My blogging experiment swimmingthewitch.com is over. It was a good 4 or 5 year stint, but my lack of enthusiasm to keep up the site has led to my decision to shut it down. It was a good ride while it lasted, but I’m now moving onto better projects.

Thanks to those of you that supported the blog.

-Mark

I’ve taken the iPhone compatible version of the website offline. I’ve never been happy with the look, and until I redesign it’s staying offline. The disadvantage of course is that my Simpleviewer galleries use Flash, so viewers won’t be able to see them via their iOS devices. This will be remedied at some point in the future.

My latest piece was a long time in coming, but it’s done. I started the Clockwork Rat before I headed back to school to finish my BFA, and it was difficult to get around to. This makes a total of 10 pieces in the series out of a planned 12. I may be heading onto the 11th if I don’t go back and redo one or two of the older ones.

Due to the GINORMOUS amount of spam that I’m receiving on these posts, I will no longer be accepting comments. Sorry. If you have complaints send them to the Eastern-Block countries that are bombarding the site with pharmaceutical spam.

-Mark

I’d like to say thanks to everyone who showed up for my lecture tonight!

Here’s the presentation I used tonight: Printing Presentation

A big thanks to everyone who showed up tonight for my intro to DSLRs! For anyone interested, the presentation may be downloaded from the following link:

Photography PowerPoint

Thanks again!

Mark

So, after leaving my last job I decided to head back to school. I believe that the time was right to finish off my BFA and head onto a Masters. The job market really requires it now, and frankly if I want to ever teach again the Masters will be a essential.

I love design and illustration work, and after leaving my last position I had to take a lot of things into consideration. Do I want to continue graphics work and teaching? Is there something else I would prefer to do?

The answer of course is no. I’m born to do what I do. Whether it’s doing art or teaching people how to do art, I should be doing something related to art. I have friends that were born engineers. There’s nothing else they were born to do. They were meant to calculate the drag coefficiency of missiles, and by God that’s just what they’re doing.

I on the other hand was meant to do this. For good or bad I’ve made a living doing/teaching art for the last 15 years, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve spoken before about the differences between digital and “traditional” or “analog” mediums. The argument is generally the same no matter who says it: “You kids and your digital have no idea what rough is! Why I shot slide film that only had a latitude of…blah, blah, blah.” Yeah, we all get it.

There is truth to all this bitching. Traditional methods of art teach you a lot. Until recently I had no idea how soft I had become by using a computer for everything. I’ve been reading Doug Chiang’s art technique book Mechanika, and Mr.Chiang’s technique lends itself to traditional sketching, shading, then (if applicable) scanning your final art piece for coloring. I broke out my art supplies and began to sketch, ink, and shade my concept sketches.

First, I discovered that even when I was sketching I was constantly reaching for COMMAND + Z (undo on the computer). After the repeated realization that undo wouldn’t work with pencil and paper, my second grand epiphany was that I was scared to do anything to my drawings that required permanence. I would catch myself saying “Well, if I just scan this at the current stage I can always print it if I screw up later” or “This looks REALLY good in pencil! Maybe I’ll just keep it that way!”. You get the point.

What I had to do was simply bite the bullet and put Micron Pen and Prismacolor Markers to the paper. If I screwed up, so be it. I heard my own voice telling my old students that “everything looked like shit halfway through the project”. Well, it does, but most of the the time it gets better.

Eventually what I found was that most of the time my technique was just fine. My sketches became easier to perform, and shorter to complete. Will any of these see the light of day? Probably not, but that’s not the point. The point is that all artists can learn by switching off what makes them comfortable. Work without a net once in a while. You’ll do better than you think.

You may ask “why in the world would you take the time to redo a piece of artwork from years ago?”. Well below is the answer. I’ve hated the original artwork (on bottom) since the day I finished it. I’ve always considered this the weakest image in my Clockwork Series, and now I really feel it’s the piece I had always intended it to be.

There is one other piece I may revise before all is said and done.

Original Clockwork Cat (bottom) and Revised Edition (top).

These are some images that I retouched recently.  The images were captured by photographer Elizabeth O’neill during a workshop in L.A. with famed fashion photographer Melissa Rodwell.  More of Elizabeth’s images can be found on her site: elizabethoneillphotography.com.

Please click on image for larger view.

Please click on image for larger view.