Finally got around to scanning some of my favorite drawings from the past few life drawing sessions.

I keep waffling between being in awe of the beauty of the human form, and thinking that we look really fucking weird. Especially knees.

( Lotsa nudity, NSFW )

Keeping myself entertained. Oh, and those neck spines are totally venomous and its main defense against predators :nods:.



( One more )

Ok, everyone I've mentioned this to has been surprised, so now I'm really wondering when the hell Ohio redesigned its driver's licenses. Or did I just get a "special" one? They're now pink, and rather ugly, or at least uglier than the old one. As a note, assuming that just because the actual holiday is on a Saturday, doesn't mean that places will have normal business hours the day before. The BMV closed early, and when I walked in the first thing I thought was to wonder about what their fire code capacity was and how close we were to it. Yeah. I was there for an hour.

However, it did entertain me that half the staff at the BMV seemed to be stealth!goths.

I'm sure other things of note have happened--I had a pretty good weekend--but I think I left higher brain functions run off about three hours ago. Oh, when my boyfriend was driving me home last night a couple of kids shot off a firecracker directly in front of our car, at about tire level. Very nice of them.

I had a visitor today ask me where the raptures were. She meant raptors. And here's the mental image that resulted from that conversation.

This is definitely one of the more...worrying options for the afterlife. Yes, I am expecting a lightning bolt with my name on it any day now.



I always get excited when I come up with a use for the fairy dust brush.

Well. This is interesting. Two of the life drawings of OMG a naked woman that I posted a couple of weeks ago have been removed from Photobucket for violation of terms of service--which I looked up. Turns out, Photobucket has a policy of prohibiting content that "contains nudity, excessive violence, or offensive subject matter or contains a link to an adult website".

Which, ok, for the moment leaving aside all arguments about how nudity != porn, how are these two drawings worse than this one that was left alone? Does it really matter that much that she's in profile? There's still visible nipples. I'm leaving that drawing up mostly because I'm curious to see if it does eventually get taken down.

Also, I love how nudity apparently means any and all, no matter the portrayal, nevermind that in order to never see it you have to avoid ever looking down while taking a shower, but that violence only has to be "excessive". People harming other people? Perfectly fine. Nipples? Obviously cause mental scaring.

Nevermind the large quantities of nipples and general lack-of-clothingness that you'll see in any art museum. Like, this painting is seriously sketchy, IMO. But, it was painted by the David that brought us "The Oath of the Horatii" and Napoleon on his pretty pony, so it's hanging very proudly in the Cleveland Art Museum. Also, it's the size of a wall, so Cupid's expression is quite terrifying in person.

This makes me really wish that I'd gotten around to scanning the drawings from last week, when we had a male model. There's a visible penis.

In other news, look, more fan art

Dude, everything really is on the internet. And the best part? The first time I saw this illustration was in a pretty serious book about prehistoric eggs.

T-REX SEX! Er, probably NSFW, or at least it would be entertaining to explain. I think the artist might have been trying to be tasteful and romantic, because, yanno, nothing says love like a flight of pterosaurs.

Wonderful, my router seems to have died. It's not a huge deal for the moment, as I'm the only one with a computer right now, so I can just plug directly into the modem, but my cable situation at my desk was already getting out of hand, and even just one more cord is making me feel a little entangled. :counts: Oh, huh, there's 10 cables draped through about a foot's worth of desk space. That might explain it.

The folks over at the history museum were playing with wet plate photography a few weeks ago, and I volunteered to be one of the models. It's a really neat technique that I wish I could explain better than "Dip the plate in a whole bunch of chemicals", and looks a lot more fun than modern chemical photography. It helps that you can do it outside, instead of being trapped in the darkroom, and IIRC there's actually fewer steps. Anyways, here I am wearing a WWII nurse's hat and cape. My uniform's on underneath, hence why I'm kind of huddling in the cape, but they apparently had the whole outfit donated, and I'd love to find out if it fits me.

My dear mother's reaction upon seeing this photo was:
"Huh, you really do look like you've been through the war. How tired were you?"
Thanks, mom.

I tried to come up with a happy sun with sunglasses design for the summer camp shirts I'm making. Simple, right? The first try looked angry, and the second try looked sarcastic. So now it's just a faceless and expressionless sun, because I don't think that "Oh yeah, I'm so thrilled to be here on this shirt, with sunglasses that protect against the light that I produce" sends quite the right message. Let's face it, there's a certain type of cute that I just cannot for the life of me draw. Attempts to do so end up resulting in something like this.

Also, I've been taking a lot of random photos over the past couple of months, so here's some stuff off of my camera.



The Ohio River back in April at Coney Island, drowning trees. Immediately after I took this an elderly gentleman came over and spent about ten minutes talking to me and my mom about river barges.

( Three more )

Ok, it's either post this, or clean the Pit of Despair. Sooo...

Five Unintentionally Horrifying Classical Paintings. Or: Anatomy Gone Wrong.

Now, in many cases the distortions might have been intentional. In fact, out of these five paintings, there's only one that I'm certain is a purely a case of artist error. However, I don't think any of these paintings are supposed to be as weird and creepy as they come off because of the screwy anatomy.

Dead Christ, by Andrea Mantegna c1490

First off, there's a lot of technical details that are really nice in this painting, and the artist gets major props for making Christ look very corpse-like. I'd also give Mantegna props for making him look Middle Eastern, except that I suspect he was actually going for Spanish. However, this is a wonderful example of how to NOT do foreshortening. Now, I'm not sure if maybe Mantegna had objections to making Christ's feet bigger than his head, but as the entire painting is done so very realistically with such attention to detail, I'm inclined to think that Mantegna was doing the thing where you try to make the figure look "normal", regardless of what position it's in.

So we all know that the feet should look smaller than the head, because generally peoples heads are a lot closer to our eye level. When you're trying to draw a setup, like this one, where they actually appear larger, you're going to be fighting this little voice saying "No, that's not right". Mantegna lost, and by doing so drastically flattened the image, so that I feel like poor Christ is about two feet long and rather deformed.

Grande Odalisque, by Jean-Auguste Ingres 1814

Ok, now this was done entirely on purpose. Ingres had a Thing for backs. Seriously, the man was obsessed, and in this painting he went a little crazy, decided that the model's back just wasn't long enough, and added some vertebrae. If you imagine what she'd look like standing up it's a little worrying, especially as the curve of her spine is a bit too perfect, and makes me feel like it'd be kinda floppy.

Isenheim Alterpiece, by Matthias Grunewald c1510

The thing about this painting is that it's supposed to be comforting. Grunewald painted this for the Isenheim hospital that cared for victims of leprosy, which Grunewald depicted Christ as having. Apparently the idea was for the patients to contemplate about how their fate could be worse, as at least they weren't being crucified.

Madonna with the Long Neck, by Parmigianino 1534

Stretchy figures was more or less the defining trait of Mannerism, which is why I dislike most of the paintings from that movement. I think they were trying to improve the figure, putting aesthetic concerns about accuracy, but it doesn't really work for me. Instead of looking at these paintings and thinking about how graceful Madonna's neck looks, I can't help but think she might be related to those aliens in one of the Star Wars prequels (my brain just failed at remembering any of the names, including the specific movie title :headdesk:). Also, like the Odalisque above, imagine what she'd look like if she tried to walk. Not to mention a rather terrifying baby on her lap.

Virgin and Child with Angels by Jean Fouquet c1450

It took me forever to find this one, as I've always thought of it as "The boob job gone horribly wrong" painting while forgetting the artist/title, and you can't exactly search that in Google. Somehow I doubt this artist had ever actually seen real live uncorsetted breasts. This is a good example of why life drawing is a good thing.