what’s going on in your visual life? thread for ilxors who like to paint, draw, build, shape, combine, subtract, deface, obliterate etc

it seems like there are enough people that maybe there should be a thread for this idk

lately i’ve been trying to get back into drawing and painting “just for the process” although i still find myself asking why am i even doing this.
i’m specifically trying to make stuff that isn’t concerned with being capital-A Art for the time being, or even “any good”. because last time i took this up i was getting very caught up in "meaning control", in big ideas and the semiotics of materials and gestures, to the point that i was just immediately shooting down every possibility without giving anything a chance.

i’ve been collecting kids’ books which are illustrated by Diane deGroat, they’re very banal but delicate and attractive drawings with a ton of narrative information, and I think what I like about them is they’re not trying to impress me for how involved they actually are. They have an unassuming naturalism, let’s say. I can’t really draw like her, and i’m struggling to achieve the finer details on a sketchbook scale. maybe i need finer pens, idk- But i’ve tried to do some drawings that are sort of in that style where the kids are visibly queer or gender non conforming.

i got these ‘watercolor pencils’ as a present recently, and they’re really great. i can spend hours building up a really controlled drawing, layering colors obsessively… and then i get to go in and make the whole thing sopping wet and risk ruining everything in a few minutes. it’s like dominoes, where you’re just waiting for the gleeful moment where you get to knock it over

and the other thing i’ve been doing is looking for silly and fun craft projects i can make with found materials from the park

hbu?

hi! love this thread, bookmarked of course

:D

i recently was working on a large acrylic “mural” on the wall in my back basement stairs area. we have/had a basement diy venue and i wanted to christen it with a big painting which fit the visual theme of the flyers i’d make for the shows here. unfortunately my landlord is a libertarian piece of shit and my lease has just been terminated (the longest, saddest story - tenant rights in Missouri are virtually non-existent). so today i’m covering it up with white latex paint so that i don’t have to look at the mural and be reminded of it all, anymore. it’s a sad day.

it’ll be a minute til i can set up a working space in my new apartment, so in the meantime i’ve just been going to the park and drawing a lot, occasionally adding oil pastels. and after a long time off, i’m resuming regular figure drawing workshops next saturday, very exciting for that.

deflator, i’m cool with any answer to this, but do you envision people sharing stuff on this thread? typically over the last 15 years or so i’ve been posting a lot of my output on this recently retitled thread: zach's old animations and new visual art, updated every 25 to 60 days

especially when i’m on a roll, i tend to make a lot of things and post a lot, but i don’t want to overwhelm this thread with it. ideally i wish there were 50 people on this thread who were regularly making things and sharing them, so that my own things could just join the stream. i love so much to see what people are working on, whether it’s people just getting into things or highly skilled lifelong badasses. but for now i will probably hold off until lots of other people are sharing. i tend to accidentally crowd out people with my own enthusiasm, sometimes, and it’s something i’m trying to work on.

ugh, so sorry to hear about your mural and space, z :(
of course feel free to share stuff here as often as you’re inclined, or on your own thread or both!

i may shy away from sharing work, or do so only selectively, but plz don’t let that stop you!!

I am bad at visual art but I'm trying to doodle more just as an outlet for creativity, I guess specifically an outlet that I can allow myself to be bad at (I write and do music stuff but I get paralysed by wanting to be good or interesting at those forms). I also decided to buy myself a mini lino printing kit, because being rubbish at controlling a pencil means I'll *definitely* be great at controlling carving utensils, right?

thank deflator! it’ll be ok. part of the nice thing about working on that corner/stairs spot is i always knew it would be temporary, which really helped to lower the stakes and make it easier to do big moves without fear of “messing up”. next one i make will be better :)

xp emil.y have you ever tried collages?

Only for things like tape covers back in the day when I used to make compilation tapes for people, very occasionally since then. I have thought about getting back into it but there's way less free printed material around these days, I feel like you have to actively seek it out now.

reason i mention it is that there’s a fun way you can use collages in more of a late-life matisse fashion, with the materials being little pieces of paper that you watercolor/gouache with whatever color you like (or just buy pre-colored sheets of paper from a store and save time) - then you make the collages by cutting out whatever shapes you want with whatever colors you want. it comes out very different than something you’d make using newspaper or magazines, printed material, etc - but it’s a way to make really cool compositions without having to rely so much on drawing/technical ability

Every so often I fetch out all my stuff and paw over it all, frustrates me that i'm not churning out more work. I don't help myself by starting pieces that are too large and end up unfinished. I need to downsize going forward.

So lately a lot of doodles and pen sketches for me whilst in office, but if I do paint it will be acrylic. I tried oils but couldn't get the hang of them at all. I enjoy mixing media though, paints, coloured pencils, crayons, markers, whatever I have.

i really can’t doodle, it’s probably clear enough from my first post that i’m one of those people who can’t seem to work entirely intuitively
i have (or had) the same problem with making music.

in high school these kids a couple of years below me one day asked to see all my class notebooks… because they assumed there would be lots of imaginative doodles in the margins. there was not a one! i always seem to create expectations that i can’t live up to.

lino printing is so brave, emily. that rules :D

for collage material, well, i once had a job in a photocopy store, like a mom & pop kinko’s. i used to put all kinds of objects and materials on the copy machine. some of it was just textural shit, like crumpled up tinfoil. using those xeroxes as collage elements = a kind of visual equivalent of sampling yourself i guess

I recently re-bought How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way (the book, not the sweet video version) with the intention of drawing a comic about one of my dogs (already have several story ideas), but I really am just focusing on basics at the moment because I haven’t really drawn in quite a long time (isometric cube doodles and such aside)

I’ve been working on a series of collages for eight years or so, sometimes with large periods of inactivity. Collage is great because it’s not messy and I can work on it anywhere. They’re abstract for the most part. Eventually I would like to do versions of them as paintings.

I met my wife while we were both working on our master’s in studio arts with an emphasis in sculpture. There’s a life-sized bronze of myself cast from a mold in the living room. The kids call him “Bronze Daddy” and dress him in drag.

I like the idea of this thread! Will try to figure out pictures soon.

I used to do weekly life drawing classes for over ten years, then we moved cities and there weren't any good or convenient classes, and family got in the way, for the best part of six years. There was also a free untutored portraits class where we'd take turns to pose for 15 minutes, that went online during covid and stayed there so I've carried on been doing that, and last year not one but two life drawing classes started near me - but all three of them are on the same day! I've also started trying to oil paint in earnest after a few false starts (with oils and acrylic) over the years. It's hard! I'll post some pics later too.

There’s a life-sized bronze of myself cast from a mold in the living room. The kids call him “Bronze Daddy” and dress him in drag.

this is amazing, pics please!

Ledge I was browsing ILX yesterday and saw some of your old work, when you were first getting started! Would love to see where you’re at now, particularly with the oil

reason i mention it is that there’s a fun way you can use collages in more of a late-life matisse fashion, with the materials being little pieces of paper that you watercolor/gouache with whatever color you like (or just buy pre-colored sheets of paper from a store and save time) - then you make the collages by cutting out whatever shapes you want with whatever colors you want. it comes out very different than something you’d make using newspaper or magazines, printed material, etc - but it’s a way to make really cool compositions without having to rely so much on drawing/technical ability

― z_tbd

for collage material, well, i once had a job in a photocopy store, like a mom & pop kinko’s. i used to put all kinds of objects and materials on the copy machine. some of it was just textural shit, like crumpled up tinfoil. using those xeroxes as collage elements = a kind of visual equivalent of sampling yourself i guess

― but some albums are more equalized than others (Deflatormouse)

These are great ideas, and I might well use them at some point, thank you.

The lino print kit is very much a mini model for home crafts and I am going to be terrible at it, but I'm hoping it will still be fun. Allowing myself to be bad at things without punishing myself for it is a skill I am still learning.

Also omg @ 'Bronze Daddy', I also demand pics

Deflatormouse, your posts itt have very much made me interested in getting into collaging, I have done the kind of stuff like pasting pictures of airstream campers onto pictures of outer space etc, but for whatever reason going more abstract hadn’t crossed my mind.

Someone I work with bought a huge sheet of… whatever refrigerator magnets are made of? For the purpose of converting their sticker collection into refrigerator magnets. I think it’s a cool idea.

Also omg @ 'Bronze Daddy', I also demand pics

― emil.y, Saturday, March 8, 2025 10:18 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i remember seeing the pics in another thread, maybe one about record storage??

oh duh z i meant to say your posts inspired me re collage as well! sorry, was stoned last night.

xp

That’s right, he’s sitting in front of my record shelves. Will post pics when I get back home in a couple of days. I’ve escaped to a beach house alone, abandoning my loving family for a weekend of making art, listening to good music and eating bad food.

xp oh no worries brimstead, truly! i think it’s so cool that you’re getting inspired!

cow_art - did you figure out how to post images? it’s way more complicated than it should be, but if you’re still looking for a way, i can show/tell you about a method involving imgur (no account necessary) that will take you about 15 seconds to use, once you get the hang of it

Also omg @ 'Bronze Daddy', I also demand pics

― emil.y, Saturday, 8 March 2025 16:18 (four hours ago) link

^^^

hell yeah, z - your work has a real sprit of adventure and investigation that’s contagious (and i hope more and more of it rubs off on me)

I’ve been working on a series of collages for eight years or so, sometimes with large periods of inactivity.

i am going to assume these "abstracts” are arranged into Cow print patterns until i see evidence to the contrary

I recently re-bought How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way (the book, not the sweet video version) with the intention of drawing a comic about one of my dogs (already have several story ideas)

omg i love this, please share one or more story ideas

he lino print kit is very much a mini model for home crafts and I am going to be terrible at it, but I'm hoping it will still be fun. Allowing myself to be bad at things without punishing myself for it is a skill I am still learning.

awesome, this is 100% what i’m doing here rn. i have purchased air dry clay! i have purchased various kits for little kids (i *wish* i could make stuff that looks like a 6 yr old did it), my whole thing right now is about taking the pressure off so i don’t prematurely shut myself down. that’s *so hard*!!! completely relate to this

lino print is one of the most intimidating media to me for sure!

I can figure out the pic posting when I get back to a desktop. Too busy making art right now!

premise is basically: howard the dog runs out the front door of my apartment one day and goes down endless hallways, crosses a liminal backrooms realm into a parallel doggie world where he initially makes friends with old money casino lounge lizard dogs but soon becomes best friends with a sheepdog who comes from old money but introduces him to radical politics. I have the idea of Howard progressing through trade school/college and the comic getting really philosophical like Calvin and Hobbes or something. My two other dogs would make brief appearances periodically in a kind of “Statler and Walford/dishwashers in The Kingdom” chorus type role.

but just from getting back into drawing, drawing a whole page seems like an insane amount of effort right now, let alone an entire story

it wouldn’t be like, human type content just with dogs, they would still be talking about eating fish heads and sniffing asses and stuff

OK, I hesitated about posting this here, almost didnt do so, 'cause I don't paint or draw or sketch or sculpt; all I've done are take photos and set them to music - often Beethoven works. But then I saw the word "collage" (as well as "combine"), and reasoned that my little videos are basically montages, and montages are basically collages that utilize time rather than space, so figured that I'd post a single one, and if nobody likes it, they can either ignore it, or view and and then make nasty comments. As I've said to everybody I've showed these videos to, I give 90% of the creative credit to Beethoven, or Django Reinhardt, or the Beatles, or Cecil Taylor, Louis Armstrong, or whichever musician whose music seemed most appropriate to accompany my chpsen assortment of visuals

Anyways, so here is "Circulation", watch it, and enjoy it, or neither

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVLsxeKT9tA

Was there a grimy condom package in there?!?

That was great!

I really enjoyed that!

I don’t draw/create in these ways, but love that this thread exists, and looo forward to seeing how it develops.

thank you for sharing myonga! something i love about projects like yours is how they can open up your eyes to noticing things in daily life, noticing things that are circles or things that are almost circles. it adds a meaningful layer to your daily existence in which you’re actively seeking, heightened awareness of your environment, relating the outer world to your inner expressive self.

awesome Myonga! i love how when you scale everything together like that it emphasizes certain aspects, like their conceits/convexity/relative shininess, etc

concavity not conceits

Ledge I was browsing ILX yesterday and saw some of your old work, when you were first getting started! Would love to see where you’re at now, particularly with the oil

Well I'm still very much wedded to figurative realism, which can be a bit limiting, it would be nice to be more confident drawing from imagination, or to get more wildly expressive - as you clearly can. But I'm mostly happily plugging away at portraits and life drawing. Here's some recent ones:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54374843587_780ceca0b5_z.jpg

Could've worked a bit more on the feet there...

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54375957173_c0ede77782_z.jpg

I think I've developed a moderately expressive style with pen that I'm pretty happy with.

As for painting it's early days (still!), been doing simple exercises, still lives, a few portraits - some have gone well, some haven't. It's weird, I'm confident at drawing and with colour mixing, but when it comes to putting paint onto the canvas it often just seems to fall apart somehow. This small and quick one for a friend's kid's birthday went ok at the second attempt:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54376110775_f72e953432_z.jpg

sorry for huge pics.

OK, I hesitated about posting this here, almost didnt do so, 'cause I don't paint or draw or sketch or sculpt;

sorry, i know i neglected to make the thread title sufficiently open-ended- only because that might have taken me all day!!
if you are making something and want to talk about it or share it here, please feel welcome.

your montage actually made me laugh! i don’t know why but it tickled me.
i wonder what the mylar balloon originally said under “birthday”

it would be nice to be more confident drawing from imagination, or to get more wildly expressive - as you clearly can

i think when i was a kid, i was like the guy in Close Encounters- i would become completely overtaken by an image, as though possessed by it. And i’d just feel the overwhelming urge to duplicate it, over and over again sometimes. And then being ’the kid who draws’ invites those expectations, of doing so imaginatively, or expressively, or in a novel way etc. I wonder if that kind of creativity is actually unnecessary at times, if subjectivity might be enough.

old money casino lounge lizard dogs

A+

I had a small revelation recently regarding my difficulty with painting. Basically since taking drawing up again in earnest in my 30s it's always been a social thing. I started off doing a course on urban sketching, some of us carried on meeting up after the class, we started a meetup group and at one point it was the largest drawing meetup group in London, with over 10,000 members! (Which somewhat exaggerates its actual popularity, people just join meetup groups speculatively and never leave.) Then I took up life drawing and found a great group who always went to the pub afterwards, and that branched out into the portraits club which met in a pub. So even when though the drawing might not always have gone well there was an incentive to keep going, to meet friends and new people and be a part of that community. With painting I've done the odd short course but now I'm doing it entirely on my own. There's no social aspect, no other incentive to keep going, loads of opportunity for self criticism and none for group support / advice / encouragement.

Thanks for the kind remarks, all...

i wonder what the mylar balloon originally said under “birthday”

It was "...Mother's Day!" when I originally found it lying abandoned, I changed it to "birthday!" to send a photo greeting to my sister, and then ended up keeping the balloon, for sending a few similar messages to others over the next year.

And yes, Cow_Art, that is indeed a sealed green condom package, at 0:34 (just spotted lying on the ground)

https://i.ibb.co/gLYhQ4Vy/pb.jpg

Oh that's really nice!!! I love watercolor.

yeah nice one deflator! snow/ice seems like a very handy subject matter for watercolor, too. i really get into stuff like the light blue rectangle background

I'm trying to make a short clip with a video synthesis app I ran across every night - I've averaged ~1.5 Instagram posts per year since it came out but I'm on like a six night streak now

https://www.instagram.com/p/DG-UCH4O043/

not my best but here is a gouache i did at a cabin the other day

https://i.imgur.com/kBKyyKk.jpeg

thanks, you're both very charitable hehe, i just wanted to start and finish something (anything!) in 20 mins before my friend came over.

posted bc i liked the friendly polar bear as an entity, more than i like the picture. but i see how childlike work doesn't have to be as crude if basic symmetry and unambiguous emotions can do the talking.

I feel similarly about this cabin piece, z- even tho it's not your most interesting or accomplished work, it has a sweetness and kindness about it that would probably be lost if you got headier.

my first little watercolor illustration from a few weeks ago was also a simple snow scene, i spent a little more time on it (an hour or two) but it's true, they're like making snakes out of clay
https://i.ibb.co/LdQ1qmQ7/dog.jpg
the drapey coat def needed more work, but the paper couldn't take it (it's a page in my sketchbook)

glad to see video synthesis represented here so soon and sorry that I don't have weed for this.

https://i.imgur.com/w5Htcpb.jpeg

quick gouache! i had forgotten how important it is to learn to work fast. i have gotten extremely slow! even this quick gouache (!) took over an hour. in my heyday, i tell you what, i was painting my best stuff in 20-30 minutes, and felt like i was overdoing it at 45 minutes. pumps iron moves paint brush

Nice! Are those... eyeballs? Good work too deflatormouse, I like the minimalism and use of the bare paper.

My energy is completely the opposite at the moment, painting wise anyway. I can happily do a portrait drawing in 10-15 mins but this took me four or five hours. I hope to get quicker and looser.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54398589144_e876f48c9c_z.jpg

I've never really attempted to make visual art in my adult life beyond designing a few flyers for my club nights in Keynote.

But I had this irregularly-sized picture frame I'd been carrying around with me that I couldn't find appropriate art for. I decided to experiment, grabbed some coloured paper and ordered some black card and craft glue off the internet and started cutting out shapes

After a few false starts, a couple of pieces of yellow paper landed in such a way that they resembled the outline of a giraffe. So I started arranging them on the paper.

Sadly, my first attempt didn't go so well: The paper was too thin and the glue too wet. I ended up with a bit of a sloppy mess:

https://i.imgur.com/UhvOQHC.jpeg

So... I bought some thicker card, proper craft scissors and used Pritt Stick rather than wet glue.

Considering I've never done anything like this before, I think it's a fun first attempt.

https://i.imgur.com/NWGN0xX.jpeg

And here it is on the wall of my little home studio:

https://i.imgur.com/HBiznvN.jpeg

It was hugely fun to do. I realise it's quite a simple, basic design, but I'm thinking of doing another one one day. My partner has requested a shark for her bathroom!

Ha! I love that guy. The tongue poking out cracks me up.

https://ibb.co/dwryKY5Z

<a href="https://ibb.co/dwryKY5Z";><img src="https://i.ibb.co/21yBK4kJ/IMG-7882.jpg"; alt="IMG-7882" border="0"></a>
<a href="https://ibb.co/NndL2XnW";><img src="https://i.ibb.co/Qj36vZjY/IMG-7883.jpg"; alt="IMG-7883" border="0"></a>
<a href="https://ibb.co/gMXhmfxQ";><img src="https://i.ibb.co/ccpVkZjR/IMG-7884.jpg"; alt="IMG-7884" border="0"></a>
<a href="https://ibb.co/nqW2hyVS";><img src="https://i.ibb.co/CprdxyXF/IMG-7885.jpg"; alt="IMG-7885" border="0"></a>
<a href="https://ibb.co/XxTc58qh";><img src="https://i.ibb.co/qYwTg5vt/IMG-7888.jpg"; alt="IMG-7888" border="0"></a>

Erg. Trying to figure out how to just have a picture show up.

Trying to use imgbb. Do I need to put some code around the links to have them show up?

https://ibb.co/dwryKY5Z

that sculpture rules, and the door paintings remind me of one of my favorites, barnett newman

I hate computers

use square bracket img tags around the image url - not a url like https://ibb.co/dwryKY5Z which goes to a page, it has to end .jpg or .gif or .png

(img)https://i.ibb.co/21yBK4kJ/IMG-7882.jpg(/img) (replace round brackets with square)

https://i.ibb.co/gL3CgKRY/IMG-7882.jpg

Hooray! This is a photo of a photo from my thesis book at San Jose State. It's supposed to be me sitting in my studio thinking about what to do for my thesis project. The paintings were... 5' x 12' if I remember right and they are meant to be an abstraction of the walls of my studio, which I had painted on and previously cut sections out of and hung on gallery walls. I had a lot of help with the bronze, I'm not a metal guy so I really bit off more than I could chew. He's sitting in my favorite chair and wearing my favorite clothes. I had to sit still for four hours with straws up my nose to make the mold.

He's 275 pounds of bronze and every time I have to move I question why I have this thing.

Now he's a big doll for the kids to dress up.

https://i.ibb.co/dJwQ4SJk/IMG-7883.jpg

At one point he was in our backyard when we lived in the art kid party house. We had a lot of homeless people wander through and it took about two weeks for him to not startle us when going out the back door.

Another place we lived he was out on the patio and a cop knocked on our door and asked about the man who had not moved for two hours.

Another place we lived his feet stuck out into a walking path and I broke my little toe on his little toe. It hurt me more than it hurt him.

Amazing

Bronze daddy bronze daddy!

Also dl that giraffe is really fun, I like it a lot.

After grad school I didn't make much art for a while. Around the time that Bill Cosby and Woody Allen became known as horrible shameful people, I was installing a show of Georges Braque's work, a big retrospective. There was a painting of a doorway, focusing on what was inside the doorway so that the door made sort of a frame within the painting. I kept thinking about doorways and boundaries and bad people that cross boundaries and I did a series of paintings called Darkened Doorways.

https://i.ibb.co/tMNFQv9n/IMG-7884.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/WNT9SXd1/IMG-7885.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/LdfVg53L/IMG-7888.jpg

^^very nice! i love a good doorway myself, have been staring at a particular one near my bed the last several nights. normal behavior

Oh shit, those are great. Particularly the way they work together - the sequence of five is extraordinarily effective, they're giving me shivers.

dog latin, congrats on those collages, you should definitely keep going!

ledge as always i’m very impressed by your portrait

Cow_Art - How did you/the sculptor make seams in the plaster to free you? That seems (lol) difficult for a full body seated pose.

amazing thread

I really like those doorway paintings.

It took two tries to get the mold right, the first time the plaster wasn't thick enough and it couldn't really support it's weight well.

I shaved everything except my eyebrows and lubed myself up. My wife and a friend applied the plaster. I think we drew a seam line on myself in magic marker so we would know where the seams should be. We put down a lot of wet plaster bandages in the seat and I sat down in it, they they put plaster on the back half of my body, up the the magic marker seam line. The plaster was folded over and thickened at the edge. Then they did the front half of me, with straws up the nose and everything. I think they put some vaseline at the edge of the seam to keep the front plaster from sticking to the back plaster. I had to sit still for a long time because once they had me covered with plaster bandages they glopped on more plaster so it would be more robust than the first attempt. It took a while for all of that to harden and set. Then they slowly worked it loose. I could help by shifting my body around slightly and pulling my skin away from the paster. Plaster warms as it hardens so when they got it all off I was incredibly cold and naked. There was a shower in the foundry and I washed with dish soap to get all of the vaseline off.

As a person who hates being gooey, it was pretty nasty.

Afterwards I continued to strengthen the mold. Then I brushed brown wax into it and pulled the wax pieces together, joining all of them so there was a wax version of me. I cleaned this wax up and sculpted the open eyes. Then I cut the wax pieces up into 12 different segments and added wax sticks that would allow the bronze to flow into the body parts. Each part was encased in a mixture of sand and plaster with some chicken wire around it. These were baked in a kiln to remove all moisture and melt the wax out. We melted bronze ingots and poured the molten bronze into each of the "kegs." After it totally cooled we broke away the wire and plaster and used a pressure washer to get all the funk off of the bronze. Then there was a lot of grinding and cleaning up of the metal. My friend who I worked in a metal shop with did all the welding and helped me clean it up. Then we put a patina on it and my wife altered my clothes so we could dress him. I had to drill a hole between the toes for the flip-flop to work.

Now I have this goofy-ass thing that my kids will have to figure out what to do with one day.

Ledge, these are GREAT!

xp
Good explanation, thanks.

Ledge, are you using acrylics? I'm hoping to start on a series of paintings in the next year or so and I think I want to use oils but it's such a hassle. Still, they're going to be bigger paintings and fighting with acrylic drying time isn't worth it.

I'm using oils. I was put off for a loooooong time because of the hassle, but it really doesn't have to be like that. You can paint straight from the tube, no medium, though if nothing else that's not gonna be cheap on paint. To start off with I use a non toxic thinner, Zest-It - no fumes, no turps smell. They also do a non toxic 'fatter' medium which reduces the drying time - I've ordered some but haven't used it yet - or you can use linseed oil to slow it down. And cleaning doesn't have to be a hassle either - Zest-It works as a cleaner but you can get brush dip, or make your own with safflower and clove oil, it will stop your brushes drying out for a couple of weeks at least and means you don't need to bother with cleaning them after every session, just give them a wipe and a dip and lay them flat.

Ok it's a bit more hassle than just using water but beyond the initial outlay on two or three bottles of stuff it's not that big a deal.

Oh so nice to get positive feedback from everyone about my dabbling.

I'm loving so much of what's in this thread too. Cow Art's minimalist doorframes are amazing, as are the sculptures.

Ledge, that portrait is so good, you are very talented!

z_tbd, your gouache paintings feel effortless and have wonderful vibrancy and movement to them

oh wow a giraffe :D

oh wow it's BRONZE DADDY!!

I feel like making more giraffes is all anyone should do, there aren't enough giraffes.

Cow_art that thesis piece is wild, it's like a redacted combine. I feel like information is restricted or classified, instead of scattered like a bulletin board. some of it is legible, but it mostly stifles your effort to read.
did you see that exhibit of Gees' Bend quilts 20 years or so ago?

ledge that portrait has a lot of personality, it almost feels like a cinemagraph or a film still in its candor, you can see the moments that occurred around the image
I'm so impressed when portraiture can do that
5 hours is about the average time I spend on a drawing lately fwiw.

I guess I'm learning to watercolor? it's very frustrating and I might stop, but it's what I have on hand at the moment. I think my interest in painting is quite materialistic, a lot of the time the thing I like the most in painting is the paint itself, I like highly viscoelastic impasto with bands of color running into each other and shit like that. so in watercolor the equivalent I guess is like the granulating effect of mixed colors separating out from each other on the page- well, I'm a really long way away from being able to harness that.

I made some sketches at the beach. I was going to watercolor over them at home but I feel very connected to the location in these drawings, so I didn't want to ruin them.
the first two were scribbled in like under a minute but the third one actually took me like an hour. so I made a 4th drawing that was deliberately really boring so I wouldn't care about painting over it.

https://i.ibb.co/DH7zhFzQ/IMG-0789.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/gZncp9fZ/Welwyn2.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/wNYxS9Mr/Welwyn3.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/nsLH5rhL/LN-Bay.jpg

Cow art has given some backstory here but what is everyone else's background? (I guess z's thread goes back 15 years and I haven't seen everything, but the oldest stuff mostly doesn't load)

Nice beach sketches, very delicate. Watercolour is hard! Harder than oils, I believe is the common opinion. I've never got very far with it.

My background, well I somehow learned to draw as a kid - that is, make a reasonable representation of what I was trying to draw ('drawing on the right side of the brain'), which is not the same as making a good drawing - neither my drawings nor my technique were good. But after school I didn't improve or even draw much at all until in my 30s I took an evening course in urban sketching, from where it all snowballed. Finding new friends, starting a meetup group, going to weekly life classes and portrait groups. I spent a long time consciously working on my technique, now I'm trying to work on making good pictures - which I find harder as there's no objective end goal or process for getting there. I've had many false starts with painting, I'm finally managing to do it with some regularity.

i also struggle with watercolor. gouache is much easier ime, as it's between watercolor and acrylic and you can let things dry and then paint over, to an extent.

love your sketches deflator! and the 'land' colors in that last one, very nice

I paint 1-3 warhammer models each year and I used to do a lot of digital cartography if that counts, but I haven't made a non-work map in a long time, partly out of feeling uninspired and partly because most of the maps I want to make require a lot of tedious big data collection and cleaning before I can do the fun visual stuff. I like doing stuff with topography but digital elevation data is beastly to work with.

Sometimes I convince myself I'll start drawing again - one of my favourite hobbies up to my teens - but I never manage to sustain it. I've dabbled in watercolour and screenprinting and ceramics, and I've gotten decent mileage out of photography, and I like them all but none of them ever stick and I find it frustrating because I really want to consistently have an arty thing or things. Mapmaking was the stickiest until I hit my current rut!

fwiw i'm a very bad self motivator and the reason i managed to stick with drawing, after taking it up again, is that i was lucky to find a community and it became a social activity as much as anything else.

There's probably something in that for me too, even though I'm usually a good self-motivator and not particularly sociable. But I did a photography course recently and the social aspect definitely helped in trying new things and taking more photos and thinking about photography critically. And part of what made mapping fun was that the Twitter community around it was really active and positive, but it seems to have died with Twitter, or dispersed across platforms.

yeah love those watercolour sketches :-)

i did some drawing and oil pasteling in a dank dark club tonight, watching some friends improvise

https://i.imgur.com/w7zLGSt.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/lODIAFG.jpeg

i like drawing live performers because they move, and it’s usually a 15 to 20 minute set so it’s a good pace to move quick but also get time to do some light details and other fun stuff

ledge sometimes mentions the social aspect of painting, and that’s true for me too - i enjoy both solitary and also working with other people, or just being the dude who is drawing. i don’t do it often in public but every once in a while i feel like it and it’s always rewarding

but i was also in a loose “class” with several other people a couple years ago, for most weeks - not coincidentally when i got a lot better at painting - and there was certainly a camraderie and mutual respect there that i miss

love 'em - bold marks, really strong colour choices, cool saxophone! i know a few people who draw live music, i've never or hardly ever given it a go myself.

thank you ledge! working on one more larger painting in my house before leaving for a better place in a few weeks. so far it’s charcoal/goauche/acrylic but will probably add some oil at the end. all on slightly warped plexiboard, oof

https://i.imgur.com/CkXdcNW.jpeg

the horrible red background will become the reds buried underneath something else. but i do like some of the tree stuff on the left

https://i.imgur.com/JNy5nfm.jpeg

still haven’t blocked in everything yet (the bright yellow underpainting) but will do that next sesh. i have big plans for the back of this beast

https://i.imgur.com/sWPUFxo.jpeg

i like drawing live performers because they move

that’s perverse

i know what you mean. you can’t draw a squirrel, it moves too much and too fast. but a rock is too slow. there’s a sweet spot of how much movement is nice, which is how much a musician moves.

the facial expressions in the one with the cool saxpophone are amazing (i guess l-r INTENSE!!, googly, serenity). also one of the musicians appears to be playing a black box that shoots rays of darkness at the guy sitting opposite.

i like that tree detail, too! it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it was a detail of the above image, even though you said so. it really stands alone. also much more energetic than the rest of the picture.

okay, i’m aborting my update for now, it’s taking too long.

i missed yr post deflator, thank you for looking! i’m still working on that last one, but nearing completion! i stopped by the coffee shop to do a quick sketch from a book of ballet poses (“the classic ballet”) and of course ended up spending way too long on it, added some pastels but the face was incredibly creepy so i gouached over it when i got home (and made it only 20% less creepy but hey)

https://i.imgur.com/2wNWiAX.jpeg

My second adult-life attempt at "art" after the giraffe upthread. Another cut-out collage. This was a lot more challenging than the giraffe, and I had to figure out a few techniques as i went along, like making the bubbles.

My partner likes Jaws, and I saw a picture of a banana skin the other day and thought at first thst it reminded me of a yellow shark, so the banana shark was born

https://imgur.com/a/a2hth1C

Let's try again

https://i.imgur.com/q5XW098.jpeg

I'm not sire if this was a bit ambitious or if I made it too busy. The giraffe worked because it was extremely simple, whereas a shark has a much more complex shape, which was very hard to do with my minimal skill level

*sure

I have been doing embroidery on clothes… a lot of the pieces are basically alternative fan shirts and sweaters for bands/musicians I have liked for a long time. It is a low pressure form of art making for me because I am doing this for me, on things I wear, and it’s fairly easy to undo if I don’t like it.

I started with solid colors on solid fabrics but am now working with integrating multiple thread colors as well as on garments with prints … so I have a black floral sweater that says “Flowers cover everything” and a white floral sweater that says “This was a pizza hut”

I'd love to have a go at doing something like that. Sounds very cool

Sarahell, can we get some pics? I love the idea of embroidering but I doubt it's ever going to happen.

Banana Shark is DOPE

What’s the best way to upload pictures and link? It’s been forever since I have done that lol.

I used good old imgur

Also, thanks so much Cow_Art. I'm very much a beginner as I say, so this means a lot

I don't think I said before, but I'd love to see some of salsa shark's cartography (and maybe learn a bit about how they're made) if they're willing to share? I enjoy maps a lot as pieces of artwork in themselves.

I use imgbb.com
-upload image
-select BBcode full linked from the drop down menu
-copy/paste
-delete everything outside the [img] tags (optional)

DL sweet, you nailed the shark shape and found a very effective and attractive solution for the bubbles! i hope you do more of these

How did you get into cartography shark? I also really love maps! As narrative pieces, and also how location memorializes events and routines. there’s a lot to love about em. I started a piece that was basically a personal memory map of my neighborhood just out of high school, never finished it. But shortly after that saw denis wood’s ‘everything sings’ book which blew me away, it was one of my all time favorite artworks for a long time (he turned out to be a child abuser so idk how I feel about it now)

Thanks Deflatormouse@

I'm starting to think that rather than cutting out and sticking card shapes, it might be better for me to create cut-out templates and somehow use paint to make the shapes. I'm not sure what sort of paint I can use indoors.

I'm quite in awe of this person's work who designs posters and album covers for my friends' record labels, and I'd love to know what technique they use (assuming it's not all done in CAD)?

Is there an affordable, simple way to paint onto card via a cut-out template to get that clean, uniform look, preferably indoors and in a way that won't stain my carpet and clothes or poison me with fumes?

https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8c9f565a6e4e954b78aeadaa8864efbe52f0f5efc5ee915363c6cefda8ae1697/WDC-APRIL-2ND-HI-RES.jpg

STENCILS, that's the word I'm thinking of, not templates

unless it's digital, i think that's a screenprint.

Poster looks to me like a very competent screenprint or more likely a digital illustration designed to look like a very competent screenprint.

The paint you want is acrylic, which will definitely stain fabrics but won't poison you with fumes, is bold and water-based and easy to work with. Stencils might not get the effect you want though bc unless they are fully pressed down at the sides you'll get leakage instead of a crisp line. Screenprinting could be an option but it's not really cost- or time-effective unless you plan on doing multiple prints.

re: maps, I am flattered that people are interested. I'll try to post a few this week, just need to do some quick redacting to remove identifying information. A warning though: I'm usually not doing street map or navigation type stuff, it's more like geography-oriented graphic design than anything you could use for wayfinding (although I would love to do more wayfinding-y maps at some point).

I got into making maps partly because it was something I wanted to learn on a personal level and partly because I wanted to be able to incorporate it into my day job (it's a very useful skill in my industry). QGIS is my main tool but almost every map also requires data in some form or other, and sometimes processing in Excel or R for really big data, and sometimes finishing via desktop publishing software when QGIS's native layout editor isn't quite suitable.

Poster looks to me like a very competent screenprint or more likely a digital illustration designed to look like a very competent screenprint.

yes, i also think it's the latter.

xp ok salsa shark already covered everything i was typing about acrylics, would only add that not all the colors are equally opaque.

you can make silkscreens at home without using photo emulsion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY4pEuSGb1Y

if you specifically want to cut or carve forms then linocut might be a good option, although it's not really the look you're after.

Salsa, if you want paint but hard clean edges, you can always use masking tape. It comes in different degrees of stick, and if low tack is still messing up your paper you can stick the tape to your clothes a few times to make it less sticky.

There also acrylic airbrush setups but that is outside of my experience and probably more trouble than you want.

You could also experiment with linocut printing which will look entirely different but would sort of act as a reverse stencil. A carved stamp.

I need to post some of the collage stuff i’ve been working on. I like collage a lot. Part of the reason I like your stuff is the tactile quality of the paper glued together.

it's more like geography-oriented graphic design than anything you could use for wayfinding

very intrigued!!

But yes, acrylic paints are the most practical for what you want to do but it wouldn’t give you clean edges with a stencil; the paint would bleed under. Stencils work best with sprays.

i was gonna say you could touch up the bleed with a brush after

I just noticed this thread. Lately I have been making visualizations based on metadata from academic publications. Here's one:

https://i.imgur.com/U0OH54A.jpeg

We have an acrylic airbrush. It definitely needs ventilation and can be a bit high maintenance! Not sure I'd recommend it unless someone is getting quite serious about their art

Dan, can you go into how that works a little? The end result is lovely.

Sure, I take a piece of the metadata, which comes in the form of a string of characters. I use one of a handful of algorithms I wrote to translate the string into hexadecimal. Some of the algorithms are simple arithmetic I do in my head and some are Python-based involving ASCII values of the individual characters. The hexadecimals get stuck together in "issues" to form the timeline of colors. This kind of thing is what comes out! This is metadata from ~20ish years of publication of this academic journal: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/loi/its

Hard to tell because the printing process dulls the colors a bit, plus it's not a great photo, but there are over 2000 unique colors in that image.

Thansk for the tips upthread peeps! I'll investigate. I'm into this now. It's fun and it's challenging me in ways I've never really attempted to challenge myself on before

Dan m, I LOVE this

Dan, I’m not smart enough to fully grasp that but you made a very attractive thingy and I like it.

I went to grad school for sculpture at San Jose State and there’s a section of the art department there called CADRE.

Computers in Art Design and Education

They did a lot of really smart artwork but a lot of it looked like shit. Sometimes good stuff would come out of there but a lot of the art was so hung up on the data that they didn’t care to find a way to make it visually interesting.

You’ve done both! You have bested the CADRE department at SJSU!

Thanks for all the compliments.

Also glad to learn about CADRE. I'm also in academia and sometimes I think my work leans too scholastic (it's about journals ffs) but it's cool to see others working in a similar vein. Casey Reas at UCLA and Jason Salavon at U Chicago are two of my favorites doing similar things, far cooler than my stuff imho.

What kind of prints are they?

https://i.ibb.co/HLPV0fds/Collage-2.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/ZR4CY1wJ/Collage-3.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/2YsVRH56/Collages.jpg

My goal is to make 99 collages and then pick my favorite ones and paint them. Here's a photo of some of them hung up at our old place for a sense of scale. 95% of the imagery is from old National Geographics, cut up and glued down with an Uhu glue stick.

I haven't counted them in a while, but I'm probably getting close to 50. I've been working on them since 2017. I started doing collage stuff because it's easy to do at home, nontoxic, and I thought I could make a bunch of them really fast. Turns out I work slow no matter what. Sometimes I start building up imagery and most of it gets covered up later.

https://i.ibb.co/5WyrHwjg/Collage-1.jpg

Last one for now. "Sitting On A Pile Of Gold". It's hard not to title everything after songs.

What kind of prints are they?

― Cow_Art, Wednesday, April 9, 2025 8:55 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just the big inkjet we have at work, on some heavy cardstock.

I like that you're making a series, btw. I have 40 or so other color timelines and most are pretty boring, but I enjoy comparing the results of the process to each other.

Hey dan, that’s beautiful.
I have a friend whose work uses generative modeling to mimic biological processes, influenced by the “morphogenetic” art of Andy Lomas, deskreptiv and others. He says that if he tried to model the form without understanding the process that gives rise to it, it would never be as beautiful as the natural world (he has done plants and corals). I think this is a liminal space between art and research that’s very exciting. for one thing, it proposes a potential alternative to “traditional art”.
There’s a question in there somewhere. I guess I’m wondering if you likewise use algorithms to make something more beautiful than you could design, because I also find it more beautiful than legible. or is there a key, or some literacy requirement?

95% of the imagery is from old National Geographics, cut up and glued down with an Uhu glue stick.

That's great, assumed the first 2 were huge until I saw the third pic. these designs will lend themselves very well to large scale imo if that's what you have in mind for the eventual paintings!

Hey dan, that’s beautiful.
I have a friend whose work uses generative modeling to mimic biological processes, influenced by the “morphogenetic” art of Andy Lomas, deskreptiv and others. He says that if he tried to model the form without understanding the process that gives rise to it, it would never be as beautiful as the natural world (he has done plants and corals). I think this is a liminal space between art and research that’s very exciting. for one thing, it proposes a potential alternative to “traditional art”.
There’s a question in there somewhere. I guess I’m wondering if you likewise use algorithms to make something more beautiful than you could design, because I also find it more beautiful than legible. or is there a key, or some literacy requirement?

― doe on a hill (Deflatormouse), Wednesday, April 9, 2025 11:32 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Thank you. Your friend's work sounds interesting and thanks for sharing Lomas and deskreptiv—I find I am surprisingly out of touch with contemporary work since I started teaching!

My process has evolved in this series from simple 1:1 transfer of metadata into writing algorithms to respond to new forms in the data… hope that makes sense. For example, initially the data I was working with was just six numbers in a string, so that directly translates to a hex color (https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/how-hex-colors-work). Then I started encountering the same type of data that was written a different way: more numbers, the addition of letters and special characters like _underscores_, etc, so I had to figure out how to wrangle those into a form I could use. It started as simple math but then I moved to using scripts to do it faster than I could in my head. To actually get around to answering your question, I don't know if it's making something more beautiful than I could design, but I definitely get different results with different algorithmic methods and some look better than others.

As for literacy, I have made some that feature text interpretations of some aspects of the publication I'm visualizing. Here's one of those and it also uses three different algorithmic processes to respond to different data forms.

https://i.imgur.com/YqmlXm1.jpeg

I like those, it's a great idea and and cool end result.

Last night I was portrait drawing for money. A fundraising for cubs, low key and low money, 50p-£1 for a five minute portrait. I sat there for ten minutes with no takers then suddenly it was non stop for the next 90 minutes. I've done loads of 15 minute portraits, I'm ok with ten and I have done that live once before, five is something else and drawing kids can be a challenge, they can't always sit still (though most of them did) and they have different proportions, if you're not careful you can make them look too grown up. In theory it was low pressure but it felt pretty intense, by the end my head was buzzing. All the drawings turned out pretty well though!

maps: https://imgur.com/a/xFt3INO

Oooh, these are ace. The inverted topography one gave me (enjoyable) vertigo, and I laughed out loud at the optimising trick or treat map.

i’m putting on a wordless experimental/diy play tonight called doctor magic, and it involves the amputation of this arm (three times actually, lol). acrylic and gouache on some sort of bendable/posable mesh covered children’s arm a friend loaned to me

https://i.imgur.com/jmqDgrG.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/psklLRS.jpeg

How did Doctor Magic go??

Wow violent!
I love how that arm is all "to hell with local color"

The optimising trick or treat map (which i adore) reminded me of the intro to Everything Sings where they said the jack o lantern map might prove useful to vadals if only it didn't require so much planning.

Dan, thank you and sorry for asking so many dumb questions. That is also a lovely image.

*vandals

Trick or treat is an inner warzone between spontaneity and efficiency

xp lavator

let’s just say…the arm was successfully amputated…three times *doctor magic music plays*

https://i.imgur.com/8zttIRL.png

https://i.ibb.co/hJ5Qf4hY/Joseph-Cowart-A-New-World.jpg

https://i.ibb.co/N6KSzGCr/Joseph-Cowart-Polyps-Under-Scrutiny.jpg

more like cow heart, amirite

yeah, love these cow art!

same!

Thanks! That last one is called “Polyps Under Scrutiny.”

the one with the vertical yellow stripes reminds me of a painting by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

https://i.imgur.com/2zWlu6x.jpeg

been meaning to update for a while but it takes too long.
the short version is, i’ve resisted the urge to start making conceptual art again and this is what i’ve been doing instead

https://i.ibb.co/QjC8yypH/image.jpg

Breeding Trump-haired mole rats?

‘fraid so, soon i’ll have an army

https://i.ibb.co/wN9dV9PK/Joseph-Cowart-Transnmission.jpg

ooh

love that

showing these in a few days at a gallery opening but mainly as an excuse to improvise snare drum solos under a blanket for 20 minutes

https://i.imgur.com/CL41G7I.jpeg