Vital Creations

Bookbinding

2009-04-27T08:11:00.002-04:00

These are pics from my first foray into bookbinding. I was in a four-day workshop learning eighteenth-century French commercial binding techniques taught by Jeff Peachey. Awesome!

The above are pictures of the sewing frame, where the text block gets sewn together.

These chords will be laced into the boards to make the front and back covers of the book.

The above pictures are of the covered and laced book. The frayed chords above are laced into the boards through three holes and then pasted down. Historically, I leaned too late, they would not have been pasted. Oops.

This is the spine covered in vellum. I pared down this parchment to back the spine; it's shaped like a comb and attached between the chords. You can see the signatures (groupings of folded pages) and sewing through the skin. Cool!

Disaster!

I used a plough (or "plow?") to trim the edge of the text, according to historical practice. But I messed up in two ways: 1., I forgot to make the covers a little bigger than the textblock (squaring the boards), and 2., I trimmed it at a skewed angle. Crap.

So I trimmed the text block further and removed the old boards. I then attached new boards and laced them more simply. I trimmed them after this.

This is while I was sewing headbands (small decorative bands of colored thread). This took a while. You can see that by this point we painted the edges of the pages red.

Subesequently, I messed up on paring down the leather to cover the whole book. This frustrated me because I got the parchment pared down, and leather is thicker and softer. But no dice. So I can't learn all of bookbinding in one weekend. But I did learn a lot and it was a rare and amazing opportunity!

Scribal selections

2009-03-30T08:31:00.003-04:00

This is a mezuzah I wrote. It's actual size is about 3 x 3 inches. Below are sections of two mezuzot that are magnified for detail.
Sometime soon I'll elaborate on the creation of these really small scrolls.

Now on Fox: Antelopes Gone Graphite!

2009-03-27T18:27:00.004-04:00

Yes, that's right: a Giant Sable and an Addax, everyone's favorite antelopes. I drew these from mounts at the American Museum of Natural History, or, as I like to call it, Heaven on Earth.

Masiakasaurus sketch

2009-03-24T10:08:00.003-04:00

I just wanted to put up this old sketch of Masiakasaurus knopfleri. I've had second thoughts about the raised second toe, but when I drew this - a long time ago - I went for what I thought would be a noasaurid look. Oh well.

Velociraptor sketch

2009-03-21T18:35:00.004-04:00

Just a Velociraptor mongoliensis. I sketched this extemporaneously with no skeletal references, so please forgive innacuracies.

Look Ma, No Arms or Legs!

2009-03-20T11:59:00.006-04:00

These two torsos are from the same sketching session at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both were done using 2B mechanical pencil lead in a .5mm Pilot mechanical pencil on Fabriano paper, and the amount of time for each was not too relatively disparate. However, the difference in the results is clearly huge.

Two main differences I noticed in the process were the lighting and my use of a tortillon. The top sculpture was much better lit; the second sculpture was lit by various sources including skylights, which made the resulting shadows muddy. Concerning the tortillon, the Fabriano paper I used is highly textured yet does not hold the graphite strongly, which makes it, ironically, and excellent paper for the use of a stomp or tortillon. The paper + graphite really beg for smoothing.

I have done many drawings without a stomp or tortillon but I felt unable to work without it in this case. I didn't want to resort to it for some reason; I wanted to achieve every effect with just my fingers and a pencil. I didn't use a stomp or eraser on the lower drawing, but by the time I got to the point you see above, I just felt it wasn't worth finishing. So I moved on to the other sculpture, and I like the results.

But I'm still not satisfied. I will post a drawing of the second sculpture and it will be finished and we'll see how it works. Maybe it will be on different paper so I don't feel as required to stomp. Any thoughts from you all out there?

Statuesque Two: Electric Boogaloo

2009-03-17T08:49:00.005-04:00

More statues. This bronze was from the American Wing at the Met museum, but unfortunately after I drew this the wing closed for renovation. Since the drawing is already a year old, I probably won't finish it when I get back to that sculpture gallery.

Here's a torso that I'm not too happy with. I tried tinted paper with white highlights to capture the gleam of the marble but my shading came out too chimeric. Capturing the intricacies of the chipped marble didn't help the piece, though I thought it would add interest.

Statuesque

2009-03-16T22:44:00.006-04:00

These are sketches from statues found in the awesome Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Greeks certainly loved portraying naked dudes, but this sculpture happens to be female and clothed. As I will discuss in an upcoming post, I have been struck down by the astute criticism of an artistic superior, which opened my eyes to certain subtle drawing practices that have already improved my sketches. I have been trying to learn these new techniques, which are in some ways entire paradigm shifts in artistic methodology. I was feeling pretty successful with this clothed female Greek, until I was forced to eschew one basic and important aspect: completeness. If it were up to me, the Met would be open evenings until very very late, so I could go and draw whenever. Also, the museum would switch its lighting around so that the statues are all lit in such a way that makes drawing them most fulfilling. But alas, the world does not revolve around me. So the Met kicked me out and closed its doors before I could finish this drawing. I may finish this sketch soon, though, because I think it was going well.

I often take a lot of time to remove all lines form my drawing, for lines are unnatural. Line in nature is determined by shape and contrast, rather than contour. In sketching, line is a basic and useful tool. So a sketch may be made by increasingly tightening lines to form the desired object. If the drawing will be taken to completion, these lines would be applied in such a way as to be easily subsumed into the shading. In the clothed woman sketch above, I didn't even get as far as planning to subsume the lines.

This next sketch of a robed Roman man was another aborted artistic process, but this wasn't the Met's fault. This was to be a chiaroscuro drawing, because if I remember correctly this sculpture is metallic and I thought the ability to highlight would be beneficial to the sketch. I skipped any outlines entirely and started applying values in a haphazard way. I became impatient and stopped after some minutes. It is really worth noting that the full process of taking each artistic step to completion is the best way to achieve finished, quality, realistic drawings. That is in fact true of almost every human endeavor. While there are valid drawing techniques that don't rely on line, but rather on the application of dark and light forms and values, this evidently wasn't suitable for my mind and the piece at the time.
I didn't end up finishing this drawing, or even spending more than the few minutes required for this sketch. I went back to it the same day with a different technique and instead focused on line to make a preparatory sketch with more success:
It's interesting how some techniques fit certain subjects sometimes but not others. Tell me what you think and what works for you! I'll be posting more statuary soon...

Surrealism and Sci-Fi

2009-03-08T20:19:00.006-04:00

I rarely like surrealist art, except for a few notable exceptions. I appreciate many of the amazing works of art by notables like Dali, but they're not works that I choose to view or surround myself with. One surrealist, however, has been quite influential on my art: the art and creature design of H. R. Giger. He was a very successful designer and artist, and his work has a unity and consitency without being monotonous. Check out this website dedicated to his art. The image above is a prominent example of his work from that same site.

Many of his works are oddities of biomechanical and sexual themes. The alien monster itself from the movie is basically a large spiky phallus that goes around eating people. The pseudo-Freudian nature of Giger's imagery both distracts from and contributes to the elements that intrigue me: the anatomical basis, the use of transparency, and the play on familiarity and alienation.

All those facets of his art are manifest in the Alien creature. The anatomical basis transcends the sexual inspiration that defines the eggs, face-hugger, and Alien's head. The endo- and exoskeletal nature of the creature itself is both human and something more. You can see in some of Giger's work that the Alien cranium, though lacking eyes, is based on a human skull:
Here's the same sculpture (I don't know who made these) topped with the cranial covering:
The pretty tansparencies aren't limited to the cranium, depending on the artist and, moreover, the movie designers' choices. Which brings me to the cool full effect of the anatomy and transparency, and that's the humanness of these aliens. Sure, that's not hard to pull off, we're used to seeing and creating humanoid things. In the case of Giger's designs, the Aliens are just humanoid enough to be accessible to the imagination, but so . . . alien that they make the viewer uncomfortable with their familiar elements rather than comforted by them.

You'll see more artwork posted here based on Giger's Alien designs, but here are two sketches to start with:

Sketchbook

2009-02-27T17:29:00.003-05:00

More drawings! That's all for now...

A dinosaur could not drink from a straw!

2009-02-20T16:44:00.014-05:00

Without lips, that is. So since dinosaurs could not drink from straws or even whistle to call a cab, there's no doubt that they could not have evolved into more intelligent species. What kind of a civilization could they have without swirly straws?! Okay back to topic.

Now cheeks. So I drew this wounded Triceratops for paleontologist Andy Farke:

It was a fun learning experience. I started with the bones (which were later modified). The wounded fossil lacked much of the skull, so I reconstructed the fossil cranium according to Andy's direction (i.e. which skull to base this skull off of) so you can see the chunk missing from the frill:
Among the many things I found out is that ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs like Triceratops) probably had ridges on their horns, like you see today on rams and such. These ridges grow on the sheath that covers the bony core of the horn, so they wouldn't be present in the fossil specimens. Here's an example from a modern ram:
The drawing itself illustrated the wound on the frill. A big chunk was missing and the edge of the bone showed regrowth and healing. Which is awesome.

There were other decisions about what the dinosaur should look like. These horned dinsoaurs have a long row of plant-chopping teeth that is a little inset from the edge of the jaw. If I can find an illustration of that, or the time to illustrate it, you'll see it soon. I wanted to know how Andy wanted the cheeks to look, so I sent him some sketches.

Sketch one is the classic cheeked look. Scientists long assumed that the tooth row was inset to make room for a cheek, which would keep the food from falling out of its mouth when eating:
This is a half-cheek; same great flesh, less cheeky:
The next sketch is a lipless, cheekless face. The lower jaw has an upward-projecting muscle attachment site (like the coronoid process on human jaws), which means a lipless, cheekless jaw would still end at that muscl-ey area:
This is a lizard-like lipped mouth closed:
And open, like a smile:
Now, the mouth would have occluded (I learned), so there would be no space between the upper and lower beaks.

The final choice was cheeks not because they were the most scientifically accurate, but because they are conventional and the focus is the frill, which is very rational. Here's the drawing in color:

So that was a little bit more about the choices that went into a scientific illustration...

Sketchbook

2009-02-14T16:33:00.005-05:00

Dinosaur sketches! I'm biding my time as I prepare a post on cheeks in ceratopsians (horned dinosaurs). Here's a sketch of a chasmosaur:

And here's a Triceratops that I like. Notice the ridges on the horns? I'll talk about that soon. I like the way the texture and foreshortening worked out:
And lastly, a chasmosaur in a forest. This was fun:

T. rex is Cool the Third: Jaws!

2009-02-12T10:43:00.019-05:00

Holy Lip Gloss, Batman! I haven't posted in a long time. This will be post three of four on the subject of dinosaur faces. For now, that is.

And soon I will share my thoughts and feelings concerning some amazing medieval manuscripts I've had the chance to ogle recently.

Remember Jurassic Park from waaay back in 1993? It affected dinosaur imagery in far-reaching ways. Not only did it help convince a lay audience that dinosaurs were active animals rather than sluggish monsters, but it brought scientific ideas to the popular perception of dinosaurs. Despite these steps, it was still a movie, and it's ultimate goal was entertainment. In the last post, I talked about the flesh covering the jaw attachment site. The JP T. rex design had a very idiosyncratic version of this anatomy. In the picture below, you can see the characteristic zig-zag JP jawline. You can also see that the actual lower jaw does not zig-zag:
This zagged jawline was proliferated due to the popularity of JP. It filtered into scientific publications as well. Here's a recent depiction of T. rex from, unfortunately, I don't know where: It has that same zigging and zagging lower jaw line. Why are they depicting it that way? Well, unlike most theropods (the lineage of mostly carnivorous dinosaurs that now includes birds), T. rex has a thick tooth line and a particularly thick and prominent jugal bone:
This bone is part of what accounts for the wide, boxy cheeks of T. rex. These cheeks also turn T. rex eyes forward significantly, giving the animal a degree of stereoscopic vision: The wide jugal projects over the lower jaw in a remarkable way: The articulation and overlap of the upper jaw over the lower indicates how the flesh should appear. There is, generally speaking, a huge overlap of the upper jaw over the lower jaw in carnivorous dinosaurs: In at least one T. rex specimen, the overlap is so great, that teeth from the upper jaw actually project below the lower jaw. Here is another view, where the red is the amount of the overlap of the jaws: So what we have is osteological evidence for the appearance of the jaw attachment. The artists behind JP took this overlap line and made the lower jaw follow it. I suspect that this also had mechanical purposes: the animatronic dinosaur model had to close and articulate its jaws, and maybe different kinds of cheek were harder to pull off. But I've never felt that the JP design was either scientifically supported or aesthetically ideal. But that doesn't mean that I've always succeeded in my attempts, either.

In the drawing below, I made the cheek covering similar to the flesh covering the rest of the head. When shading the jaw, I think I understated the jugals projecting over the lower jaw.
The problem is that if this drawing were correct, the cheek flesh would have to extend over the jugals and down to the lower jaw thusly: Which is pretty far out there anatomically. What's next is to update the drawing and have both versions. If any of you have an opinion, let me know!

For now, here's Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex, with "her" particularly wide face:

T. rex is cool part deux: Let's get cheeky with it!

2009-01-30T12:24:00.023-05:00

So I've thought a lot about dinosaur flesh, because that's what's missing from them. The fact that any drawing of a living dinosaur is a detective saga makes these animals more fun to draw, yet such a different task than, say, wildlife art (check out Robert Bateman's miraculous art). Dinosaur artists could have it worse off, though. We don't have to reconstruct mammals from their skulls:

But even though dinosaurs likely didn't have things like trunks hanging off their faces, there are plenty of questions about how they looked. One important question is how well dinosaurs could kiss. Like, did they have lips? Robert Bakker and other paleontologists are associated with promoting the idea that dinosaurs had fleshy lizard lips:

The prolific and inspirational dinosaur artist Gregory S. Paul also illustrated dinosaurs with lips. Though I used to illustrate dinosaurs with lips, I no longer do. Amateur paleontologist Tracy Ford and others have promoted the idea that maybe dinos lacked lips. One argument is that the lips of lizards are formed by scales growing over and past glands that are found just above the gumline on the outsides of their skulls. Since dinosaurs (probably?) didn't have these glands, or overlapping scales, why would they have grown lips? Paleontologist Lawrence Witmer and his research lab are important go-to guys about the soft tissue of dinosaurs. He has been interviewed about the subject and questions whether any dinosaur had any muscular cheeks or any fleshy mouth structures. The point is that crocs don't have lips, and birds might not have lips, and since they are dinosaurs' closest relatives, why not check them out for their facial structures? Why not, I ask you?

So lips are gone. But what kind of flesh covering did the jaw attachment site have? Gregory S. Paul drew his dinosaurs' jaw attachments with a very revealing lizard-like sheet of skin covering the musculature along with their lips.

(detail from here):As compared to this lizard: Once I took lips off their faces, I wasn't sure the sheet of skin made sense any more. Here's a crocodile:

Crocs' facial skin is very highly adapted to their sensory and lifestyle needs. Their skin tightly follows their skulls' contours, and at the ears and nostrils they have evolved very specific structures suitable to their semi-aquatic lifestyles. Are their jaw attachment sites similarly specialized for croc lifestyles, or more accurate for dinosaurs? I followed their example in the drawing of T. rex at the top of the page (also here) and in this drawing of Coelophysis bauri:
Then one day I had the chance to stick my finger in some predatory birds' mouths. That was cool. I got to know a falconer who brought out his birds and let me actually touch the beaks and claws of his falcons and hawks. Then I got to draw from them and study frozen bird carcasses. That was fun for me, though some wouldn't prefer it to an afternoon, of, say, cow-tipping. Hawks have a tough skin that hides all of their jaw musculature:

Other birds have a similar structure, albeit a bit more revealing:
So in the spirit of scientific experimentation (in art), I chose to draw bird-like cheeks and no lips on these guys.

But the ultimate answer is that we don't, and won't, know for sure. Soon I'll explain why T. rex may not have had the cheek structure I drew, despite my best efforts. Until then, here's a crazy dinosaur with, in this case, lips. Heeeere's Suchomimus tenerensis:

T. rex is cool. Period. . See?

2009-01-28T13:39:00.012-05:00

The above drawing is a detail of this piece. In various upcoming posts, I'm going to discuss the different decisions that led to the final look of some of my drawings. There is a lot of scientific evidence that an illustration has to take into account to be accurate ("accurate", of course, as of the date of the drawing. There will always be new data that will out-date previous work). Maybe y'all have criticism or advice that can inform my future works.

This first post is about the early development of this drawing. I wanted to accomplish these things while portraying Tyrannosaurus rex: environment, facial structure, and the anatomy of the flesh covering the skull. It all started with this sketch:
The skull of T. rex has lots of intense shapes to it that I wanted to highlight. The boxy cheeks, big teeth, big rugose lumps of bone above the eyes, nasal ridges and bulging jaw and neck muscles are very appealing as subjects for harsh lighting. But I wanted to show off different aspects of the skull, with the mouth closed and open and from different angles of light, so I added another animal:

Now, when I look back at this sketch, I think to myself, "Those thumbnails all look the same, you fool." But at the time I had a specific piece of illustration board set aside for this and I wanted the animals and the scenery to all fit on the 12 x 20" space. So T. rex has wide-set cheeks with eyes facing forwardish. Most images of dinosaurs in general are fairly boring sideviews of the animals. In the end, I chose boring sideviews, too, because the image and the shading, I felt, would be least confusing this way.

The lighting I wanted would have to come from about head-level of the animals and cast distinct shadows, so dusk of dawn was the natural choice. But since there's no sky visible, I didn't have to portray this except with the lighting. Since I wanted a plant-filled background, they must be at the edge of a forest or something for the light to work this way. I can only assume that my viewers pick up on that or that the piece looks natural enough. I chose magnolia, conifers, and cypress as representatives of T. rex era plants and made the undergrowth dense and leafy. These dinosaurs are knee-deep in plant matter, yessir. And that'll be all for now.

Next time I talk about jaw skin anatomy. Stay tuned!

rib tickler

2009-01-27T17:20:00.004-05:00

I just added this picture to my online portfolio. The most challenging part of this was keeping track of the ribs. I lost count a few times and had to erase quite a bit. I drew this from a photo with great lighting. The translucent scapula is real; not my invention. That's what drew me to this picture. I will probably do another chiaroscuro version of this with better tools. For this I used those big, rectangular General's pencils because they had a very useful white charcoal pencil, but I found an even better brand. Faber-Castell's Pitt Pastel pencils are my new friend. What do y'all think? Is it three-dimensional?

Soon I'll get even more into the anatomical transparency thing with an update to my half-anatomical self-portrait, and other such work. In fact, I've already ruined one such painting, so we'll see what I can produce.

the forest OR the trees

2009-01-26T11:47:00.014-05:00

I put up my first inklings of a portfolio, consistently titled Vital Creations. Check it out, you'll be pleased!

Meanwhile, since my art jobs are currently scribal rather than drawing based, I've been running headlong into all my trouble areas of art.

Today my challenge is forests. This, for example, is a perfectly acceptable photo of a forest. But my challenge is in drawing natural-looking forests without photo reference. The epicenter of my challenge lies in the natural randomness of an ecosystem. The different parts of a forest - the diversity of species, natural arrangement of trees, lighting effects, ground cover, etc. - all add up to a reality that is obviously far greater than the sum of its parts. Forests are representatives of nature's complexity, and so creating a drawing that is detailed and comprehensive of a forest is like encapsulating nature for a moment.

I broke it down and focused on foregrounds:

This is a scene from the New York Botanical Garden, near my apartment. It's a study done from the skywalk in the rainforest room of the conservatory. I tried to get the complex plant forms drawn as quickly and accurately as possible.

This drawing above was going to be a prehistoric ecosystem, but never got past this stage. I tried to include plants that would have had ancient representatives, like magnolia and cypress, but didn't use photo reference, so it wasn't going to be accurate enough to be a scientific illustration.
I drew the above sketch while on the phone. I tried to use value to create depth, which is different in a dense forest. That's also what I tried to do here. This all partially stemmed from the consistent depiction of dinosaurs in empty spaces. Sometimes that's appropriate, but one amazing thing about good art is that it can encapsulate an entire world in just one piece of art (check out examples of Doug Henderson's art).

And one last sketch of a forest. I'll return to this theme for sure.

when extinct life imitates art

2009-01-23T16:40:00.002-05:00

Howdy folks! Thanks for checking out my art! I grew up on dinosaurs, and I've been drawing them most of my life. After junior high, my artistic repertoire expanded to include superheros, and superheros fighting dinosaurs. And now I'm an artist, illustrator, and scribe with some professional dinosaur art under my belt but also lots of other stuff I've produced.

This here is a detail of the piece up top. It features Troodon formosus and shows how to draw a dinosaur. It's originally a pencil drawing, but the skeletal and flesh drawings are Illustrator work and the coloration on the life restoration is Photoshop. Enjoy!