New Drawing

New drawing. Feels like its missing something. She needs tattoos or jewelry or something. Any ideas?

Rantification #1

Its an interesting debate when someone criticizes another artist's work with zero merit to his claims, and contradicts himself trying to explain his own art. He says Dan has no creativity or imagination since he works solely for commercial purposes, ignorantly say the artist just painted a photograph without even so much as researching the artist in question. This coming from a "professional" who certainly has many year of experience in the illustration world! He even goes so far as to mention several other artists who have revolutionized the visual world with their art and desecrates their names. Anyone can have an opinion, there's no doubt about that. I have many opinions of my own. But when you rant incessantly about a painting, offering no real criticism whatsoever, then i feel that opinion loses all merit. There's an irony in all this as well. The enlightened artist whose critique style i am discussing, has no personal style of his own. Anyone who knows Frank Frazetta knows that his art spawned a whole slew of artists who are merely his clones. Frazetta did something revolutionary in sci-fi and fantasy art and he is on my top three list of favorite artists in any field. Its really easy to copy that style and profit off of it as well as the man's philosophy on art making. So you paint from your head, good for you. Now why don't you paint from your head and not make it look exactly like someone else's work. Take freedoms, just like he says he has. But is copying another's style really freedom?

I may be ranting here myself. But it appalls me that some people, even a self-proclaimed professional artist who has "invented" many more styles of his own, *coughs* have the gall to completely attack someone they don't even know at all, basically calling that artist's work garbage. You can have one style or many styles, but they're only as good as you make them. If its just an imitation then where is your own voice? I've seen his work, most of it thanks to his website and the world wide web. I implore my friends and anyone who happens upon my blog to take a look at:
http://hoffmanmuse.blogspot.com/

Maybe I'm over thinking or over sensitive because I happen to respect Dan, but reading his other entries completely justified everything I just said.

More to the whop

Here is a painting I have been working on for the past week or so. I've trashed my old approach to painting as I've learned from looking at some of my favorite painters that over blending flattens things. So she has 0 blending. The tree is in its final rendered form after two previous renderings that I didn't feel captured the tree I wanted to paint. So...feedback is welcome.

Whopper

So its been a few weeks since i posted anything on here. Don't know who has been keeping up, but doubtless you have been upset by the lack of work posted. If you read in the last post, I said I have begun drawing in a new technique, I guess you can call it. I don't know why this particular approach has drawn me but it allows me to stay realistic but not be so confined by the minutiae and the details that I normally work with. I thank an artist I happened upon while blog searching, Rich Pellegrino, for the spark of inspiration that led me to this and encourage anyone to look him up. All told, these drawings didn't take me more than an hour and a half to complete depending on the level of finish. Some only took me 10 minutes and they look better than a 10 minute drawing I used to do only a month ago. So enjoy. I'll post some drawings for a clearer before and after effect. The first three drawings probably took me like 20 minutes to do and I didn't get very far. They're nice. I don't like bashing my drawings since I love my drawings. But I just think the next few are more exciting to look at, and for those who know me its a far cry more interesting and less technical. I took the advice that a teacher gave me...well not advice. He just told me I use too many lines when I draw. So I "capitalized" on that, as Scott Fischer would say and this happened. Its also mixed with elements of my normal sketching style, when I don't use any reference at all. All of these were done with either a live model or photographs. I'll go in the order in which they were completed...