New acrylic painting started way back in 2010. This piece went through a number of changes right there on the canvas. See if you can count the number of times I repainted the hair:

Finished a new acrylic painting, which some of you may remember as this work-in-progress from way back in August, which remained unworked-on for the majority of September through March.

Sometimes I’ll do that, put a painting on hold for long stretches of time, only finishing it months later with very little work in between — a habit that would be much easier to hide if I didn’t painstakingly document every moment of my painting process for all the world to see. Speaking of which:

Reference photo by Gilliann (model) and Bansheechild (photographer) on deviantART.

Not sure if this qualifies as a “speedpainting” anymore though, as the changes took me another 3 hours — an hour longer than it took me to do the entire previous version! Ahh, so it goes.

As before, painted from this reference photo is by Aimee Fitzgerald.

Photoshop speedpainting from reference, about 2 hours. Reference photo by Marcus Ranum.

Photoshop speedpainting, no reference, about 1 hour.

From this reference photo by Aimee Fitzgerald (though I don’t think I quite nailed the intensity of her stare).

I originally intended this to just be a quick speedpainting, but then I kept finding things to work on and before you know it eight hours had passed. But I’m trying to push my digital work in a more painterly style, so it was nice to work on something longer that also felt very loose and energetic.

(From reference photos by Marcus Ranum)

(Reference photo by Aimee Fitzgerald)

reference credits: Rebecca Röske, Hong Ly, Marcus Ranum, lisajen-stock

reference credits: Rebecca Röske, Hong Ly, Marcus Ranum, lisajen-stock, attemptestock

My painting Sunlight Nude is on exhibit right now at Market Street Gallery in San Francisco! Lots of great artwork in this group show by the looks of it. Opening reception is this Saturday, November 5 at 6:00pm.

I recently went through my vast collection of figure reference and whittled it down to only a choice set of the best poses and photos. Oddly, one of my most important criteria? The model must not be looking at the camera. I was surprised to realize how much this makes me not want to draw a pose. I guess it breaks some sort of fourth wall for me. Well, also I took out any poses that felt too forced or self-aware, and I suppose looking directly at the camera falls into that category as well.

In any case, what I’m left with is an awesome set of beautifully natural poses that I always want to draw — all the better for encouraging daily drawing!

(reference for many of these poses by Marcus Ranum, whose deviantART account has loads of awesome poses and would be a great place to start if you were looking to build your own collection of figure drawing reference.)

With this piece I’m doing something that I literally haven’t done in years — using the color black.

One of the things they taught us in art school is that black has a tendency to deaden the colors you mix it with. Instead what you do is mix a blue and a brown (typically I use ultramarine and burnt umber), and that gives me a nice rich chromatic gray that mixes really well and looks black on the canvas, but doesn’t feel out of place next to all the other colors.

Normally I don’t have any black on my palette at all — but with this piece I want that sort of deadened look that comes from using pure black.

And so into my art supply archives I went, pulling out a tube of mars black that hasn’t been opened since probably 2004.

Note: your eyes are not playing tricks on you, the colors in the video do look much different than the actual painting, something to do with the lighting I think. I assure you the actual painting is much closer to the plum color in the full view and not the dark indigo shown in the video.

(original reference photographs for this last one by Marcus Ranum)

As always, these pieces are available for purchase in my store.

Buy this painting

Buy this painting

Buy this painting

Buy this painting

Buy this painting on Etsy

Ahh, February, the month of true love. On that note, one of my paintings, Faceless Nude, will be on display this month at Dirty Show 12, an erotic art exhibition in Detroit. The show runs from February 11-19, 2011, more information at www.dirtydetroit.com.

Buy this painting on Etsy

Buy this painting on Etsy

Buy this painting on Etsy

Buy this painting on Etsy

Buy this painting on Etsy

It’s only been up for a week or two, so all I’ve got so far is an artsy post about StarCraft and old game graphics, and a short post about a dream I had involving Bill Clinton. Oh, and pictures of my lovely Minecraft creations. I can’t guarantee I’ll always have such riveting material as this to post, but if you feel like following what’s going on in my life outside of the art-related stuff, look no further.

But, after a couple months practice I think I’m getting back up to speed. It doesn’t hurt that for the last week I’ve been painting using this year’s big Christmas gift — a new large-sized Intuos4 tablet with a luxurious 12.8″ x 8″ workspace.

If I’m being truly honest, I can’t really say that it’s making me draw better … but I can say that it definitely makes me want to draw more.

Sunlight Nude: 11″x14″ | 8.5″ x 11″

Pale Nude: 8.5″ x 11″

Beach Girls postcards are now available as a 5-pack! I wanted to offer them in a bulk deal for those who might want to send to multiple people (or possibly give them as gifts), plus I liked the photograph I took of them.

An exciting new addition to my store, my digital painting Beach Girls is now available as a 4″ x 6″ postcard! Suitable for framing, for use as a bookmark, or for actual mailing. Available now at my Etsy store!

The show will be open for the next four weeks. The opening reception is this Saturday, October 9, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

This piece and the one I just finished (previously) were both painted using an extremely limited palette: ultramarine blue, burnt umber, and white gesso. And I’m currently working on a third using the same palette.

This is my entry in the show.

“If you don’t feel personally exposed when publishing the game, you did not make art.”

It’s funny that I’ve never been asked that same question, since I also paint a lot of women in various states of undress. I’m probably covered (so to speak) with my watercolor pieces — since those are all technically life drawings and thus fall under the safely acceptable umbrella of “artist study” — but I don’t have the same excuse with my acrylic pieces, which were all done from my imagination, and thus I had to choose that as my subject matter.

To my friends’ credit, none of them have ever gone and asked me, straight up, “What’s the deal with all these naked women?” I think maybe they understand what an uncomfortable question that is. Or maybe it’s just not a big deal to them. I have no idea.

But I’ve thought about it a lot. These feel like very personal pieces for me, but I couldn’t really tell you why. There’s nothing autobiographical about them. There’s no message or statement I’m trying to make. What makes them so personal? I know that when I sit down and just paint for myself, these are the paintings that come out of me, but are they really personal, or are they just paintings of naked women? Do I fall back on the standard excuses — that the female nude has been a favorite subject of artists for thousands of years? Or, even better, that I’m just your average heterosexual male and so of course I like painting naked women?

I don’t know. Maybe. But I think there’s more to it than that.

For one thing, I’m purposely painting these pieces a certain way. I tend not to like painting in an obviously “pin-up” style, and I try to avoid all the usual pin-up tropes, like deliberately sexy poses or staring seductively into the camera (in fact, whenever I can, I usually try to paint them looking away from the camera, or just off-camera). My paintings still feel a little suggestive, sure, I’m not trying to avoid that. But I think my intent is to make it seem like the subjects aren’t aware that anybody is looking, and so maybe they’ll seem a little less fake and posed, and a little more relaxed and natural.

Another thing is that because I’m painting these from my imagination, not from reference, I think it gives them a more personal quality than the ones painted from live models. I don’t know exactly why, because, again, what’s so personal about painting a naked woman? Maybe it lets the piece be closer to my natural drawing style, more stylized, like something out of my sketchbook. Maybe it turns the piece into more of an abstraction, like I’m painting the idea of a woman, rather than any one specific individual. Or maybe it’s that, by creating the entire piece from my imagination, I’m showing you exactly what was going on in my head, and, well, there’s just something very personally revealing about that.

But why is that the image in my head in the first place? Why not flowers or landscapes or people with their clothes on?

Well, I don’t really have a good reason, because I’m honestly still trying to figure it out. I only started this series a year ago, after a long hiatus from traditional painting. And at the time, I was at something of an artistic crossroads, with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my art. When I started painting again, it was because I wanted to see what would happen if I just painted for myself for a while.

But I think maybe sometimes you don’t get to decide what a piece is about, even when you’re the artist. Sometimes you just paint what you feel compelled to paint, and only when it’s finished does it reveal to you what it’s about.

This series hasn’t quite revealed its purpose to me yet, but here’s my best guess so far, which is maybe just a variation of the “straight male likes to paint naked women” excuse, but here it is anyway:

I think I’m just trying to paint something beautiful. And maybe this type of female nude — this stylized, abstracted, anti-pin-up woman — is what I think beautiful is.

If that doesn’t make these pieces personal, I don’t know what does.

The exhibit will be at Market Street Gallery, more details as we get closer to the date. Incidentally, the submission window doesn’t close until July 31, so if you, too, make pictures and want to express your reaction to the word “Palin,” by all means, join in.

About a month prior to its release, its creator wrote a post explaining his reasoning behind, god forbid, actually charging money for the game, and in the middle of it all was this quiet indictment of the conventional wisdom:

“… The idea that we can produce more things, with higher quality, and fund it with smaller payments seems unrealistic to me.

“The smart money is not the ones trying to survive on microscopic payments, but the ones creating a platform to skim money from them. Apple wants the games on the Appstore to cost next to nothing, so that people buy more iPhones even if its not sustainable for the vast majority of developers. Google wants to you to think that you can become an overnight millionaire when everyone suddenly flock to your lolCat page with google ads on it, when they really make money on having millions of websites with their ads on that get a few hundred views each.”

And it makes me wonder whether this brilliant internet business model of giving your work away for free and then making money off the eyeballs is going to work when all the eyeballs are doing it too.

Seeing as I currently have a number of works available for sale, allow me to set the record straight on my own views:

I want you to buy my art. I’m happy to sell you my art. And I would love to sell enough art to make a living from just selling my art. But please don’t buy my art because you think of it as an “investment.” That’s not what art is for. That’s not why I created it. If you’re going to buy my art (and I really would like you to), please do it because you really like the art.

If you only buy art that you like, you’ll never end up with art that has no value.

Look for more acrylic paintings coming soon. I’ve got a few that have been brewing for some time now, and I think it’s all gonna boil over if I don’t finish one of them soon.

I’ve got a new painting up in this month’s issue of The Book of Imaginary Beasts. As always, there’s also a new timelapse video of my process.

These are comps for the next paintings I’m working on (and an older one I already finished). Most of them are currently in what I and many other artists refer to as the “ugly phase.”

The ugly phase is a phase every picture has to go through, it’s the phase right after putting something on the blank canvas (because you need to put something there or you haven’t started) but before any of it is in the right place. The ugly phase is essentially fixing everything after that first stupid move, when you decided to sully that nice pristine canvas with your wretched markings.

Thanks to my new procedure of recording every bit of my process, you can actually watch me go through the ugly phase on some of my own paintings. You might not even notice, it goes by so quickly in timelapse. That’s accurate; the goal is to get through the ugly phase as quickly as possible — because, for the duration that a painting is in the ugly phase, its artist experiences lasting physical pain until it stops looking ugly.

And while the video makes it look easy, what the camera doesn’t show is all the time spent between sessions, not painting, just staring at it, thinking to myself, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Now what am I supposed to do?”

During this phase, it’s rare that I’ll spend longer than twenty minutes before stopping, setting it aside, coming back to it later, working another twenty minutes on it. I spend a lot less time, but it’s much more staggered, and all of it is agonizing. Compare this with the rendering phase, which is long and boring and monotonous, but easy. At that point, all I have to do is finish it. And when I get to this phase, I’ll often work for hours at a time, and it may take a while, but at least I know what I’m doing.

And that’s the thing about the ugly phase. It actually doesn’t occupy that much painting time. The bulk of the time on a painting is really spent on the rendering needed to take it across the finish line. But while the ugly phase may account for maybe only 10% of the time spent, it easily occupies a good 90% of the anguish.

The ugly phase is what makes starting a new drawing or a painting so difficult. It’s not just the tyranny of the blank canvas, as some say, though the two are related. After all, you had a perfectly good canvas there, it looked fine before you decided to draw on it. Now look, all it took was a single mark, and you’ve ruined it. It’s too late to take it back. You have to live with it now. You can only go forward.

Ruining the canvas was your crime, and now the ugly phase is your punishment.

Faceless Nude, 8″ x 10″ — (etsy link)
Sunlight Nude, 9″ x 12″ — (etsy link)

Three of my paintings are currently on display at D-Structure in the Lower Haight in San Francisco — two acrylic paintings (Figure on Canvas and Teal Nude) and one watercolor (Nude on a Draped Pedestal).

All three of these pieces are available for purchase, so if you happen to be in San Francisco over the next two months and you’d like to own one of these, now’s your chance. Click on this link for prices and directions to the store.

For any other insecure artists that may be reading this, I submit to you this short list of required reading.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
A sprawling ensemble novel about lots of different things, if you want it to be. Some may identify with it as an immigrant story, some as a novel about class tension in America. I identify with it as a story about being young and insecure, and facing the pressures that stop us from doing what we were really meant to do. There are no artists in this novel, but not for lack of art. Whether any of the characters ever decide to do the thing they love isn’t for us to say. But they aren’t alone in their struggles.

Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado
The story of an ex-Hollywood executive turned Vermont-based small business owner and master baker. An inspiring success story of a person doing her own art on her own terms (in this case, the art of delicious cakes and pastries). Along the way, we get accounts of the frustrations of working in Hollywood (always cathartic), and, as an added bonus, each chapter concludes with a recipe for one of the many titular confections.

Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton (audio book version)
Like the previous book, this is also a story of an artist’s rebirth from the ashes of a former life in Hollywood. Unlike the previous book, however, this deals much more viscerally with the painful effect of years of constant failure, and questions of insecurity and self-doubt as the author tries, again and again, to do the thing he loves. It’s one of the most touching and honest books ever written about an artist’s vulnerability. Yes, there’s Star Trek in it, but it’s not a book about Wesley Crusher. It’s about an artist’s personal demons, public failures, and eventual rebirth doing the thing he was probably meant to do all along.

The two points that Cartoon Brew excerpted (and indeed almost all of the list) speak to something I’ve believed for a long time: the idea that as an indie, you can afford to take more risks because there isn’t $150 million on the line if you fail (unlike if you were doing a big budget film at a studio), and the ability to fail without huge consequences means you have the freedom to do what big studios can’t, so you should take advantage of that.

But I’m surprised no one is talking about this one, even more relevant to animation, in fact much more relevant than it is to video games:

12. Grow up.
Chances are you’re not a fucking kid anymore, so if you feel like making a more adult game, do so. When you’re indie you don’t have to answer to anyone, so stop designing games like you have to have to pass ESRB. I’m not saying everyone should make porn games, but why do all video games seem to have immature themes? People aren’t stupid: stop treating them like they are. Speak through your work like you would to your friends, design for yourself and don’t censor your ideas.

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but this is always my number one complaint about animated films. The medium can be used to make anything, and yet so often it always comes back to family entertainment or children’s films. This is, of course, this is the safe move. It’s what everyone knows will make money. And I do understand, the studios have a need to make a profit, especially since these movies are not cheap to make, so I don’t begrudge the big studios for making what the market wants.

Independents, on the other hand, aren’t trapped by their price tag the way big studios are. So let’s please use that to our advantage and take some risks, including more animated films in different genres. Let’s please let some of them be sophisticated adult stories like the best of our live action films are. And let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that stories with real people instead of talking mice don’t “take advantage of the medium” and are automatically better suited for live action. Animation, just by being animation, already takes advantage of the medium even before we start to justify its use with things like the twelve principles.

All the best stories being made right now are done in moving photographs. All I’d like is to see them in moving illustrations.

P.S. — I understand, of course, that making a feature-length animated film as an independent is a tall order; in fact, from first-hand experience I know what an incredible undertaking it can be. I know I’m asking a lot, here. And I know there won’t be any flood of feature-length independent animated films, in any genre, coming out anytime soon. But I can still want it anyway, can’t I?

P.P.S. — Two movies from the last few years obviously already did this: Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir. These are incredible films and exactly what the medium needs. However. Let’s diversify a little bit. We don’t want the only alternative to children’s entertainment to be weighty political memoirs.

Not the first new painting of 2010, since I actually painted it in December, but the first newly posted painting. This was a Christmas gift to my brother, last seen frolicking on the surface of the moon in Oregon. Pictured above.

Also, timelapse video of said painting, for those who, in these economic times, can’t afford to go to the moon themselves, you can live vicariously through the magic of streaming web video.

This redesign is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, now. The old site may have sufficed, originally, as a humble gallery to display my work, but as my interests diverged I needed to expand, and ended up creating a whole different site specifically for my portfolio work, leaving this site to house my growing body of (so-called) fine art. Well, very quickly that, too, outgrew the original site. A change was in order.

The site now features a Wordpress-powered blog for sketches and news updates, a new store page with prints and original art for sale, and a paintings section with the capacity for many more galleries than before, including entire series of works that previously had no proper home. This also, of course, allows for the expansion of paintings and series not yet painted, so no longer is my work limited by where to put it on the Internet.

Hopefully, this means I’ll be getting work online sooner and more often, and best of all would be if this encouraged me to make more art in general. That would be convenient, because that was my plan for 2010 all along.

There’s also a sort of sappy personal story behind this, if you’ll permit me.

This is a special painting for me, because it was the one that got me back into doing traditional painting. I started working on this one about a year ago, at the end of 2008. Now, since then, I’ve actually managed to finish a bunch of other traditional paintings before this one, but before I started this, pretty much all of my work was purely digital. Before this piece, the last time I’d done any traditional painting was 2005.

It didn’t occur to me how much I missed painting until I saw, of all things, a post on Penny Arcade showcasing some paintings that Gabe had started doing. The paintings themselves were pretty great, but he also wrote this in his post:

This latest piece is the first in a series I plan on doing based on my favorite games. I sat down and made a list yesterday of all the games I’ve really loved over the years and I plan on trying to do paintings based on as many of them as I can. The list has stuff like Zelda, Rez, Kingdom Hearts and Bioshock on it, plus lots more.

Strange as it seems, that’s what inspired me. Just the whole idea of painting something fun. Somehow, in the previous three years, I’d been so serious when it came to making art (anyone who’s been through art school maybe knows what I’m talking about) that it didn’t occur to me that I was allowed to have fun.

And so I started this painting. And now a year and five other paintings later, it’s finally finished.

Here’s hoping I can keep it up.

I’ve also got another four as well, that only got as far as pencil drawings during the session, and I’ve been working on these at home. I’ll post them later in the week when they’re all finished.

In the meantime, enjoy!

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

Another timelapse film, from the latest painting. Enjoy!

With the focus of this site shifting increasingly in the direction of the fine arts, I’ve been needing a new place for all of my actual production work. Well, today my professional portfolio finally has a proper home with the completion of my new portfolio site, Zachary Knoles Illustration & Design.

Over there, you’ll find my professional art: illustration, backgrounds, design, storyboards, etc. Back over here will be my personal work: paintings, short films, and this blog. Maybe it seems like an arbitrary division, to split my work thusly into two sites. But there is a reason. With one site now clearly marked as “the portfolio,” the other one can be used for whatever I want. I find that freedom comforting.

Latest painting. Was going for something like that old pulp paperback cover feel. Or something like that.

You can actually see the original thumbnail for this one way back in this post, second from the right. The pose changed along the way, that thumbnail was just for the colors. Sometimes that’s all it takes, for me to want to take something to a finish.

You can see the finished painting here.

Total painting time was about 19 hours. The footage was shot with a Canon PowerShot A570 IS running CHDK firmware, using Ultra Intervalometer to take a picture about every five seconds. The unedited footage ran almost nine minutes, so I actually had to speed up the footage even further to bring it down to the four minutes it is now. In this final version, each second represents a little less than five minutes of painting time.

Also, my goodness, I have terrible posture.

Five of the pieces available for sale:

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

One of my favorite things about Cogswell’s life drawing sessions are the short poses. At Cogswell, five minutes is considered a long pose. The warm-ups are ten-second poses. Ten seconds. I’ve never been at another drawing session that does it this way, but it’s great. When the models know they won’t have to hold a pose for very long, they all seem much more willing to give us more difficult poses. And with less time, our pencils get looser, and our drawings get better.

That’s the idea, at least. It doesn’t happen that way all the time, and sometimes it makes me feel utterly exhausted to draw that fast for three hours straight. But more often than not I get some real gems out of these sessions, and even when I don’t, it’s more fun this way.

Some of my favorites from my last two sessions:

New painting, acrylic on canvas panel, 11″x14″.

I’m doing a bit of a fun experiment. For the last couple paintings, I’ve been shooting timelapse photos of my painting sessions, with the intention of being able to show the entire process of how I make a painting. Also so that I might look back at what I did and learn from it.

This one here is the first painting where I’ve recorded the entire process from beginning to end (I have footage for other paintings, but they all start at some point in the middle).

So hopefully I’ll be posting a timelapse video of this painting soon, provided the footage didn’t come out terrible!

Our film got a nice write-up in the Mercury News last week. The full article is online at the Mercury News website.

The last several posts are the result of a new system of warm-up exercises, which I shamefully stole from my fellow artist Geoffrey Stone. It’s very simple. First you start with a list. Fill it with all manner of drawing exercises. Assign each one a number, one through however many you have. Then, when it’s time for your warm-up exercise, take your list, look over it very carefully, and roll the dice.

Whatever the dice say, that’s your exercise. Now go do it.

I love this system. For me, the worst part of having lists like these is actually picking one. Making a decision always feels like such an investment, like there are so many choices, I’d better have a good reason for picking this one over the others. Most of the time I end up not doing any of them. But now that’s not a problem. The dice make my decision for me.

My list is below, for anyone who’s curious. (Extra nerdy detail: some of these also have secondary rolls from other lists, and one of them even requires me to roll again from the same list. Yes I do enjoy this a little too much.)

1 – SKETCH OUTDOORS FROM LIFE
2 – NOIR SKETCHES
3 – COSTUME REFERENCE
4 – FIGURE SKETCHES FROM REFERENCE
5 – FIGURE SKETCHES FROM MY HEAD
6 – SELF-PORTRAIT
7 – COLOR SCHEMES
8 – SONG SKETCHES
9 – FAN ART
10 – ARTIST STUDIES
11 – AMBER’S CHOICE
12 – PIXEL ART FREE SKETCH

Drawn first in ink with a brush pen, then scanned into Photoshop where I added several variations of color.

This was how I found Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, a novel I’d never heard of, and it turned out to be the best novel I’ve read all year. It’s not at all the kind of thing I would normally read, but it’s amazing (and, for a 560 page novel, an incredibly fast read). I wish I could easily describe what it’s about, but it’s an awkward sort of novel to summarize in a compact, elevator pitch description (“sprawling modern day Victorian novel featuring Korean-Americans from all walks of life and every rung of the class ladder, poised at the edge of what-do-we-do-with-our-lives and finding their way in mid-1990s Manhattan” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue).

There’s an interview with the author (4 parts on YouTube) that does a much better job of describing the novel than anything I could say. So I’ll only add that although the book has nothing to do with being an artist (except possibly for protagonist Casey Han’s love of making hats), reading it I somehow felt as if it was describing exactly the same trials and pains and pressures that I feel as an artist.

There are probably other books that do exactly the same thing, but Free Food for Millionaires does it really damn well.

My wife and I went to Seattle a couple weeks ago, and I did this sketch from the window of our hotel. (I know, it’s what every artist draws in Seattle, this or the Space Needle.) Below is a photo of the same view.

Hey, it looks like Bye-Bye Bin Laden just got a pretty awesome review from KGO Radio’s Ronn Owens and film critic Tim Sika, who calls it “the film with an all-talking, all-dancing, all-singing Taliban,” which is a better tagline than we could ever come up with.

Check out the audio of the review!

Incidentally, Bye-Bye Bin Laden is out today! Go buy it now on the Cinequest website!

And that wraps it up for all my previously unposted Sketch Noir drawings! Enjoy this quick little animation (done from this initial sketch).

After a hiatus, Sketch Noir is back to being updated. I’ll post the rest of what I have over the next week or so until there aren’t any left, and then I’ll wrap it all up with a short animation of one of the sketches. After that, updates will be more intermittent, whenever I have more drawings to post. Enjoy.

Some of these are for the paintings I just posted, while some others are for paintings I haven’t done yet. For the last two, I used their color palette in this painting, but I still want to make them each into paintings of their own.

I’ve also got a deviantART gallery up now, so if any of you have dA accounts, you can follow me on there: acebullet.deviantart.com