Pregnant plus Kitties equals Today

A couple of these MAY have been blogged before, but they've been worked on since.





I am pregnant and I like kitties.




















I like the glassy eyes of cats.











And drawing on extremely cheap wrinkly paper.





Unfortunately some boobs follow.

Booby Lady

Here is Smiling Booby Lady II!





(I might change the title one day.)

She's a bit ghoulish, but she was mainly an excercise in using up paint.

Make it come true

I'm now trying to paint some 'beautiful paintings' that combine together all the best things I've learned from drawing lately. The kind of paintings that would be self-justifying, even if I never wrote blogs or tried to be clever. I have to think the word 'beautiful' to myself to make it come true.

But in the meantime here's a lady with awkward composition. I don't think she minds. Except she's lacking one of her eyes.

I think I unintentionally made her look a bit more like some of the female members of my immediate family than she oughta.

Nature's Colour is Most Beautiful if we can but see and understand it

I haven't got a nice neat little collection of pictures today, partly because I'm trying so jolly hard to get better at everything. Yesterday following the suggestion of Bill Wray in the comments, I found these lovely mostly out-of-print books by Andrew Loomis, online in their entirety.

Originally I wanted instruction on perspective, but these books cover a lot more. Absorb! Wondrous free resources for those who crave knowledge!

Click on the image to find the rest of the book 'Creative Illustration':





I was thinking that maybe could write more on this blog about who and what I'm trying to learn from.... and why.

I like these books' extreme heterosexual male 50s-ness. I like that it's about 'commercial art'. It could bee seen to be a nice counterbalance for my silly-headed womanly English hippy tendencies.

I also like them because the author seems to genuinely care about teaching well.... communicating... in the clearest terms... but he has his own voice, he's not bland. I like it when people speak their own words.






Perhaps the only reason I ever didn't want to be 'an illustrator' was the crapness and mundanity of a lot the stuff I saw at illustration degree shows etc. Doing fine art seemed... well it's more glamorous, but that wasn't really it... it was more challenging, I could sense the frictions I was in for. Unfortunately they weren't so much sexy frictions as a nasty cultural labyrinth of poo, from which there seemed no escape.

Luckily now I have clear-headed mid twentieth century American chaps to help me into the land of sufficient competence. Screw postmodern cynicism, bugger ambiguity and 'interestingness'-masturbation.... Enough questions! I want answers! I think I'm entitled! I can handle the truth! I want to be good! I believe in truth and beauty! Gsaahh!

Remember the five Cs!





As I haven't assembled any sort of pictorial thesis of the crisp 'John Cena is a Bump-Lunk' calibre (but I'm working on it), I have a teaser picture, it's some boobies I painted with oil paints. The painting also has a head in it. I'm getting back into oils, gradually, between frenzied drawing sessions.