The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Borrowing the title from Sergio Leone’s film, I’m going to share my impressions on 3 brushes I have in my studio. On the bottom of the picture below we have Winsor & Newton 13mm/ 1/2″ Artist’s Water Colour Sable ‘ One Stroke.
In the middle we have a very cheap Chinese brush that I bought 6 for $0.99 with shipping included (!) to Brazil. I can barely reads the gold lettering on red handle but where I can read it says “820 / Cheng Zhen. The third is a Keramik 6 – 916 brush sold by Keramik in Brazil, that I suspect it comes from China as well.
So, the Good is obviously the Winsor & Newton’s brush that while is not expensive, is made of selected Kolinsky sable hair. The handle is well balanced and ferrule is well constructed.
The Bad, is the second brush. While the Hair is fairly decent synthetic fibers, the handle leaves much to be desired. Ferrule is poorly constructed and the handle is very light weight. It is clear when you hold it that no attention given to the balance of the brush.
The Ugly is this Keramik brush. The hair fibers appears to be made from the poorest bristle available on Earth, it is extremely hard and pointed to various directions. The ferrule is as poor as the Chinese in the middle and on top of that, no balance to the handle as well. I have this brush in my studio to remind me to not buy any brush from this brand ever again.
Its the evolution!
I’m constantly amazed by how things evolves in computer graphics.
I got myself thinking these days about the evolution in the Computer graphics area in the past decade.
In the old days the CG artist… (more…)
Sketch Box
My Sketch box: A couple graphite pencils, charcoal pencils, mechanical pencils, blenders, kneaded eraser. All together in a handy metal lightweight box.
Ingres on Drawing
“Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that. ”
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Mona Lisa virtually restored
Still about Mona Lisa, the Louvre’s version have been virtually restored in 2004 by Multispectral camera technology. According to the article, at Lumiere Technology website,
“The hidden knowledge of the true colors was revealed by multispectrally scanning the painting in thirteen channels – from Ultra Violet to Infra Red. Then the spectral response curve of the varnish in each pixel was isolated and subtracted from the digital file to virtually reveal the surface of the painting when it had freshly exited Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop.”
Mona Lisa’s Twin
There are many copies of Leonardo’s famous painting but the articles spreading around regarding this Mona Lisa copy is really interesting; Conservators at Prado museum found out to this one was painted at same time as the original on the Louvre so much likely to be painted at Leonardo’s studio by one of his pupils.
The Mona Lisa copy had black paint over the background, added in 18th century as reported and was carefully removed by restorer, revealing interesting details not so well preserved in the Louvre painting.
Left: Louvre’s Mona Lisa. (more…)
Alchemy
Alchemy is a very nice piece of software that I’ve found in the past months that is basically a sketch environment with several tools oriented to shape, lines exploration. I find it particularly useful when the brain is tired of thinking, there are tools that just throw chaotic lines and shapes around that can be worked on another software such as Photoshop, Painter, etc. Its released under GNU license. Alchemy also has a pretty decent documentation.
A couple doodles I did in Alchemy below:
Vintage nudes from sketchbook
Bringing back some content of the old blog; four pages of my sketchbook featuring vintage nudes. All graphite.
Michelangelo on Mastery
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all”.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)