Tonight I'm posting the completed manipulation of Bill Murray in a painting by El Greco. The original painting is called "El caballero con la mano en el pecho" which in English means "The Knight with His Hand on His Breast". I changed the name just a bit to "El caballero con el pulgar en el culo" which means "The Knight with His Thumb in His Butt". I'm sure those Spanish speaking readers already got the punch line. If you're a Bill Murray fan as I am and you remember the late 70s and 80s, you'll understand the Brooch on his chest. For those of you who don't, the brooch pays tribute to SNL Star Gilda Radner or as seen as her alter ego, Rosana Rosanadana. Hope the spelling is correct. I'm sure that's clear as mud for those of you who don't remember her. Anyhow back to the manipulation. If you view it in full size you will see the texture work I'm kind of experimenting with. I'm trying to produce convincing paint crackles, scuffs and scratches. I'm not there yet but I'm getting closer. Source painting below:
May 08, 2011
May 07, 2011
Bill Murray Painting Manipulation WIP
Tonight I'm posting a work in progress of Bill Murray. I have chosen a painting to use this caricature in and will post it next time. This was a mild caricature as Bill was already showing off one of his signature expressions. Tonight I'm showing the process I go through when using a manipulated caricature on a piece of art. They're always a lot of fun. I'm just showing some very basic steps I go through to prepare an image to be used in a painting. There is still more work to be done to this image after it's applied to the painting. Further texture refining and applying a crackle effect I've been experimenting with which are often seen on the old Masters' paintings. Everything I'm showing you here is my own experimental process. I have so much to learn. I do things different every time I sit at my computer. One day I'm going to figure this stuff out.
Original source image:
I hope you enjoyed. Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!
May 04, 2011
Bill Murray ~ A Caricature Study
Tonight I wanted t get something posted so I did a very quick caricature study of Bill Murray. I was not at all concerned with likeness. I was more concerned with the overall feel, so don't ask me why the likeness is not there. It was an experiment. I think that the fact that I did it so quickly may have helped actually because I kept it loose. I didn't get hung up on the details, which usually tighten me up, and the image ends up looking stiff of forced. I only spent about an hour and a half from the quick liquify sketch to the final caricature manipulation. I've posted the source image below as well as a short video clip from Caddyshack from about 1980, which is the Bill Murray I grew up with. That and SNL.
I hope you enjoyed. Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!
May 03, 2011
Featured Artist ~ Jeremy Lipking
Jeremy Lipking enjoys the process of wandering. As he journeys through life and explores different paths, his watchful eye continually searches for the subject of his next painting. Sometimes he’s captivated by a sight he’s never seen before. Other times, he paints an object from his everyday life, fascinated by how the light touches it at that very moment. By striving to capture the “here and now” in his paintings, Lipking injects into his classic and romantic images an ethereal, almost mysterious quality – something that many other artists have attempted to copy, but have not been able to replicated.
Born in Santa Monica , California in 1975, Lipking is a fourth-generation California artist and the son of Ronald Lipking, an advertising designer, children’s book illustrator and landscape painter. His early exposure to art – the constant presence of paints and brushes in his childhood home and frequent trips to local museums and galleries with his father – provided the younger Lipking with a strong foundation of the basics of design and drawing.
But it was the years he spent from 1996 to 1999 at the California Art Institute, which enabled him to make a tremendous leap as an artist. His instructors taught him to look at the world differently – to not, for example, look at the eyes and nose as distinct elements of the face, but to detect the shapes created by lights and darks and the subtleties of color. Following his studies at the institute, he embarked on an intensive self-directed effort to improve his paintings, closely examining the works of artists he most admired: John Singer Sargent, Spanish plein-air painter Joaquin Sorolla, and Swedish artist Anders Zorn, among others.
In 2001, at the age of 25, Lipking began attracting attention of the international art community. He received both the Gold Medal and the Museum Director’s Award at the California Art Club’s 91st Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition, one of the country’s most prestigious exhibitions of contemporary-traditional fine art. A year later, at the 92nd Annual Gold Medal Exhibition, he received the Museum Purchase Award. Lipking has had four solo exhibitions and has participated in many gallery and museum exhibitions. In 2003 he was asked to participate in the Arnot Museum ’s exhibition Re-presenting Representation, in New York . Magazines ranging from Art and Antiques and Art News to Art-Talk and Southwest Art began reporting on his meteoric career and the enigmatic quality of his work that appeals to a growing list of collectors.
Today, while Lipking feels especially compelled to paint the most classical of artistic subjects, the human figure, his body of work also includes landscapes and still lifes – whatever subjects manage to capture his interest as he continually searches the world around him for reasons to put his brush to canvas.
I hope you enjoyed. Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!
May 01, 2011
Morph Movie / My Caricature Process Peek
I've spent a lot of time making this new morph movie. The first one I did was pretty bad. Well, this time I'm learning the software and this one will have really clean transitions. It's also being created at 1024x768 and all images were reworked to expand the backgrounds to the same aspect ratio. Below is a crude animation of one of the many transitions (its jumpy and poor image quality. I chopped it into 15 frames and made the gif.) Below that is an image showing the software interface and what that particular sequence looks like in progress and at exactly 50% on the transition. This project is taking me far longer that I thought it would but I keep going back and improving things as I learn new tricks. Hopefully it will be worth the time spent when it's done. This is a very rough example but if you look at details like the eyes tracking, you can see that I'm being much more precise on this one.
Everyone keeps asking me to tell my secrets about my manipulated caricatures. Well, I really don't have any secrets I'm hiding but I thought I would give you a small sampling of part of my caricature process and practice method. Below is a 2-3 minute very quick, what I call a manipulated caricature sketch. I do dozens of these in a day for practice at times and I almost always make a 2 minute liquify sketch prior to doing a caricature to try and capture the basic morph that I want, keeping it very loose. When working on a caricature in Photoshop, I always have on my canvas, a small sketch which hopefully captured the essence of the person, a small version of the original image and the image I'm working on, all together so I don't lose track of the direction I'm going, likeness, proportions, etc. I am reducing my reliance on and use of liquify, but when I do use it, I bring all three images in together so I can see the whole picture.
Now, let me make a couple of things clear. I am not yet what I consider to be a caricature artist. I have no formal training. I don't claim to be an expert or in any way qualified to teach caricature. These are my methods (if you want to call it that), not necessarily the correct ones. If you want to learn the art of caricature, take lessons from a Master. Jason seiler offers lessons online and as soon as I have the money, my wacom and my Mac, I'm taking lessons from him. Can't wait!! Ok, that's a little peek into how I do what I do. I will release more information on my personal techniques along the way. Don't ask me when. Goodnight!
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