I Have No Shame - Is This my Missing Link?

Post-Graduate confusion certainly reached it's peak for me this year. Or has it? It seems before I went to school, I had a clearer idea of what I wanted to do than after I came out. Does this mean I wasted $X for a  piece of paper telling me I am adult now? I certainly thought that, and in my darker moments, I still do. But I think I have reached a truce with myself; I must have patience, and a whole lot of determination.

I have been thinking very much over the past year of how I wish to proceed with my art. After getting great advice that I should just keep drawing, whatever it may be, and something is bound to come out the other side, I decided sure... I will do just that. It is interesting what has come out of that: I noticed that no matter how many different styles and techniques I went through in my experimentations this past year, there is one thing that holds everything together, it is my lack of shame.

Folks, I have no shame. If you noticed, my drawings never held much back, and more recently I held even less as I shed my inhibition to draw genitalia. I am no Giger who's work was the divine proclamation of raw and shameless (albiet dark) human nature. But I found that sexuality, nudity, and other things of the like are what really hold everything together. I must say that I am excited about my future with this realization in my head, where before I was depressed and hopeless.

And with that, I must go... I hear the countless whispers of plump tits, penises, pussies, and posteriors waiting to be drawn. I have no shame and so should you.

Website finally launched!

I am so glad to finally announce the launch of my website: ATarasenko.com. It's still under construction but the majority of my work is up there. I will add sketches sometime this week and it will be complete!

I am also working on a lot of new stuff that is going in a different direction. I will post some of that next week as well.

In the meantime, please take a look at my new site, leave a comment, +like it, share it, etc etc.

Portrait Painting

I thought I would show my process for life painting, one of my favorite things to do artistically. There is just nothing better than the figure, the color of the skin, the proportions of the face, etc. It's one of those things that just makes me super happy. 

This is a painting I did on 9x12 pre-gessoed hardboard that I undercoated with phthalo blue mixed with raw umber. 

So it begins as this sketch. Since I am an impatient and fast painter, this is all went down in the first hour of the painting. I don't fiddle too much with it in terms of accuracy of proportions since I know it will all be changed as I progress. What I do look for is the basic layout of where everything goes, lights and shadows, and the beginnings of a good skin tone. 

By the third session, this is what I had. The proportions were better, but still needed tweaking and overall I was very happy with the skin tones. It was beginning to look like her. To make skin tones, I never use a skin shade color because a) it is never the color of skin  b) when you try to mix another color into it, it comes out brownish and muddy... not good. My palette was basically: titanium white, cadmium yellow, lemon yellow, alizarin crimson, dioxozine purple, cobalt green, cobalt blue, and orange (not sure which). I never use black either because it also muddies things up too much. Instead, I mix cobalt green and alizarin crimson, it makes a perfect, non-muddy black every time. Cobalt green must be my favorite painting colors, it is the perfect green and is very luminous when mixed with other colors. 

So here is the finished product, or as much finished as 4 sessions with the model allows. This definitely looks much more like her. Of course, I could continue tweeking until the cows come home but at this point the only real difference it would make is only to me. It is really to see just how off the sketch is from the finish, it was in the finishing touches that I moved the nose 1mm here and a eyeball 3 mm that way. The more it developed, the easier it was to see what belonged where. I added a surrounding color which was a rather odd mixture of cobalt green, dioxozine purple, and white. Who knew it would make the most lovely shade of lilac? 


I will be posting more of these as time goes on. 


Over and out. 


-Anastasiya 

Some New Sketches

It has been a while since I posted a blog here. Everything is going pretty cool lately and I have had some good ideas, my execution however, is another issue entirely.

The sketch for the egg tempera I am working on.

Just a miscellaneous sketch, I don't know what I will do with it yet.