trompe l'oeil butterfly

Here's an old picture of the development of this painting .

Mural

Two fun pictures of me working on a mural over winter break.

90% done light switch

Here's a study I did just for kicks. Though its nearing completion, I plan to add a few more holes, push pins, tacks and such.

Moss

A tuft of moss growing between the bricks.

Ethereal puddle

After coming home soaked, I decided that a little photography outside coudn't get me that much wetter. Haha, I was wrong, but here's one of my favorite photos of the afternoon.

Here's a fun one I did with sharpie markers. Funny part is, I'm actually going to get a design for a real tattoo to another friend tonight, right after I post this update!

Photography atrocity

So, apparently photography is not my Forté. Haha.


Over winter break I did this painting of a good friend of mine. I felt, although there were plenty other traditional and Vogue-like poses I could have chosen, this actually explains what he's like. I hope that by simply looking at it, you can get a sense as to the kind of person he is. The first picture shows the actual color...and the second shows what the colors are intended to depict.

First pastel -1/2 done

So here I'm trying out my pastels for the first time in the stairwell of my dorm. Well, sometimes you just have to work with what you've got.

Anyway, it's about St. Anthony the founder of Christian monastacism. Summarized nicely by Wikipedia: he lived in a tomb in the desert, closing the door on himself and depending on some local villagers who brought him food. When the devil perceived his ascetic life and his intense worship, he was envious and beat him mercilessly, leaving him unconscious. When his friends from the local village came to visit him and found him in this condition, they carried him to a church.
After he recovered, he made a second effort and went back to the desert, further out, to a mountain by the Nile, called Pispir, now Der el Memun, opposite Arsinoë in the Fayyum. There he lived strictly enclosed in an old abandoned Roman fort for some twenty years. According to Athanasius, the devil again resumed his war against Saint Anthony, only this time the phantoms were in the form of wild beasts, wolves, lions, snakes and scorpions. They appeared as if they were about to attack him or cut him into pieces. But the Saint would laugh at them scornfully and say, "If any of you have any authority over me, only one would have been sufficient to fight me." At his saying this, they disappeared as though in smoke, and God gave him the victory over the devil.

Last night I painted this on my friend's cast. Lot's of fun. Also did a Betty Boop the week before, but I forgot to take a picture of that. Maybe next week...

Erika Atzl
June 10, 2006
Last Internship Journal

A quick comission I'm working on:

A portrait of a boy in charcoal

On Tuesday, I spent time with Gloria Barbre in the torpedo Factory, who mentored me during the year in a sewing internship. 

Here's two different stages of a still life of cherries:


This is the actual still life that I’ve been working from:

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30 minute sketch in Liberace's Figure class:

Journal Number Three with Pictures!

Erika Atzl
Internship Journal Number Three
June 3, 2006
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Robert teaches his students to apply the paint in a basic way of gradually applying the paint more and more thickly as it builds up in intensity of light. These paintings are flecked with sudden jumps from the intensity of the midtone to the highlight. As you can see from even his own paintings, he often keeps his highlights as a simple dash, making the highlight absolutely unmistakable and intensely vibrant. From there, the only alteration to the highlight would be what he calls “tickling” the paint, keeping the paint stroke full of “action” and completely vibrant at the same time. This mimics the natural movement of the eye. We are not copying from a lifeless, stationary photograph with clear delineated edges, but drawing a living, breathing, moving model. As such, the eye takes in information more discerningly.

In every good painting there should be something called a “center focus.” This can and should be achieved in two reasons and for two ways. Whether literary, visual, or theatrical, the most obvious way to achieve a center focus is by subject matter and composition. For example, if the painting or photographic portrait is commissioned to have the main idea of “I have a beautiful and alluring wife” then the subject matter will be of the woman, and it will be composed in a way that she is likely near the center of the painting, the most exciting colors will be perhaps a part of her clothing, and she would be the most dramatic shifts in light. Pretty obvious. But paintings like Liberace's mimic the the physiology of the eye. 

Generally speaking, we are not aware of zones of increased fuzziness around the central image we see. The reason for this is that the eyes are constantly moving, bringing first one part of the visual field and then another to the foveal region as the attention is shifted from one object to another.  When the eye looks at an object, let’s say the leaf on a tree, not only does everything else goes slightly out of focus, but the actual edges of the object itself are never entirely clear unless the eye is looking straight at the edge. Therefore, the most beautiful drawings often include a variation between a trembling line and a carefully delineated line, just as the eye itself skips around adjusting to the form, noticing some details and overlooking others.

Experiments in highlights:

A choppy style of highlighting.

Blending and diffusing the highlights.

The Cherry Painting

Monday and Wednesday were the normal 9 to 5 days in Danni’s studio at her house. I’m currently working on a painting of some cherries I picked from a tree in her backyard. They’re lying in a green dish, which conveniently is the complimentary color of the red cherries. Most interestingly, they are under the light filter of a green satin cloth hanging from the ceiling and directing the light down in a tube onto the still life. A combo of warm light, reflected off of a cool surface, the shades are drawn elsewhere to keep the main lights on the still life cool, and to avoid Southern exposure. -Ingenious.

The Self Portrait Projects

She’s also assigned me the self-portrait I told you about last week. The “yard long painting with my life-sized face must have the following: a scene of the room behind me, with a mirror reflecting the back of my head as I paint (requiring three upright mirrors)… WITH my hand doing the actual painting. That was really hard. 

Composition of this complicated setup.

She keeps telling me to stop with all of the crazy jumps in color, because in life she says that “shadows don’t just jump from red to green like that.” But she always commends me on the fact that I’m not afraid to use color like I was only a year ago. We laugh frequently on how I tend to go overboard with any painting advice that she gives me.

No more crazy jumps from red to green. Haha.

My Freetime Piece

And here’s the development of a painting I’ve been experimenting with also in my free time -My friend eating snow off of a branch. These are the only photos I have of it, before I turned the snow into a puff of warm breath on wintery air. I like to watch the stages of the painting, and I think you might too. 

Owlie

I also challenged myself in the hour remaining to paint an owl as fast as I could. Speed painting is a rush!

Going a little nuts in my last few art classes

Woohoo for a free schedule, free paint, and freedom from any painting apprehension!

So I played around a little for another day...here's the abstract ( I think) done.

Duo-tone experiment

Tried for the first time using only green, orange, and white for the lit skin tone. Shadow was burnt umber. Fun stuff! Fun lady!

Haha. I guess I had some fun today in art class. My first abstract painting EVER.

Hah. You know it feels good when you accidentally say "groovy."

Sketch of Jenny drawing me :P

Jenny!! That was so much funn....
Next time, we're PAINTING each other. Muahuahua.....

Past Works