Alabama man still drawing murals at age 112

"...Frank Calloway spends his days turning visions from his youth into lively murals — and at 112 years old, the images of his childhood are a window to another time."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25774249/

...And still putting in 7+ hours a day drawing! This was a great story to read. I'm glad that I came across it.

Note to self for the "To Do" list: Still be making art after 100!

Here is a video of Mr. Calloway at work: "Take my time and do the job right."

Participating in Online Art Challenges

I like to participate in some of the various online drawing and painting challenges that are featured in many of the art forums. The challenges can push you out of your comfort zone by making you take on subjects that you normally don't portray.

This piece was created for the "Fly the flag" jam over at The Drawing Board.

Description: "This month' Jam is dedicated to characters who are symbols of their nations identity, or whose costume contains symbols of their nation."

This character is called Nuke. He first appeared in the Daredevil "Born Again" storyline. He is the result of the government's attempt to re-create the "super soldier" serum, which gave us Captain America. Nuke got increased physical attributes, but he also became psychotic.

A Quick Fantasy Sword

I've been looking over my website, artbykidd.com, making plans to update the content (Finally!). I'd almost forgotten that I'd added a couple of walk-throughs to the resources section. "How to create a quick fantasy sword" was done in response to someone in one of the forums I frequent asking how to draw a sword.

Its pretty basic fare, but maybe someone will get some use out of it. I'll be adding more resources to the site and providing updates on this blog, so you can consider this an introduction to my other "internet house."

View Tutorial: A Quick Fantasy Sword

Portrait Redux

While looking for something else, I came across a quickie portrait that I had done last year. It wasn't very good, but there was something about the face that had some potential. I decided to see if I could do a better version.

Part of the problem was that there was no indication of the underlying structure of the face. It was very flat. So I started "building" the head and face.

The darks and lights were nearly indistinguishable from one another, so I darkened the darks and lightened the lights. I liked the idea waves in the hair, but I took the hairstyle in a different direction. I toned down the shape of the eyes, though I tried to keep some of exotic feel.

I added some musculature to the the neck and shoulder area and created some jewelry. I used custom brushes to create the background textures and to add texture to the skin.

I used a blending brush to soften some areas and to shape others.

Overall, I like the way the redo came out.

Wind Elemental

This is a painting that I set aside and finally found some time to finish today. I'm going to count this as the first painting completed under the "Finishing Project." Its not the one that I thought I'd do first, but its helped me to get started.

Even though the figure is in a static pose, the painting itself is about movement. I tried to represent movement by using the swirling snow, flowing fabric and streaming hair. It is about cold,too, which is why I restricted the palette to blues, whites and cool grays. Finally, it is also about sound. My goal was to make the viewer almost hear the sounds of the wind.

Did I hit the mark? That's for the viewer to decide. I try to raise the bar for myself on one element or another on most of the paintings that I do. The act of defining the goals and the attempt to reach them is my personal measure of success.

Everything else is gravy.

The Value of Back Stories

As I briefly mentioned in another post, one of the techniques that help me with my work is developing a back story, history and/or environment for the subject that I'm creating. Once I have a sense of who or what the subject is, it becomes easier to develop the visual image.

For example, I was using a custom brush, just painting random shapes. Eventually, elements of a scene began to emerge from the shapes. As I began to refining the shapes, a back story began to suggest itself.

"No one knew how long the keep had been there. Legend was that it just rose out of the ground one day. It was said that a great and terrible wizard walked the halls of the keep and that he jealously guarded it's secrets and treasures. Many had climbed the spiral stair that wound around the gnarled column, eager to discover if the stories of great treasure were true. None returned."

The story doesn't have to be fully developed to be helpful.

Since this was just a doodle session, I kept the sketch loose and unrefined, to hold on to some of the original randomness.

Technical Difficulties

My Internet access has been down since I installed Microsoft's latest update. It seems that it interacted badly with some firewall programs. On the plus side, my computer is performing better than it has in a while. Before I found out the real cause of my problem, I ran all of my anti-spyware, adware, etc., defragged the drive and uninstalled some old programs.

Still, it was a bit annoying.