I wasn’t able to draw a lot in the past couple of days because my very last final (English) was on monday, so I had to study for it because for once in my life I decided to act like a reasonable adult and do the right thing.
To reward myself, I drew today instead.
Since some time already, I wanted to draw an artist and I already had some potential people in my mind but for the first painting I wanted to go for Frida Kahlo because she’s without a doubt one of my favourite artists ever.
I might do more of my favorite female artists in the future, maybe Marina Abramovic and Cindy Sherman, I’ll see.
But until more people are coming, have some Frida Kahlo-Progress:
The reference and the weird first sketch. The first draft is ALWAYS ugly.
A little more details and less geometric shapes
Even more details and actual lineart
It’s going to be so colourful. Like a unicorn came by and decided to roll over the canvas
Colour colour colour.
The hair. I love her hairstyle.
I wish my hair was long enough so I could do it too
Flowers
Pretty, colourful roses.
I had no Idea what she should wear.
Some stuff in the back so the background isn’t too empty
I freaking love Adventure Time.
It’s beautifully weird and the characters are pretty cool, too.
Just recently Adventure Time started airing on a regular basis on free TV here in Germany and I am more than happy to be finally able to watch it daily and on a real television screen instead of my laptop’s display. I wanted to draw something fast and fun because I was in the mood and since my brother and me were singing the Adventure Time’s theme the whole day so I decided to go for Flame Princess
The sketch
Basic skincolour. It’s the first time I drew a yellow person. It was a special experience.
Mesing around with colours, trying out different oranges
Some outlines
The gems. Gave her stretched lobes because she’s badass.
Art is weird. Contemporary art is even weirder. Sometimes, pieces of every artistic era are very hard to understand and leave you with a faint feeling of “What the fuck did I just look at”. Everybody knows this and is probably familiar with the horrible moment when standing in front of an extremely strange piece, not getting anything, while the person next to you suddenly says “Wow. What an amazing work of art”. It’s hard to admit your total lack of understanding when everyone around you claims to love a certain thing because you don’t want to seem uncultured or like a philistine. We could now talk about the fact that probably just a very tiny minority of the people who say they fully understand a work of art by taking just one glance at it actually tells the truth in this case, but I’d rather talk about a way of becoming one of the people who “understand” art. First of all, you’re not doing something wrong when you wander through a museum and the realization “Oh. Ok. I can’t figure out what any of these pieces mean.” kicks in. This is absolutely normal. Most of the time you’re not supposed to understand it with one simple look. Artists usually hide their message quite consciously.
When looking at older paintings, the first thing you can do is finding out more about the historic context.
Art is always a mirror of the time and society that existed at the time a painting or a sculpture was created. During the Baroque times for example, people lived in constant fear of war and while the nobility tried to live life to the fullest with beautiful clothes, wonderful parties and gorgeous architecture and wanted to suppress the thought of war a little bit, artists began drawing still lives in which they showed flowers ( which are transient too) and other things next to skulls. “Memento Mori” -“Think of death” was the motto and a way to remind the people of their mortality. So here is the very simple explanation why the painting you see might have a skull in it when it seems out of context first. Taking a glimpse at the historic relation works with many paintings especially older ones.
Another thing you might want to try is taking a look at an artist’s life.
What did they experience? Did they live during a war? Did they have issues with their family? Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for example was an artist who lived during the iconic Belle Époque in France. He suffered from a disease called Pycnodysostosis which caused him to never fully grow and made him a bit of an outcast from society, but because of his illness he started art in the first place. He made famous posters for the Moulin Rouge (“Lady Marmalade” is about this club) but also beautiful paintings of couples in bed (Lesbians, by the way. Which is pretty cool given the time period the paintings were created in). He pictured them not in some sort of erotic way, just two people who maybe woke up some minutes before and want to spend some more time together. When you see those pictures you can feel the intimacy and the trust between those people. But why did he draw something so…”normal”? Again, because of his disease. He never had a constant partner in his life, a spouse who loved him in this sort of intimate and unconditional way. It was something he missed in his life and something he wished to find. Seeing it this way gives the paintings some more context and give them more depth and emotions linked to them.
Next, think of criticizing society itself. One of my favourite artists is Marina Abramovic. She’s specialised on performances and they are always shocking, weird, heavy and impressive at the same time. Most of her work is linked to her early life, too so many pieces explain themselves when you read her bio. Let’s take a look at my favourite performance by her, “Rhythm 0”. It was part of a series of five performances. In Rhythm 0 she let the audience take the action. Something that hasn’t happened before in the world of art or at least not in a way this drastic. She stood next to a table where 72 different objects were laid out. Roses, feathers, honey, whips, knives and a gun with one single bullet. Some of the things could inflict pain on people, some of the objects are usually connected with positive feelings. The audience was allowed to use these objects in any way they wanted to without having to face consequences afterwards. During the first couple of hours, everybody acted pretty shy, they gave her roses to hold and were very cautious but those actions escalated during the time the performance was going. Her clothes were cut open, she had wounds and one member of the audience almost shot her. With this performance she showed how humans reacted when they are free of any social consequences.
What is my personal guideline though is emotion. Don’t worry about understanding the art at first. Go through galleries and look at the objects and then see which ones will speak to you on an emotional basis. The truth is, many things won’t. And this is totally fine. If a painting doesn’t make you feel something, just let it be. Don’t even bother to do one of the things above because that might give you a full understanding of the formal aspects of it but if you don’t feel something by looking at it, it doesn’t matter if you understand the history behind this specific piece. Then it’s like looking at a random stone and reading all the details about it. It’s nice to know that this stone got its rounded edges because of the tornado in 1798 but…that’s it about it. A painting needs your initial interest. It’s not important if you think it’s ugly or if it’s beautiful, it needs to get your interest and make you feel something. Sometimes, this takes time. But try the emotional approach. It makes you open up a lot more because you’re not busy worrying about seeming like the most intelligent art-expert ever. Trying the emotion-method might even intensify the experience you have with some pieces.
So, yeah, don’t ever worry if you don’t get the message behind a painting, remember that liking a certain piece simply because you think it’s visually appealing is absolutely valid.
When I was a child, Sailor Moon was one of my favourite shows. I loved Usagi and always laughed until my stomach hurt because of her clumsiness and I adored all the other Sailor Soldiers as well, especially Sailor Mars and Sailor Pluto, they were pretty much my favourites. Back in the day, I recorded all the episodes on VHS so I could watch them on repeat and forced my friends to reenact them later with barbie dolls. I even had a Sailor Moon costume which I wore to a costume contest. I won free Pizza. This deepened my relationship to Sailor Moon even further. Since the 90s are having this weird comeback right now and there is this Loveparade/Raver thing going on, the double bun is absolutely in as well and who rocked the double bun at first? Correct, Usagi. And I love this hairstyle a lot. I wanted to draw somebody with a similar hairstyle since an eternity and today I finally did it. I also couldn’t stop myself from putting a moon in the back and putting something on her head as a little nod to the moon tiara and well…the moon. Progress:
Very rough sketch
A little more details
even more colour
The sailor buns were in severe danger for a short time
Back to the buns
Colouring the hair and trying out the moon
The “Tiara”
Bling bling and all that jazz. I used stock images from deviantart for this.
Colour manipulation
Last but not least some texture for the shirt.
And the final picture:
Mirrored, played with the colours a bit and added a colour-layer on top.
By the way, I found a great playlist on spotify. It’s mostly acoustic music, I listened to it while drawing and it’s extremely relaxing and keeps the flow flowing. You should check it out, maybe it works for you as well! Many of the songs are great.
I am lazy. Incredibly lazy. Take the laziest person you know, multiply their laziness by 10 and you get my level of laziness.
That’s one of the reasons why I always try to avoid drawing actual backgrounds even though I actually like drawing them.
One of the only times I drew a background was when I made a Screencap-redraw of a Gravity Falls Episode (Into the Bunker). Browsing Tumblr, I found a pretty cool thing, a 30 Days Background Challenge. As you can probably imagine, this is about drawing a different themed background everyday for the next 30 days. I immediately liked a lot of the topics on the list and decided to take part. I don’t know if I will draw one everyday or if I will draw every 30 of them, but I’ll definitely do the ones with themes I like.
I decided to start with “Mountains Landscape”, Number 13 on the list. I decided to draw the mountains at night so I can add awesome northern lights inspired effects in the sky because I just love them and it gives the whole drawing some sort of look that makes me think of Iceland which is in the Top 5 of my “To visit” list.
I wanted the whole drawing to have a bit of a rough look, a little shabby and I wanted the mountains to look rough, a bit two-dimensional, not photorealistic. Like somebody took a sheet of paper and just ripped shapes out of it and glued it on the background.
So here are some process screenshots I took during working on the landscape:
I start with a blue and add some spots that are a little darker and a little lighter to give it some dimension
Next are some colour swatches where I want the lights to be
I changed the blending mode of the first few swatches because I liked them better this way and drew new ones on top.
Now I just add more colours, I use different brushes to get some variations
I add some colours on a layer underneath to make it more glowing
First rough outlines of the mountains
I fill them in with white and a lighter and a darker grey. I want them to have a very rough look like somebody just ripped apart some paper so the colours almost remain like this.
I add some shading before a texture layer comes on top.
Some light right behind the mountains and textures come on top to give it a bit of a dirty look
In the final drawing I did some colour adjustments to make the colours pop a bit more.
Sometimes inspiration comes at 7 A.M on a saturday morning when the sun is too bright, you’re still grumpy because you’re tired but you can’t sleep anymore because the idea keeps nagging at you.
Let’s talk about inspiration. The biggest mystery in the world of art. Nobody understands it, nobody can grasp its works and ways. Inspiration can hit you right in the face in a moment when you least expect it (like 3 A.M but you just have to take that stupid photo) but you might also suffer from a total lack of inspiration, resulting in a long artist’s block. Probably every person knows this, not only artists but writers and people who do something just remotely creative as well as people who haven’t got any interest in stuff like this.
For me personally, there seems to be literally no healthy mediocrity. I go on art binges where I can draw every single day, sometimes even multiple times daily but these binges are followed by phases where I loathe art. Especially my own works.
Simply taking a look at my pencils and colours makes me want to throw up in extreme cases. What kills my inspiration or my mood to do art can be lots of different things. Sometimes I’m disappointed (or plain angry) because everything I try turns out ugly or at least feels dissatisfying for me because it varies from the image I had in my head originally, sometimes I’m discouraged because my works don’t get as much attention as I want them to get when I post them online, sometimes I just run out of ideas. My head turns absolutely empty and I can’t think of anything to do considering art. But in the past I figured out some things that help me overcome those phases at least a little more quickly.
I thought I’d share them with you because these might be helpful in many situations not just when it comes to art.
The first thing I ususally do is move away (or straight out flee) from my workplace. I put aside my pencils, my graphic tablet, my brushes, everything. I just get it out of my sight. Sketches I made and hate wander straight into the garbage can (At least put them away somewhere. Just don’t look at them). Sometimes I regret it afterwards but at the point of frustration the “No mercy” attitude helps me a lot. Then I go outside. I take walks. You don’t need a specific aim, just go outside and walk around. Don’t start with the thought “When I get back home I’m going to do something extremely epic and pioneer art” because the probability that this is going to happen is…well…not high, it’s even going to clog your brain even more and this isn’t the exact effect we want to achive with the walk. Instead, walk around and just open your eyes.
Practice thinking of nothing or just let your thoughts drift freely. You’ll notice tons of interesting things like this. Plants, buildings, garbage on the streets, passing people (Damn I’m such a hippie). Take walks early in the morning during sunrise and take walks during sunset and just notice how the light changes druing the day, it’s actually quite fascinating. Especially if you live in a tiny village like me and everybody is still asleep or already inside of their houses so all the streets are empty. It sounds silly but getting impressions of the actual outside is so helpful, I don’t do this often enough too.
What usually is a great help is music. I play the guitar and love to sing (but I sing horrible. Does this stop me though? Ha, no ), I listen to music all day long because I can’t stand silence at all. I love how different songs can affect how I feel. Some songs make me feel badass, like I can kick in doors in and defeat professional MMA fighters, some songs make me want to lie down and stare at the ceiling while thinking about how hard my life is and how my poor unfortunate soul is trapped on ths planet. You can try and translate those feelings directly into art.
Do it with the colours you use, the symbols you decide to put in your work or just draw a person who looks the way you are feeling. You are allowed to do absolutely everything (that’s the cool thing about art. No rules, yo)
I also like reading lyrics of songs. I love words in general. Writing is another hobby of mine and I like typography and using text on my drawings. Song lyrics and music are probably the things that gave me the most ideas in the past.
I’ve done so many things inspired by songs I love, it’s almost scaring me.
What works great, also words and letters related (call me Queen of Transitions please), are poems, books and short stories. Especially Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A Hoffmann, mythological stories and fairy tales work well for me. Some of the music-inspired stuff:
Arcitc Monkeys-Why’d you only call me when you’re high
Ar Dân
Arctic Monkeys-Old yellow bricks
King-Years & Years
City and Colour-Sleeping Sickness
Flight Facilities-Crave You
But in the end, you can’t force it. You can do things that might be supportive of bringing the inspiration back but I guess there is not “THE ONE“-way of guaranteeing that there will be an amazingly brilliant idea blossoming by the next day. And it works different for everybody, even differently for each individual depending on the day. Sometimes just seeing a photo on tumblr, browsing fashion on lookbook can be helpful.
The tiniest things can give you amazing ideas while making great efforts can result in nothing. It’s difficult to calculate, if not impossible. But all the blocks, all the frustration, all the suffering is worth it in the end because the excitement when you get a vague idea and then keep building it until it becomes something real and something you can be proud of, is just one of the most rewarding feelings ever.
So whatever you do, don’t quit, don’t give up, frustration is awful but brighter times are coming.
Yesterday I really felt the need to draw something non-digitally.
Since a couple of months I focused on digital art because I wanted to imrpove it a lot and when I still had school a month ago, I had a pencil in my hand the whole day and basically spent all my lessons doodling something so the digital painting was a nice break.
But school is as good as over and I haven’t touched my pencils for ages. The last time I actively used them was in my art final and the art final is something I erased from my memories completely. It was a horrible day.
In my mind I had an idea floating around for a very long time already so I decided to finally go for it. I was inspired by King by Years and Years especially the line “I was a King under your control”.
In the end my scanner screwed up and the colours turned out horrible so I had to paint over it digitally in the end. This led to the final picture, more mixed media than traditional but hey, I’m more satisfied than I thought I would be.
I even took pictures of the process:
First very rough sketch of the pose. I already had one in mind so this didn’t take much time.
Quick drawing of the face
Drawing the outlines with pigment liners and pencil
In my digital art gallery I already posted my drawing of Kimbra alongside with other paintings. Back when I finished the drawing I posted it on her Facebook Timeline because why not and apparently she saw it and reposted it on her Instagram. But already one month ago.
I guess this is the awkward moment when you don’t realize that your favourite musician posted your art a month ago until your friend googles you and mentions you in a comment.
I’m a bit angry at myself for not finding this earlier but at the same time I’m just the happiest person alive right now. Literally all the comments are positive and it has more than 2500 likes. This is so amazing. Holy Shit.
For this night, Love in High Places is definitely the song that plays on repeat. Also listen to this live set if you have some time. She is so ridiculously underrated. We should carry her around in a sedan chair.
If you don’t know Kimbra and her music yet, check her out. She’s an amazing singer. She sung with Gotye in “Somebody that I used to know”!
I hope you all have a great day! I continue being absolutely done and emitting screams of joy.
So yesterday I watched Mad Max Fury Road with some friends. That movie was absolutely amazing. The visual style is just on point, the colours are wonderful and the female characters were perfect. Imperator Furiosa who freed the “wives” of an insane ruler called Immortan Joe was super badass and the wives themselves were just so credible. They didn’t turn into fighting machines with mad skill but they were at not one single point damsels in distress. They helped Furiosa and Max as best as they could and were just generally impressive.
I immediately wanted to draw all of them but I decided to start with Capable (Riley Keough) because she’s just so great with the War Boy Nux. So here she is.
Art is weird. Contemporary art is even weirder. Sometimes, pieces of every artistic era are very hard to understand and leave you with a faint feeling of “What the fuck did I just look at”. Everybody knows this and is probably familiar with the horrible moment when standing in front of an extremely strange piece, not getting anything, while the person next to you suddenly says “Wow. What an amazing work of art”. It’s hard to admit your total lack of understanding when everyone around you claims to love a certain thing because you don’t want to seem uncultured or like a philistine. We could now talk about the fact that probably just a very tiny minority of the people who say they fully understand a work of art by taking just one glance at it actually tells the truth in this case, but I’d rather talk about a way of becoming one of the people who “understand” art. First of all, you’re not doing something wrong when you wander through a museum and the realization “Oh. Ok. I can’t figure out what any of these pieces mean.” kicks in. This is absolutely normal. Most of the time you’re not supposed to understand it with one simple look. Artists usually hide their message quite consciously. 
In my 
Miss Katz | Ceci n'est pas un art blog. 