Loyal reader! I thank you for your forbearance!
In February I completed my artistic anatomy course with Scott Eaton. It was highly educational and quite intense. Each week I learned about a new part of the body and I had weekly ecorche assignments where I had to put that knowledge into practice. I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for the marvel of engineering that is the human body. It’s a subject that you could easily spend an entire lifetime on.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be taking another course with Scott Eaton: Digital Sculpting. This will help solidify my understanding of anatomy and I’m hoping that I’ll pick up some technical tricks in zBrush too. Ultimately, I plan to spend the next year or two refining my understanding of human anatomy and my digital sculpting skills. Eventually, after I have a solid grounding in human anatomy, I’ll move onto comparative anatomy.
Over the past month, I’ve given some thought to my prospective artistic journey. I’d originally thought that if I simply collected enough reference photos, I could create digital sculptures from them, paint, light and render the sculptures, and thereby skip over 10,000 hours of drawing. But I’ve now come to the realization that patience and diligence are virtues, and I’m going to have to roll up my sleeves and get my learning on. I’m starting to think that digital sculpting is not a shortcut so much as it is a different path (albeit with certain advantages).
I’ll be doing a show with Ajax Creative Arts in the first week of May. I’d originally planned to enter two new paintings (along with some others from 2018), but I’ll probably only have one completed in time. After completing my underpainting of the Red River Hogs, I started glazing them but I found that the colours weren’t turning out as I’d hoped. So I’m now painting directly, which means painting the whole thing over top of the underpainting. Live and learn!
