Beluga Still Life

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I have a virtual student at Elite Animation Academy preparing a portfolio with specific requirements. One requirement is a still life. I asked my student to arrange a few objects, some large some small to paint. The beluga whale plush, acquired at a recent trip to an aquarium, became the subject along with several wooden tree sculptures.

I painted along with the student. I was attracted to the way the light illuminated the wall. My student an I both used lots of line work to construct the whale basic shape. However after several hours my student got frustrated, not knowing how to progress. The line work seemed to hinder progress as if painting the piece into a corner.

I stopped work on this to offer advice on how to loosen up the process. My student needed to transition for stiff to spontaneous. I suggested forgetting about the outside lines and just start playing with the digital brushes. That opened up the process making it play rather than a serious high stakes struggle.

Relaxing and having fun are the ultimate end goal. We started town that new track.

Beluga

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On Saturdays I have been teaching 8 hours of Elite Animation Academy private virtual classes. I always worry that my energy level might drop after the back to back zoom meetings. My final student of the day is preparing a portfolio for admission into a visual arts school. We were working on a still life and she was painting a stuffed Beluga whale she got on a recent vacation to an aquarium.

My student seemed to hit a brick wall with the still life since she felt it wasn’t painterly enough. Her usual way of creating art is to do detailed line art and then color it in. She felt this was making her piece stiff. We broke away from her still life and instead just started playing with brushes in Procreate.

She seemed to stop worrying about a final polished look and just started playing with the wide variety of brushes. She quickly blocked in a light blue field surrounded by dark blue. What emerged was a memory of her trip to the aquarium.

She paused when she had a head drawn on the page. I stepped n and gave her a quick example of how to use gesture lines to get the figure on the page. She quickly followed suit and drew the people into her sketch. While she worked, I blocked inn the water on my rough sketch and started painting the beluga whale in the tank. My sketch was a lesson in making a mess and hoping for the best. Control was surrendered for spontaneity. Is the sketch finished, heck no. Is it the best sketch I ever did, heck no, but it is also not the worst. On to the next.

Crealde Student

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In my Crealde Urban Sketching class I pose for students after explaining how to get a figure on the page. I realized I put on weight during the pandemic when I saw one of my student’s sketches. Anyway. We then each pose in turn for just 5 minutes and we use all the tools in our artist toolbox to get as much information on the page as possible.

One sketch is used as a demo and the others I walk around to show my process at different stages. My next series of classes were canceled sing no enough students signed up. That gives me time to branch out and start exploring with my sketchbook on my own on weekends.

I am including these 5 minute sketches since I feel it is important to documents how different people handled the pandemic. Some like myself remain fully masked while others wear chin straps or feel the pandemic is over. Sine my ear is to the rail, I know better.

Creating COVID Frankensteins

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CBS News reported that Boston University has been testing strains of the COVID virus they created by combining the ancestral and Omicron variants. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) partially funded the school research but these funds were not directly used to wards this research. and they were rather miffed to find out about this research through news articles. Federal health authorities say they are looking into whether the scientists should have sought their permission before undertaking the possible “gain of function” research. Such research being done in Wuhan back in 2019 could have potentially started the pandemic to begin with.

Scientist were looking into the Omicron variants spike proteins Mice were infected with combined versions of the virus creating a new variant of the virus. Hey what could go wrong, right? Boston University said it was under no obligations to report this gain of function research to the NIH.

100% of the mice infected with the original Wuhan strain of the virus died. When mice were infected with the recombinant strains created by researchers 80% of the mice died. What joy it must have brought researches to find they had created a strain with an 80% mortality rate.

“It is concerning that this research – like the research in Wuhan that may have caused the pandemic – was not identified by the funding agency as possible enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP) research,” Rutgers University Professor Richard Ebright wrote on Twitter.

Crealde Pandemic Student

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At Crealde School of Art once each series of classes I pose for students doing 5 minute gestures and then I have students pose in turn. With one student I will do a 5 minute demo to show how I approach getting the figure on the page with as much information as possible. Rather than just using a pencil, I use watercolor as well to get quick color shapes down on the page.

With more time I would work on top of this adding detail in ink and making the darks darker. My process is pretty simple, in each section of the sketch I want to have three values, the white of the page, then a medium value and a dark dark. In this sketch I only had time to throw a medium value over the darker areas of the figure.

Sometimes detail is left out due to time constraints but then you realize that the that detail isn’t always needed. The goal is to dance on the line between crazy rough and gloriously refined. So long as each sketch is not the worst I have ever done, I can keep moving forward.

My latest Urban Sketching Class for advanced students was canceled because not enough students wanted to sing up. Either students are social isolating or there isn’t much interest in sketching on location. I still wear a mask every time I sketch on location. The pandemic isn’t over and I have dodged the COVID bullet so far.

A Halloween Carol Rehearsal

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During the pandemic, Tracy Jane wrote the book, music and lyrics to a frightful new musical called A Halloween Carol. Orchestrations were done by Christopher Robinson. I have seen Tracy’s work on stage before so I was excited to see what she had in store. Tracy is like Orlando’s Nora Ephron, writing stories for stage productions with heart and humor.

I had some difficulty finding the rehearsal space on the Seminole State College campus. I finally had to ask someone for directions. It turns out that I asked Nicole Ponce (Marley Jacobs) for directions and I was right outside the building I was looking for. I wandered the halls and some classes were in session and I could see the occasional masked student through glass door panels. There was a ruckus behind one of the classroom doors and I decided the noise had to be the excitement of actors just prior to rehearsal. I was right. Stephen Lewis (Barnaby) offered me advice for a sketching angle.

There was blue tape on the floor to mark the size of the circular stage of the Renaissance Theater. Chairs were arranged inside the circle. Tracy explained the difficulty of getting an entire cast to learn the range of songs. Orchestrations were still being changed on the fly from one rehearsal to the next. A piano accompanist was brought in for this rehearsal. His ability to stop and start and offer feedback helped solidify the music as it evolved.

Actors sat on the floor shuffling and arranging sheet music. The sheet music must be evolving from rehearsal to rehearsal. At one point a pile of sheet music avalanched off of a chair. She offered to pick up the pile but was rushed on stage. Rehearsal started, and the actors quickly scrambled into their seats. That is when sketching began in earnest.

The first song the cast rehearsed started with the lyrics, “look at me.” It seemed appropriate since I was deeply engaged in looking at each cast member in turn trying to capture their delight and humor. Carson Holly (Ghost of Halloween Past Perfect) in a skull patterned sweater, impressed me with her professionalism. She asked for notes and joked with her co-star Alessia Preda (Carol Cratchit). They gave each other high fives when the music hit the mark. At one point Carson stepped on the leg of her fragile music stand and it snapped and tumbled over. She handled the setback with delightful humor. Luckily it happened right before a break. Her stand was replaced with a solid steel behemoth for the second half of rehearsal. I smiled behind my mask overjoyed to see this young cast stretching their incredible talents. Another song, Past Perfect, had me bobbing my head as I sketched.

Music director Billy Williamson encouraged the cast and kept them on point while keeping to the tight rehearsal schedule. At times Tracy had to help get the music back on track and she would hum a few bars to set the record straight. She explained that she had written pretty simple songs, but the rich and layered orchestrations took some practice to learn. Carson used her phone to record important passages she needed to further rehearse. During a 10 minute break, actors got to ask the pianist to go over certain passages.

There will be an exclusive Orlando preview workshop of A Halloween Carol on October 26, 2022 at the Seminole College Library at 7PM.  Donations are accepted for the performance. All proceeds and donations from this event will benefit both the school’s library and the show’s cast, to be shared equitably among cast members. You can be among the very first treat-seekers to preview the frightful new musical. The hope is that will be further developed into a full staged production if the stars align.

I am told the Renaissance Theater performance on Halloween Eve (October 30, 2022) will sell out. Here is a link, just in case you are lucky enough to get in.

Crealde Student

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In one session of each series of Crealde Urban Sketching classes I pose for students and then have each student in turn pose of 5 minutes. I give a brief lecture on human proportions and how to fit the figure on the page by noting where the head and feet will be planted before starting the sketch.

I also point out that everyone has more tools at their disposal like watercolor and which can be used to throw quick masses o the page. I do a demo showing my process as I sketch one student. My hope is to convey a frenetic approach where the process is part sketching and part juggling the many tools.

After we do a series of sketches of students isolated on the page like this one, we then start ingratiating the figure onto an environment. I often have the students do a sketch on the Crealde campus and then ask them to incorporate their favorite sketches that they did of fellow students so that it seem like the student was sketched while relaxing on the campus. This then also becomes a lesson in sketching multiple figures on the same page and having them work together in perspective.

Candle Oracle

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Testing sites for COVID-19 have closed across the United States.Congress slashed funding to keep track of cases across the country. At home tests are being used but those results are seldom reported to health agencies. That means that any case counts are just the tip of the iceberg.

This gave birth to the Yankee Candle theory of tracking COVID cases. It was discovered that whenever there was an influx of negative reviews citing no smell, there was usually a spike in COVID cases to go along with it. Losing your sense of smell is one of the many symptoms of an infection.

Nick Beauchamp an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University, decided to do a more detailed study to test the finding. He created a model to test the results. To his surprise, the relationship was clear; COVID cases followed a very similar pattern to the frequency of the reviews. By mid-January 2022, he had written a paper and submitted it to a journal, and by June 2022  it had been published.

Tthe results from the paper showed that COVID when there was a recorded surge in COVID cases, there would likely be an increase in the negative reviews. A negative reviews might actually be an earlier warning sign than the official COVID data. The reviews offer  “digital breadcrumbs,” of the rising cases to come.

Crealde Demo

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Once with each class at Crealde I do a quick demo to show the stages of progress for a typical sketch. Behind the classroom is this tranquil view across the lake. I didn’t spend as much time as I usually do on the inking of the line work. I opted to keep much of the distant far shore line work in pencil and I just inked the chairs ad the sculpture. Part of the lesson was to encourage students to leave the white of the paper showing in multiple places.

The grass wasn’t just painted green. instead I painted it yellow where the sunlight hit, then green then yellow ocher and then blue where shadows hit. My goal is to get students to get away from a puzzle piece approach to covering the ppage with color. Instead I try to get them to only use three of four very large washed to cover most of the page and then to break up those large wash areas into smaller light and dark areas.

If the darks are taking too long to put down then I just start frantically scribbling in darks with colored pencils. The main point is to get the students to see my chaotic and frantic approach. There is never quite enough time to finish a sketch to a high degree of polish so I paint like a madman and then slow down if the subject lingers.

COVID Class

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This sketch from January of 2021 shows one of my Urban Sketching classes held at Crealde. At the time the case counts were the highest they had ever been during the course of the ongoing pandemic, with over 800,000 new cases a day in the United States. At that time over 2,500 people were dying from COVID every day in the United States.

I kept my classes outside for student safety but maintaining social distancing was a challenge. Students don’t go to in person classes to social distance, they go because they want a break from social isolation. I maintained my own social distance by carrying a 6 foot long stick. More often than not I maintained a 22 foot distance since I am well aware that an airborne virus does not limit itself to a six foot radius. It billows in the wind.

Each student still got one on one attention since I would share my ideas with quick sketches to demonstrate perspective and composition. Those sketches remained in my sketchbook, but I did them bold enough to be seen from any distance.

Today deaths have remained steady at about 400 to 500 deaths a day from COVID-19 in America since about April of 2022. People however are “over” the pandemic. 500 deaths a day seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the 2500 deaths a day we faced in January of 2021. People will do anything rationalize crowding together and wishing away the pandemic. This fall and winter the numbers will again rise thanks to new immune evasive variants and the fact that masks and social distancing seem to be a thing of the past. I continue to take every precaution. I like being the only person in the room wearing a mask.