It's been difficult but theres some good things happening when I combine charcoal, paint and ink with digital manipulation, photographic textures and digital painting techniques, and the next step is to go further with printing the work and working into it in order for it to have more of a life in the real world. I'll be looking to focus on this as soon as possible along with improving my technique with paint and ink and having a better understanding of skin tones. Also I'd like to get more of a narrative into the work, something I'm starting to get across but needs developing. Expression, posing and detail are some ways you can imply a context that allows people to connect with who you're depicting whilst still keeping things open enough for different people to get different things from an image.
Here's some of the stuff I came up with recently, still a long way to go but I'll keep the same rate of progress going.
A lot of the time I'll intend to get some more colour into the images but I do like black and white with occasionally a bit of colour here or there. Getting enough energy and texture into the work without making it unclear is a challenge, as well as getting a likeness if I intend to depict somebody in particular. I'll tend to look at a bunch of different reference images and compose my own thing but being accurate when needed is something else I really need to get better at.
The Gym is still a thing, and I'm still enjoying the odd satisfaction you get from doing something a few times a week and shovelling food in order to convert said effort into Human Being Material. I've seen flying dumbbells, scenes where mirrors were obliterated by said dumbbells and people throwing multi punch combinations in the weights area (between sets or was that the exercise?) but since starting university it's been a really positive thing and a good break to go and do something which can be as repetitive or varied as you want. I'll tend to mess around with what I'm doing quite a bit so you don't find yourself stuck on a particular weight or whatever for too long.
I have some really great things to read for my second piece on social media so I'll be looking to get started on that ahead of time. I find essay writing quite fun when I know what I'm talking about, whereas if I don't it quickly becomes tedious as I work out what the hell I'm supposed to be saying and who is responsible for this pile of poorly written notes and frantically underlined non-epiphanies.
(Me).
