Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Feb 23, 2020 --Copying a Moebius Masterpiece

The club met indoors again, but the first signs of Spring are here. There are honeybees rummaging through the lavender blossoms of the rosemary bush, with a few hummingbirds cruising through the yard now and then. The stink bugs are back — I don’t know how they survive our winters — and the squirrels are fighting ferocious battles on the roofs and in the treetops. All of these signs mean that winter is fading and our chances of actually meeting outside in the fresh air are increasing every week.

For the challenge of copying a master, I copied a cell from Moebius’ masterpieceThe World of Edena. I started by sketching in pencil, then inked a fine liner, then scanned the inked page, which I re-inked in Clip Studio Paint using a custom mono line brushes based on my Rotring Isograph technical ink pens. I set the ink layer to be a reference layer and used the bucket for coloring. There were quite a few vacant areas that I had to color manually.

Al Fresco Art Club Artrage Masterpiece Challenge for July 20, 2019

There was a full day of Arting around here today. It started with the Vitamin D sketch, which I do every sunny day it’s not freezing. In the Pacific Northwest we get short-changed on sunshine. Vitamin D deficiency is epidemic. While I’m catching rays and generating Vitamnd D, not to mention resetting my biological clock, I do these sketches in 15 minutes. With the short time limit I have to simplify. I like to do a pen and ink drawing when I’ve got just a few minutes.

Here’s the Vitamin D sketch. I used by Kuretake Sable Brush pen and a 5.5x8 in. Strathmore Visual Journal (140 lb. watercolor paper).

View fullsize

For the weekly meeting of the Al Fresco Art Club, we decided to do another one-hour challenge that forces us out of our comfort zone. We decided that trying to copy a masterpiece always pushes us to do some thinking. The bonus is that we learn something about humility, as I did today when I tried to copy Gaugin’s “Woman with a Mango”.

Here’s the Alfresco Art Club painting of Paul Gauguin’s “Woman with a Mango” done using Artrage on the iPad Pro. Really, you should check out the original here.

View fullsize

Sunday Art Club Artrage Challenge: Paint like a Master

This week the Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to learn by trying to paint a masterpiece…that is, try to copy a masterpiece. We got to choose our favorite painting program. We could pick any masterpiece we wanted, and we had to work in one layer with no undo. I chose to copy a Cézanne still life using Artrage. I kept it simple by leaving out some details, including a wine glass, background details, and anything else that wouldn’t fit into my one-hour window. I used a two-color palette: bluish and orange-ish, pretty much the same as Cézanne’s color palette.

I chose a still life because I thought it would be something I could complete in one hour. In that amount of time I managed to get the basic shapes and a rudimentary foreground and background. I learned at least one lesson: Still life’s are harder than they look.

Here’s my interpretation of a Cézanne still life. My reference names this painting simply “Still Life.”

View fullsize