork.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing. And it costs a fortune, doesn’t it?”
“Not really, in that quality about $250 per ton, if not less.”
“Still two grands! What’s about something cheaper, like, dunno, watercolor?”
“Like we did in kindergarten?”
“Yeah.”
“But I never got better at it since then!”
“But it’s cheap?”
“Yepp.”
“So be it.”
“Where do I send the bill?”
“Whut?”
“Just kidding, just kidding. I think in this time of these so called listicles I’ll make one myself and it will be about:”

Things ending [cue drumroll] badly

• me, doing nudes in watercolour
• me, wishing I could be elsewhere
• me:”Oh, Galegas for 50 cents a kilo? That’s cheap!“
• me, extracting 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine. At least it didn’t explode this time
• replacing politicians with other ones by way of democratic elections

“Does politics belong in art?”
“That’s discussable.”
“Yeah. And now?”
“There is no bar in Casette, as far as I know, but a small supermarket.”
“How do you…? Oh, forget it, it’ll do.”

Shopping List

Pommes Schranke

If you want a portion of french fries here in the Ruhr-area you need to utter the easy to remember term: “Eimma Pommes Schranke, bittä!” Yes, as easy as that! But it might get a bit more complicated as explained in the following paragraph:

You might get asked the following in return: “Pilsken beie Schranke?” which translates, roughly, as “Do you want a nice cold Pilsener with the fries?”. The accepted answer is either a short: “Jupp!” (“Yes, please!”) or a more elaborated: “Dachtesse ich würch die Fritten trocken runter, oder watt?!” (“I really appreciate your offer, even if slightly redundant, and accept it with great joy and pleasure!”). You might reject it with: “Nä, lass ma, muß noch faahn.” (“No, thank you but I might risk my drivers licence if I get caught again.”) or something of a similar kind of a distinctly lame excuse.

From the Attic

Homage to Oscar Reutersvärd

Needed to re-conquer some storage space and discovered some older (2002 says one signature) works. The tribute to Oscar Reutersvärd above was one of several tries with gouache/watercolour in connection with inked contours. Two more of these experiments below the fold

70 (seventy) Percent of all Literature about Tax is written in the German Language

My calligraphical talent seems to be quite low

My brother-in-law works as a tax consultant and I once made this stupid little quatrain:

Der Deutsche auch nach wild`stem Treiben
Läßt stets sich eine Quittung schreiben,
Auf das das Amt von den Finanzen
Nicht soviel nimmt im großen Ganzen.

Which translates freely as something like:

The German even after the wildest ado
Always insists on a written receipt,
Such that the office of the taxes
does not take so much, by and large.

Meanwhile…

Felis silvestris catu (vicinae) in watercolor

Not a complete failure; it is a cat, even identifiable (“Hey, that’s my Peter!”) but still not what I was able to do some twenty years ago. Such a long pause is definitely not good for anything that needs a steady amount of training. The old saying “A picture a day holds you on pay”* is not one of the most idiotic proverbs, although it comes close if you ask some of the not-extremly-famous artist.
Some people like to know all of the gory details, so here they are: it is painted on a 30x40cm size 220g/sqm cold-press paper. Some repairs have been made with acrylics (the black spot on the back has seen three to five work-overs and I still don’t like it) namely iron oxide and titanium oxide. The titan-white has been used for the lights, too, as acrylics seem to do a better job than gouache for the lights.
Oh, and yes: 220g paper is too light for large wet-on-wet washes. Even with a heavy glass plate laid on top of the paper the large crimps are still visible.
The quality of the picture is bad, I know. It is the same cheap digi-snapper I’ve done all the pictures on this blog with.

* Yep, I admit it: I made that up.

About proportions

Sketch with different candle-flame proportions

The size of the flame should fit the size of the candle, of course. At least that is the first guess of most; common knowledge, so to say. That is not the case here, the flames are too big for both sizes of candles, about one third too big but still look kind of right, right?