spies and cyberpunks

I cleaned out a few years' worth of of old paper trash the other day: bills, shipping receipts, instruction manuals for meds and medical devices, a pamphlet for a political party for an upcoming election, etc etc. There's enough data there to reconstruct a lot of details about me or other household members, including the kind of detail that would be illegal to ask in a job interview.

Just by going through someone's trash, you could find out if someone is taking antidepressants, or if someone is pregnant or on birth control, their legal immigration status, their shopping habits... etc.

You could find out where they work and where their kid goes to school. With enough material you could figure out when they tend to be out of the house.

For portraiture you have the unique challenge of capturing the distinctive features while flattering them. There’s a tension of “what makes the person look like themselves?” against what they WANT people to see.

Acknowledging and respecting that, reflecting a View of the Self instead of a simple photograph, has always been an ephemeral and noble challenge of portraiture. It’s a rare skill, and while I’m not claiming to be a brilliant practitioner, here’s how I go about it. You want the person to feel SEEN - on a level and in a way that only a portrait artist could.

If someone in a novel were to spend a paragraph studying the portrait, they ought to be able to say something plot-relevant, like “the artist had faithfully captured the FAMILY RESEMBLANCE in the notable features and the PLOT POINT in the shape of her eyes… but no photograph could have captured the wistful turn of the mouth. Across a hundred years of distance, her soul was clear, speaking to Protagonist as if she were merely in another room…”

That’s the skill of portraiture, really, and it’s rarer than the ability to do good lineart (which I can’t do either; note that I’m not claiming to be GOOD.)

The immediate outstanding features of the “fan” are

Dark, hooded, distinctive eyes - she’s probably proud of them

Challenging, knowing expression

Long dark hair is a feature she’s proud of; because it’s well-cultivated

A sweet beauty of youth, but I can see what she’ll look like when she’s older

Notes on her features:

Roman nose that’s unusually short for the bridge type. Doesn’t have the space to be “hooked” but has the shape.

Natural brow with natural arch - fuzzing in to a shapely tapered form

Rounded face but with an interesting composition of flat slabby cheekbones and a high flat forehead. I’d love to look at it from other angles but she could model for a LOT of time periods and a LOT of artistic traditions.

Cool olive skin - very tricky!!! Especially with that pink lip. Frankly beyond me to depict fairly tbh… but at least I tried

Dark pigmented undereye and eyelid, which I chose to handle in the sense of “flattering eye makeup”rather than true depiction of her colouring.

Full mouth with NO CUPID’S BOW - fullness in lower lip

I’d elide the faint double chin out of gracious recognition of the angle and acknowledgement of the fact that the sitter would PROBABLY prefer it not to be noticed. I ultimately alluded to it, but elided it.

Even without the double chin, her determined yet rounded chin is another charming and forceful contradiction that lends what we call “character” to the face

💯 keep the moles

Presumably a fan of Instagram anime art is familiar with conventions and is therefore hoping for a portrait with glow brushes and SHEEN and TEXTURE and anime petals and veils barfed all over it - so I did a final version with those things - presuming it would make the “customer” happy

Obviously you can see that I’m quite humbly and realistically not an ARTIST but I thought it was interesting to contrast what skills are valued in a party trick of portraiture (breaking down and flattering features, playing a delicate game of flattery/pleasure and clear-eyed recognisability) vs a much more skilled and stylish render that is based on replicating anime aesthetics and thus - despite being better which I acknowledge! - didn’t engage so much with the goals of portraiture. Returning to the goals of portraiture - likeness, gesture, expression, picking out features, affection for the subject - is so,so good for the soul. For one thing, it reminds you of your ability to fall in love with faces…

All that, and she is, put simply, a person with conventionally attractive features and normal weight. Like this isn't even "IG artists challenge to draw fat people ffs", not even skinny people have a chin that looks like it was shrink-wrapped around their jawbone, because that's not how skin works. Being able to see the underside of someone's chin is normal at that angle because that's how 3D space works on actual human people. I wouldn't even call it a double chin.

I was looking up facts about Cormorants to find a title for this and found out about the liver bird a mythological creature from liverpool that is literally just a cormorant which I find kinda funny

Video games kinda suck at designing female heroes

In 2002, the photographer Howard Schatz published a photo collection called "Athlete" featuring pictures of, well, various top athletes from every sport and genre. These are some of the women he photographed, and the thing I want you to do in your head is compare the variety of humans that you're seeing here to the variety of humans you see in the cast list of your favourite video games.

These women are all in peak human condition for their fields - if you wanted to design a character who is tough and strong, these are the kinds of bodies you should look to for reference on what that looks like. You tell me how many video games or comics or movies or anime create their characters with even this limited variety in shape and size.

Character in Context opens tomorrow at @armitchellmuseum and curated by @ellistrator

Opening Reception from 5-8pm.

Return to Lilac Wood | 9x12” watercolor and pencil on Arches (please contact gallery for purchase inquiries)

Oh huh! I hadn't realized I didn't post this one here on Tumblr! I finished this study in early March and have plans to have it be one of 3 pieces to go together 🙂‍↕️

Living Wall

These vegetated surfaces don’t just look pretty. They have other benefits as well, including cooling city blocks, reducing loud noises, and improving a building’s energy efficiency.What’s more, a recent modeling study shows that green walls can potentially reduce large amounts of air pollution in what’s called a “street canyon,” or the corridor between tall buildings. For the study, Thomas Pugh, a biogeochemist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and his colleagues created a computer model of a green wall with generic vegetation in a Western European city. Then they recorded chemical reactions based on a variety of factors, such as wind speed and building placement. The simulation revealed a clear pattern: A green wall in a street canyon trapped or absorbed large amounts of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter—both pollutants harmful to people, said Pugh. Compared with reducing emissions from cars, little attention has been focused on how to trap or take up more of the pollutants, added Pugh, whose study was published last year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. That’s why the green-wall study is “putting forward an alternative solution that might allow [governments] to improve air quality in these problem hot spots,” he said.Compared with reducing emissions from cars, little attention has been focused on how to trap or take up more of the pollutants, added Pugh, whose study was published last year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. That’s why the green-wall study is “putting forward an alternative solution that might allow [governments] to improve air quality in these problem hot spots,” he said.

Wolf Pup