I’m happy to share two updates for the month:

Upcoming show

First, I have an upcoming show at Haven Gallery in Northport, NY opening on June 7 — featuring my latest set of city pieces. For those in the Long Island area, come check it out! (And for others, all of the art will be easily viewable for all using the power of the internet).

City of Another Time

What ever happened to the visions of the future we had a century ago? We were once promised skyscrapers towering into the sky like cathedrals, and giant airships soaring overhead. This series is inspired by the dreams of that era - notable influences such as the film Metropolis, the illustrations of Hugh Ferriss, and other historical sites that never came to be from Never Built New York.

Some of those dreams came alive in the brief window when the willpower was there, and others never came to be. This set of illustrations are inspired by the future we never had — the City of Another Time.

New Shop

This week I launched my new shop at https://shop.chrisbeckerart.com where I have 4 new original pieces available for purchase. Each original piece is hand-drawn with graphite on Ampersand Gessobord panel. I plan to keep these pieces small and affordable (for original art at least😅 ), so check it out if you’ve ever wanted to own some unique original art. Each month I’ll be dropping a new set of pieces in there, so be sure to come back to see if anything new strikes you!

(Also I’ll add if you’re looking to buy prints of my older pieces, those can be ordered from my shop on Inprnt at https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/chrisbeckerart/)

Join us for the reception! RSVP here 👉

In a captivating blend of past and present, five contemporary New York City-based artists - Alexander Ney, Michael Hafftka, Chris Becker, Evelyne Drouot, and Artem Mirolevich - join forces with the legendary 20th-century art icon, Pablo Picasso, to explore the profound question: Why is man?

This innovative exhibition at Salomon Art Gallery, New York, brings together the diverse perspectives of these modern artists, whose works resonate with introspection and philosophical inquiry. Each artist, in their unique style, delves into the complexities of human existence, echoing Picasso's profound explorations of the human condition.

Aleksander Ney's instantly recognizable sculptures, Michael Hafftka's figurative expressionist art, Chris Becker's surreal graphite creations, Evelyne Drouot's enigmatic pieces, and Artem Mirolevich's symbolic artworks collectively challenge viewers to ponder the essence of humanity.

"We are thrilled to showcase the works of these exceptional artists alongside the legendary Pablo Picasso," says Rodrigo Salomon. "Their thought-provoking pieces spark conversations about our place in the universe, bridging the past and present in a captivating dialogue."

Don't miss this extraordinary opportunity to witness the fusion of tradition and innovation, as these visionary artists come together to explore the eternal question: Why is man?

This exhibition will be open by appointment, March 6th -27th. For more information, please contact Gigi Salomon at 917 435 0584 or at Salomonarts.com

RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/black-white-color-tickets-845971081277

Art Exhibition Opening 
Wednesday, March 6, 6-9pm 
Salomon Arts Gallery
83 Leonard St. 4^th Fl, New York, NY, 10013 

1. Don’t use AI art generators to make your art. 
   It devalues your work because everyone else using AI will make the same generic stuff.

2. Cultivate a style of your own and create a consistent body of work.
   People will begin to recognize the look of your art and know when it’s a <YOUR NAME HERE>.

3. Make stuff that AI can’t do well. 
   Draw lots of hands! Find new subjects in the news that AI hasn’t been trained on yet.  Do it well and consistently and you’ll have your own niche AI won’t touch soon.  

4. Make a physical (traditional) piece of art.
   AI isn’t going to pick up a paint brush or a pencil, and if it ever does it won’t be an artist, that’ll just be called a printer.  

5. Make art about local places.
   AI has a lot of data on popular locations, probably nothing on the local mom & pop shop down the street

6. Make art about a person in your life.  Tell their story.
   AI will only generate images of generic people or uncanny celebrity lookalikes.

7. Run Glaze (@TheGlazeProject) on your art
   But remember that it only prevents “style mimicry” - its not a complete defense against AI using your images in other ways

8. Give your art totally random titles.
   Name your painting of a cat with a fish something random like High Eggplant Pencil Sharpener (just call it avant-garde). AI needs images and text to train itself on.  If the text is bullshit, it’ll poison its well of data for making specific subjects.  

9. Make art during a blackout!
   Cause you know what’s not going to make art during a blackout?  AI.

10. Invent the next great style of art.
    You know, easy, right?  But someone’s gonna do it someday…

11. Yes, there should be more than 10 of these.
    There should be a hundred more things we can do to adapt to the spread of AI art, and everyone should add their thoughts to this list too!

This past week I joined artist & draughtsman Gabriela Handal on her podcast, A Conversation About Art to talk about some lofty questions like “what is art?” and “what is beauty?” See the full episode here:

This week I finally finished a piece that’s kept me busy for most of August — “City of another time” — not really the future, and not really the past. Maybe an alternate future? Maybe another universe entirely? (Don’t ask me how I managed to get a glimpse of it). I took a few nuggets of inspiration from places like the film Metropolis and the drawings of Hugh Ferriss, and also some of the shapes and features of Flemish architecture (a style that I’ve often overlooked in my hunts for architectural inspiration, but which I’ve come to appreciate recently for its whimsical playfulness).

This piece was made with graphite on a 24 x 18 in. gesso board. The process for this was identical to how I made City of the Future — and so since I did it once before I was able to do this one in much more cavalier fashion (trust me, I looked cavalier doing this). It began with an outline on drafting paper, which I then traced onto tracing paper, which I then used like a piece of carbon paper to get the outline onto the board, cavalierly.

Prints of City of Another Time can be purchased here on Society6.

After a piece is finished…

I thought I’d share a few notes on some of the extra stuff that happens behind the scenes after I put the pencil and eraser down and call a piece done.

Fixative

Recently I’ve come to appreciate the benefits that a coat of fixative can have on a piece, especially a graphite drawing. With graphite, more than many other mediums, it’s very easy to muck up a piece when we’re handling it— graphite might smudge or rub off, or a rogue eraser could wipe a bunch of it away. A good coat of spray-on fixative prevents most of that, and also gives it some UV protection that could prevent it from fading under sunlight later on. I’ve been using Krylon’s matte low odor clear finish for this. One other big benefit of using fixative on graphite drawings is that it prevents the “reflectiveness” of graphite that you get when light hits it at certain angles. As a result, when you view the piece at any angle, the lights and darks will pop out a lot more and the piece will have a much smoother look to it.

Scanning

With a lot of my pieces I may just take a photo with my iPhone, share that to Instagram, and be done with it, but if I’m looking to get a digitized version of a piece for a high quality print, I’ll pull out the scanner.

The problem with a lot of pieces, (like City of Another Time) is that they don’t fit on a normal scanner. Large format scanners that can do 24x18+ inch pieces are incredibly expensive, so instead we have to scan in segments and stitch them together. Back in the day I used to do this with an old 12in scanner and some very careful manual stitching in photoshop— a process which took a few hours per piece.

These days I use a VIISAN 3120 17x12in scanner, which scans nice and quickly, and then PhotoStitcher, which takes care of all the stitching in just a few seconds.

One problem that can happen when scanning an oversized piece— especially if it’s something rigid like a panel, is that its impossible to get it fully flat and lined up on the scanner’s glass since the glass is often recessed below the plastic casing of the scanner. As a result you could end up with sections that are blurry or darker, or accidentally skewed at a slight angle.

One way to fix this is, instead of shifting the piece left→right, up→down to cover each section, just rotate it so that each corner gets a turn at the “alignment” corner of your scanner (usually there may be an arrow pointing to it). On each scan, make sure the piece is flush with the 2 sides of the scanning surface, and as you scan it, rotate the resulting digital images so they’re all “upright”. PhotoStitcher can then take these 4 parts and stitch them into a nice sharp, perfectly aligned, consistently lit image in cavalier fashion.

Thanks for reading! Prints of my pieces can be purchased at https://society6.com/chrisbeckerart

This past week I finished Towering Gothic - it’s both a new piece and also not a new piece — because I started working on this one back in 2006…

Ah, 2006. Myspace was the place to be, Twitter was barely started, Instagram didn’t even exist, and everyone carried flip-phones in their pockets. Also that year I decided I was going to pursue the humble goal of drawing the biggest f&$king castle that had ever been drawn. A humble goal for sure. I spent a whole lot of time that year brainstorming and sketching ideas for it…

Once the forms took shape, I developed a few precise outlines for it…

Then spent a year or so producing a full 3 dimensional outline…

Then in the winter of 2008 I drew this version from it:

After staring at this for a few months I wasn’t quite satisfied with it, so that summer I drew another version:

I liked this version a little more, but still wanted to do better, so I scanned it and played with it in photoshop for a bit, and came out with this:

This one felt more like the big f&$king castle of my dreams. I uploaded it to DeviantArt (the only real social network at the time for art) and considered my goal to draw the biggest f&$king castle sufficiently satisfied. It got picked up as a Daily Deviation that summer, which was the most attention any of my art had gotten until then (and it would be the most attention any of my pieces got for another 10 years or so…).

So then earlier this summer I rediscovered the outline for it in an old portfolio and decided it would be fun to do a new version of it.

I made a few modifications here and there - gave it more gothic details, and tried to give it some better structure in spots where my old plan didn’t really work for me any more.

Then I realized I needed to give it a new backdrop - something subtle that wouldn’t distract from the main subject — but it made me rethink, where does this castle live? Previously I’d planted it alone among mountains, then in a field surrounded by towns, then I thought… maybe it lives in the water. Surely, that would be a strategically sound place to build a big f&$king castle — after all, many castles around the world are surrounded by water for their defense, and I wouldn’t want my giant castle to be invaded that easily. That would just be a nuisance.

So there’s the final version of this castle, more than 15 years after I first started it. Maybe in another 10 years I’ll do another version and redesign it yet again!

“City of the Future” - or as some clever commenters have noted “…or city of the past” - but since we never actually got to have this in our past, then maybe it still is yet to come. Either way, this is the first real piece I’ve done on 18x24in gesso board rather than paper. In my experiments with other types of surfaces, gesso board (aka “gessobord”) was the closest I could find to paper, with the advantage that it’s a bit more substantial and comes mounted on a wood frame like canvas, so it’s ready-to-hang anywhere from a gallery, to a spare wall in your bathroom.

So as I said, Gesso board was the closest I could find to paper, but it’s not exactly the same. For one thing, it’s a bit more challenging to erase. A regular rubber eraser mostly left big smudge marks on it; my kneaded eraser could lift some graphite off to gently lighten things up; but I mostly had to rely on my electric erasers to fully clear anything away and even then the graphite could be stubborn to lift off. Gesso board “holds” onto graphite quite easily, so it’s easy to get dark tones to come out nicely. Blending behaves a bit differently, since gesso board takes a little more effort to get the graphite to move around on it. It’s a slightly less forgiving surface than paper— it holds onto mistakes more easily, and becomes tougher to get them out the longer you work on it, but overall I like the look of the piece and the solid surface makes it a bit more valuable as a piece of original art. I gave the piece a few coats of fixative in the end and that gave it a nice smooth matte finish.

The drawing process

Most of my detailed drawings start off as an outline. But when I make my outlines, I’ll usually make a big mess — there’s lots of trying stuff, seeing what works, erasing it, trying again, and all along the way I’m smudging it all over with my dirty fingers — so I’ll usually draw the outline on a separate piece of paper and then trace it through onto anther clean sheet to do the final piece on (usually some sort of heavyweight paper). That tracing process usually involves taping the outline onto a piece of plexiglass, placing the clean sheet of paper on top of that, and then shining a light behind it, then tracing the outline through it. Unfortunately, with Gesso board, I couldn’t do any of that.

Since Gesso board is basically a solid panel of wood, I couldn’t shine any lights though it and trace anything onto it. So instead I had to go about it in a rather roundabout way.

First I copied the outline onto a sheet of tracing paper:

I used a 6b pencil for this — very soft graphite to ensure that it would come off later when I needed it to.

Then, I flipped the tracing paper over, placed it face down on the Gesso board and traced the outline again — only this time the tracing was just to press the graphite from the other side of the page into the board.

(Before I did this I’d spread graphite power over the board to give it a soft gray backdrop). With my outline “traced” onto it, it looked like the image above.

And finally after that it was time to start the real drawing…

Overall this piece took me about 6 weeks to finish, and holy shit this was a tedious motherf^%ker.

Up next…

A sneak peak at the next work in progress:

A few months ago I’d dug up an outline I’d made for a piece back in 2007, a time when I’d established the ambitious goal for myself to draw a big f&^king castle. I’ll share more shots of that project, plus the finished piece next week!

Featured print…

This magical, completely non-airworthy edifice could soon be hanging on your wall! Get yours at https://society6.com/product/lost-kingdom8444105_print?sku=s6-27455679p4a1v45 It’s the perfect piece to hang above your mantelpiece, or if like me you don’t have a mantelpiece, then that prized bit of empty space above your toilet will do too!

Starting off with a work-in-progress here. I’m slowly inching forward on a larger version of City of the Future, 18x24 inches, vs the meager 11x16 that was the previous one. Work on this version has been slow and a total pain in the butt! Mostly because its all technical and precise and involves rulers, and t-squares, and triangles for every single one of the 3.4 billion lines in this thing (I didn’t count, but trust me it’s at least that many). Also in the back of my head, I’m mulling over ideas for a City of the Future III to follow up on last week’s City of the Future II.

Weekly thoughts: First impressions of Threads.

After spending a couple days using Meta’s new Threads app, my main impression is that it’s actually quite… pleasant.  In comparison, whenever I spend 10 minutes scrolling through Twitter, I usually end up being mad at something that I hadn’t been thinking about 10 minutes earlier. (And what’s worse is that I can’t stop scrolling for more).

Now, on Twitter I never really had a big following compared to Instagram (1k vs 50k followers), so for the most part posting on Twitter for me is like shouting into a void. In my first day on Threads, I had more interactions with more people than I had on Twitter all year. The best thing of all so far, is that Threads has been free of the trolls that regularly fill Twitter with whatever the internet’s equivalent of raw sewage is.

I think we all agree that social media has deteriorated over the last 10 years. It seems that all the big ones realized that they could make their profits by just feeding us viral content and ads and they didn’t even need to let us interact with each other anymore. Twitter certainly learned that all it has to do is make us mad and many of us will gladly come back for more. Threads, however, has felt something like Twitter in 2010; people are just happily exchanging banter. I saw 3 people post photos of their lunch, and one just posted that he wanted to spread happiness. What sort of weird magical social media fantasyland have we just entered here in 2023?

When I popped back on Twitter I was surprised to see some of the criticism posted about Threads (and by people who usually hate Twitter nonetheless). For some it was the missing features — no DM’s or trending topics; for others it was the feed of posts from people they don’t follow (which I assume Meta mainly did to fill up empty space to start out); and for others it was just a deep hatred of Meta, which is understandable. After all, there are plenty of reasons to be critical of Meta— they have a history of abusing our data and radicalizing old folks on Facebook— but if you’re already on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, then Threads isn’t really doing anything new to you that isn’t being done to you already.

My takeaway from those critiques is that the Stockholm syndrome of Twitter is really quite strong…

And yet as much as I’d like to detach myself from Twitter, it’s still the only place on the internet where you can go to find out what’s happening in the world right now, in real-time. The lack of trending topics in Threads kind of severs us from the rest of the world in a way— all we focus on are just the posts and replies in our feed.

And maybe that’s what we’ve been missing in our social media for a number of years now; a place to just interact and banter with other like-minded folks, and not feel like everything you post has to be part of some “global conversation” where everyone’s mad and a bunch of trolls and Nazi’s are going to show up…

Here’s to hoping it stays as pleasant it is for while.

Following the theme of my previous piece, City of the Future (1), I continued reaching back to a prior century’s wistful future. Perhaps there’s a timeline where those pesky wars didn’t derail everything and we built big grand things. Or maybe there’s still a chance that our future will be as interesting too. Well, earlier last month the entire sky in New York turned orange from forest fire smoke a long way off. Our future might be closer to blade runner at this point.

Weekly thoughts: 5 things that have inspired my art

I tend to find inspiration in all sorts of things, but here, in no particular order are 5 that have stuck with me for quite some time and in small ways and large inspire the subject matter and style of my pieces.

1. Hudson River School art

Although there are many styles of painting I enjoy, nothing quite hits the spot like a majestic landscape from the Hudson River School and other artists of similar Romantic geological-inspired movements. And nothing quite hits the spot within that spot like an Albert Bierstadt painting of giant f***ing mountains.

It’s wild to me how the locations depicted in these paintings from early days of the United States are probably now within eyeshot of a highway and a strip mall. But these paintings let us forget all that. As far as I’m concerned, these paintings have it all; powerful atmosphere, ethereal lighting, a massive sense of scale, tranquil waters, peaceful fields, and mysterious forests. Somehow it manages to convey the overwhelming power of nature and the soothing comfort of nature all in one painting.

2. Daguerreotypes

There’s something somewhat magical to me about early photography. Between all the noise, the blotchy shadows, and blown out highlights we can see reality come through from an era when barely any part of reality was captured by photograph.

I’ve always liked striving to depict things as realistically as possible in my art, except for the small probably that very little of the stuff I draw actually exists in reality. Since it’s incredibly hard to depict something photo-realistically that doesn’t exist, I thought, well, what if I aimed to draw as well as a really shitty photograph? But rather than settle for a shitty photograph, what if I could capture some of the essence of how early photography captured reality? Imperfect, not perfectly crisp, but clearly recognizable as reality to the eye.

3. Clouds

A lot of my art relates to the sky, and part of the reason for that is I just f***ing love clouds. And I don’t mean, some dinky little wisps of cirrus clouds. No; the only inspiring cloud in my book is a big f***ing cumulonimbus cloud towering as high into the sky as atmospheric physics will physically allow it to. Whenever I find some good massive voluminous clouds, I can’t help but think that something magical needs to live in there. Maybe a city, maybe a ship, maybe a vessel that would violate a ton of FAA regulations. Who wouldn’t want to live there themselves? (Actually, it would probably be incredible dangerous, and besides, there’s no supermarkets there).

4. The concept art of Yoshitaka Amano

I played a lot of video games when I was a kid, and sometimes I still do. In the course of those endeavors, I ended up mesmerized by Yoshitaka Amano’s artwork, most specifically his concept art for games like the Final Fantasy series. The fact that those games often take place in steampunk-inspired worlds makes them fall right in my wheelhouse (and actually they probably helped create my wheelhouse). Amano somehow manages, with what seems like a whirlwind of whimsically abstract flourishes, to create a piece that makes your eye fill in the details. Somehow in all this chaos, I can see a city and I’m not sure how.

5. New York City

Few other cities in the US come close to New York in terms of the quality and quantity of inspirational pre-war architecture. Sadly, many inspiring buildings, including most of the ones in this photo no longer exist, but somewhere in space and time there was a version of New York that remains intact with all this splendor. Fortunately, because this city is just so big, there’s still a huge amount remaining, and you can find virtually any pre-war architectural style here; neoclassical, beaux-arts, neo-gothic, romanesque revival, art nouveau, and of course a massive f**k-ton of art deco.

* * *

So I said I’d share 5 sources of inspiration, right? I mean, I could keep going. There’s definitely at least 6, and maybe even a hundred. I’d better save those for another post though…

This week I’m in the middle of a few incomplete projects, so I’m sharing a piece here I made earlier in the year. In the parlance of classical artists of yore, this piece is an example of me “winging it”. I basically sat down in front of my sketchbook and said “I think I’ll draw some shit with trees”. I browsed Pinterest for an hour to see what it could stir up in the ol’ imagination, and found a photo of some old stone steps in the woods. Surely, I thought, these steps should just keep going up and up and up… What could be up there? Well that was a mystery for another day. I finally had some shit to draw with trees.

This piece was relatively quick to do and I finished it in the course of one night. The big trees were just big smears of graphite powder with a few touches from the old electric eraser to give them some bark. The thing about drawing leaves, is that sometimes when you draw lots of really small things really half-assedly, when you zoom out (or look at it on a phone), the mistakes disappear and it looks much cooler than it does at full size…

Anyway, if you look carefully you might find all sorts of hidden shapes in there. Shapes that might have been old things built long ago by people long gone. Is there treasure there? Probably not. The real treasure, after all, is the health insurance plan you’ll need if you risk life and limb climbing all the way up those stairs.

One thing I learned is that sometimes a simple concept (and a pinch of mystery) will make a great piece. Not everything needs to be a grandiose flying city…

(*but many things should definitely be a grandiose flying city)

Weekly thoughts: where AI art goes from here

One thing I keep wondering is if the next generation will think about AI art the same way we think about innovations from the last couple centuries— from cameras to computers and digital art.  Will it become normalized while we become the old curmudgeons dismissing modern technology?  As much as I want to shake my fist at it and tell it to get off my porch, I know it’ll be hard to avoid.  Especially when we look back at some of the old innovations that have become normal for us…

Back in the 1800’s the invention of photography basically rendered realistic painting obsolete.  What you’d once pay an artist to painstakingly capture with a lifetime of skill could be done by a person with a small machine in a much shorter amount of time.  But while many painters were at first opposed to this new invention, later on it spurred whole new styles of painting, and ignited the art of photography.  (Will AI drive artists into new creative paths too? It’s hard to say. They’d need jobs to do that)

Back in the late 90’s (ahem, 1990’s) when digital art software was just starting to get good, there were some brief debates about whether digital art was “real art”.  After all,“real art” at the time didn’t come with undo buttons or perfect color matching, or copy and paste, or magic wands, etc.  Some things that used to take a lot of manual labor could now be done with the click of a button.  In the fine art world, it took a while for digital art to gain acceptance, and even today it hasn’t really eaten into the fine art market very much. But in the end, digital art did replace traditional art almost completely in some industries—  concept art for film and gaming development, art for marketing and advertising — basically anything commercial where the gains in productivity from digital tools could be the most profitable.  Ironically these are the domains where AI is threatening to take over the most.  

20 years ago cheap stock photography and illustration started becoming a booming online industry.  Cheap illustrations, clip art, and photos of handshakes and awkward smiling models could be bought for fractions of a dollar. Projects that used to pay high prices to photographers for custom shoots, (or to Getty images for high priced licenses) were replaced with vast selections of cheap stock photos. Today these microstock companies are a thriving industry with hundreds of thousands of corporate customers.

Today all of these things— cameras, digital art, stock images, have become normalized.  With each new “innovation” a set of skills that artists earned a living for was de-valued. Over the years, the groups fighting against these innovations dwindled, and people entering the industry today see all these high-tech replacements as commonplace.  

Is “AI art” going to become just as normalized too someday?  

Probably.  But just as digital art didn’t fully supplant traditional art, AI art still has a number of hurdles that may keep it from fully supplanting human-made art.  

• Copyright: We’ve yet to see the legal system fully digest this pickle.  On the AI-development side, we have companies that sucked up vast troves of copyrighted images from all over the internet to build their for-profit image generation tools.  (There’s a lot of businesses that certainly wouldn’t be happy with their media libraries getting harvested for this purpose— we’ve yet to see them move on it legally). On the other end of the pipeline, images generated by AI may not be copyrightable, since they’re not produced by a human, making their use by potential corporate customers rather limited.  

• An insatiable need for more data.  In order to improve their models, AI companies will need ever more images to train on.  While AI aims to replace artists, they’d need an ever-increasing supply of human-made art to continue improving the technology.  That is, the humans whose jobs they plan to take with this tech.  In a way, it’ll be like a snake eating its own tail.  Soon, AI may be choking on art that it generated itself, and it may already be doing so…

• There will be a limit to how good it can get.  Even CGI in films today — while it’s good, it’s still not perfect.  In software development, its often “easy” to get a new technology from 70% perfect to 80% perfect, but its often insurmountably expensive go from 98% perfect to 99%, and effectively economically impossible to reach 100%.  AI will always have its weak points— niche subjects with little training data, or combinations of things it just can’t quite get right.

We’re still in a lot of unknown territory with AI generated images. The only sure trend I see is that AI art will have no real “value” very soon, if it ever did. That is, “art” that is cheap and can be made instantly in great volume will have no worth whatsoever— either to pay for or even to take the time to glance at. Once the internet is flooded with this stuff, it’ll be the human-made art— art made with care, created with inspiration, where the details matter - that’s the art that’ll be valued.

Back in the beginning of the year I did a series of pieces called “Industrial Dreams” where I had riffed on some of the old “cities of the future” that were envisioned in the early 1900’s, such as in the film, Metropolis, and the works of Harvey Wiley Corbett, Hugh Ferriss, Harry M. Pettit, William Robinson Leigh, and others. Back in those days there were all sorts of wild imaginative visions of the future. The skyscraper was new (and wasn’t yet just a boring rectangle), Zeppelins and other airships were the hot new technology allowing us to travel the skies. At the time I expect people were very grumpy about these things, but here in 2023 we can stare back at that stuff with a subtle grunt of appreciation.

Anyway, I had fun making “Industrial Dreams” and wanted to riff on those ideas some more, so this will (hopefully) be the first of a new set focusing on the richness of the city from above in all its messy details and glorious complexity. This one took about 2 weeks to complete, which is on the longer side for me.  And to make things worse (for me) I decided I’m going to make a bigger version of it soon too...  

Weekly thoughts: Inspiring Art Deco

I love weird buildings, especially ones that make great fodder for fantastic cities or surreal structures, and Art Deco architecture from a century ago gave us a lot of them.  

Take the Paramount building here, sitting in the middle of Times Square, (and thankfully still standing today). Its top half is a weird uneven ziggurat, there’s a grand entryway stuck off to the side, a clock tower that you can’t see at all from the street below, plus some extra clocks on each side for good measure that also nobody can see from anywhere reasonable, and it’s topped off with a tiny globe. Who even thinks of putting tiny little globes on top of skyscrapers anymore?

New York City has a ton of Art Deco like this. If you throw a stone in any direction it’ll ricochet off three of them (then you’ll get fined for property damage and likely be punched by the nearest person you hit). Thanks to 1916 zoning laws requiring “setbacks” to let sunlight through, we have a city of weird ziggurats, and thanks to many others from back in those days we get all sorts of cool ornamentation and other quirks (there’s buildings with literal pyramids on their roofs too).

At the other end of Manhattan, sitting in the shadow of One World Trade Center, we have the Barclay-Vesey building, which almost feels like a medieval fortress among the other buildings in the neighborhood. Did the architects go and build a perfectly normal building here? Of course not, they had to do some weird s&!t too. The whole building’s shaped like a rhombus, because that’s what the block was shaped like, which gave that big tower in the middle that little off-kilter angle. Prime location for an evil lair, I’d say. (Spoiler: it’s luxury apartments now)

At the other end of New York State, in the city of Buffalo (a city that was booming in the earlier 20th century when building this great architecture was all the rage) we have one of the largest city hall buildings in the entire country. The entrance looks like a greek temple, and that tower probably could hold a super-villain or two. The west side of the building has vents to catch the wind coming off Lake Erie to power it’s “non-powered” air-conditioning system. This building’s full of all sorts of clever stuff that could give the average steampunk tower a run for it’s money (130+ clocks in the building regulated by a master clock in the basement? Seriously!)

So that’s just a small sample of the weird quirks that Art Deco buildings from the early 20th century gave us. Some of these make me think maybe we weren’t that far off from building those old “cities of the future”. Here’s to hoping the city of our future will bring more intrigue and inspiration.  Or maybe we’ll all be living underwater by then…

Looking for Art Deco architecture inspiration? Checkout my Art Deco Pinterest board.

This week’s artwork

The above piece was the result of 2 years of on and off work that I started in 2007. I made this one in a period where I wanted to get very technical, and wanted to make something big and complicated. So I looked at the general panoply of fantasy art at the time to find the biggest castle I could, and set out to make something bigger (because who doesn’t like a big castle? Nobody, that’s who).

The above version was colorized in photoshop; the original piece was done in graphite; and the original outline for it was a Process (with a capital P there) that managed to bog me down for most of the two aforementioned years. I plotted this whole thing out with architectural side views and top views and wrangled that all into some sort of 2-point perspective system that involved T-squares, triangles, and even a parabola (don’t ask).

At the time, my only presence on the internet was an art website that nobody visited and a DeviantArt account that also nobody visited. This piece, however, somehow made it onto the front page as a “Daily Deviation” which gave it the largest burst of viewers that any of my pieces had gotten until that point.

Although that reception was great, a small thing I took away from this experience was that I never wanted to spend 2 years working a piece ever again. I’ve found that the longer I take to work on a piece, the harder it can be to stay motivated to see it through. (If I spend months on a piece, it’ll really burn my muffins if it doesn’t turn out really good). Last year I set out to challenge myself to make one piece a week, often just winging it, experimenting, and seeing what works. If it doesn’t, then I’ll just make a new piece a week later. I’d say I’ve learned more in a year of doing that than I did in any year prior (but more on that another day…)

Weekly thoughts: Inspiration vs AI

It seems these days that AI-generated images have been sucking a lot of air out of the room (a.k.a Art Twitter). One argument I keep hearing from AI promoters is how AI is just “learning” to create art the same way a human artist learns. They suggest that a computer digesting artwork and generating images is the same as an artist viewing another artists work and then making art of their own. The implication they suggest is that it’s therefore not “theft” when a for-profit corporation harvests millions of pieces of art online to train its AI, because it’s just doing what artists can do.

Of course, this shows no understanding of how an artist works and it also shows little understanding of how AI works. AI can only do what computers have always been good at: consuming data, and producing data. To AI, artwork is just data. It reads pixels of an image, it finds common patterns among them, and if it sees enough of them, say 10000 pictures of a dog, then we can say it “knows” what a dog is. And with that data it can find the common bits between them and generate an image that might statistically be likely to look like an average dog.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know any artist whose process remotely resembles that. Artists aren’t photocopiers, nor do they simply produce some sort of averaged-out version of all the pictures they’ve ever seen. Nobody looks at a thousand still-lifes then makes a still-life that’s just an uncanny mix of them all. The human mind is so much more advanced than that. A person could meet a dog once and make art based on that one encounter. They could make art inspired from many things they’ve only had fleeting glimpses of. A person could string together concepts totally unrelated and make a piece of art from it. An artist might see a single image of something and then make something wildly different in response. To put it bluntly, artists can come up with crazy shit, and that’s what makes artists great.

Another major difference is that AI has no conceptual sense of what’s in the images it’s consumed. To AI it’s just flat, two-dimensional data. It doesn’t know that dogs walk and bark; that they have muscles and skeletons and stomachs that want to eat literally everything; it doesn’t know that they’re alive, that they feel happiness and sadness, and may obey or misbehave; it doesn’t know what it’s like to have a dog for 10 years of your life, and those are things that an artist and not an AI could comprehend and use to inspire a piece of art. To AI, a dog is just a bunch of pixels.

(For the record, I’m a cat person. Never had a dog; don’t know why I started using a dog example, but once I started I had to run with it. Sorry, cats, didn’t mean to offend)

Anyway, anytime someone suggests that image-generating AI is “just doing what artists do”, remember that these programs are just spitting back averaged-out pixel data, and they definitely are not doing any of the actual weird shit that artists really do.

This week’s artwork

This week’s work is a trio of portraits of Marceline, a fantastic artist and model, and an excellent collaborator in pursuit of something gilded with a tinge of “noir”. This set was based on a batch of photo portraits that she self-shot for this drawing series. Although portraits are not my typical oeuvre, I enjoy them precisely because they’re different. They let me finesse my technical skills at realism, they evoke a wider range of emotion, and they give me a chance to work with some cool people too.

How it was made

The signature piece of this trio, shown above, was made on 24x18in. Fabriano heavyweight paper. The backdrop was done with a spreading of graphite powder, and most of Marceline herself was done with a Faber-Castell 14b pencil, which is like the Spinal Tap (“it goes to 11”) of pencils. The result was a range of darkness that I’d expect more from charcoal than graphite. The secret tool for getting the smooth tones on her arm and back was a simple wad of paper towel for blending.

Weekly thoughts: Drawing for realism

Sometime in the mid 2000’s I came across the fantastic work of Armin Mersmann and was blown away at the level of realism that could be achieved with simple graphite on paper. I convinced myself to try my hand at it, and failed miserably. Over the years I tried to get better in small steps on one subject at a time— drawing rocks better, drawing trees better, drawing clouds, etc; and then, finally people.

These days there are a ton of really well done portraits all over Instagram and other sites. In many of these cases a well-done portrait can be created with just a good reference photo and a lot of patience. I have a lot of respect for people that can do that well, because one thing I’ve learned when attempting portraits, is if you go for realism and get things just a little bit wrong, you’ll be riding a bus deep into the uncanny valley without a ticket back.

There are some artists out there who have an incredible ability to look at a subject and translate what they see perfectly through their hand and onto a page. I, however, am not one of those artists. I’ve recently gained a new appreciation for the “grid method” of drawing, and while a few might call it “training wheels”, or a “tool for beginners”, I find it makes an excellent tool for focusing. Half the battle of drawing realistically is just putting the lines in the right place as your eye darts between your paper and your reference (and Instagram, Twitter, and email, of course). When it comes to depicting a person, I find this tool to be much more useful than for other subjects. If you draw a tree slightly cooked, nobody will notice, but if you shift one edge of an eye or a lip, you completely change the expression of a person; and if you alter the angle of a nose or a jawline, you end up drawing a completely different person completely. So, when I’m trying to accurately get a person’s likeness onto paper, I think the grid method is extremely helpful.

There are plenty of artists who could probably teach a lot more about this type of drawing than me. But with each piece I try to make the next one better than the last, so here are a few tips I’ve mostly learned myself in the course of doing this:

• One lesson I learned early on is to draw large - use a literal large sheet of paper - it gives you a bit more freedom to fudge the small details, because when you step back (or look at it on a small phone screen) the mistakes and the stray pencil marks all disappear, and voila, “realism” appears.

• Fingers are such a pain to draw well. Do them wrong and you have 5 small sausages. The subtle shapes of knuckles, the lines of wrinkles, and all the little shadows between them all make a big difference. Same with the highlights and shadows around the edges of fingernails.

• One of the most important skills to figure out that made a big difference to me was the ability to perceive all of the subtle shades of gray between the light and dark parts of a subject. A novice artist may just darken the shaded side and lighten the illuminated bits. But look a bit closer and you see that the shaded side also has light and dark parts and the illuminated side has brighter and darker parts as well. But seeing those shades is only half the battle — the other half is putting them on paper.

• If there’s one thing that I’d want to improve on still, it would be the subtle details in texture, whether its skin or fabric. This again becomes easier when working on a large scale, and then having the patience to fill in the subtle shades and patterns in a way that looks convincing when you zoom out.

The last thing I’ll say is that there is much more artistic freedom to be had when you’re not going for pure realism. For one thing, going for a more stylized or abstract form steers you away from the uncanny valley problem, and the more stylized or abstract the form, the more distinctive and eye-catching your art might be. Maybe that’s what I should be attempting next…

This week’s artwork

Once again I’ve built a vessel that is in no way airworthy and likely violates a ton of FAA regulations. “High Chateau” I’ve called it, as it is high, and bears some resemblance to the residences of old, dead, French aristocrats.

Where the idea came from

As with much of my fantasy architecture I usually blend bits and pieces from a bunch of different sources together. This one has a bit of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, a few windows from the Palais Garnier in Paris, and a few corbels, lamps, a greenhouse, and other accessories that a feverish late-night escapade through Pinterest deposited me with the next day.

Weekly thoughts: Making art with Style

On several occasions I’ve been asked how one can learn to draw “in my style.” After initially being humbled that someone might want to learn to draw like me, it had me thinking, “wtf is my style?” I mean, I look at other artists, and I can clearly see their style. But me? I just start doodling and drawing and out pops a weird hot air balloon or something.

But what is style anyway? How does one develop a style? Can style be taught? Most artists I know just draw/paint/create what comes most naturally to them, often through years of trial and error, some self-taught, some with formal training. The best artists out there often have clear distinctive styles that they can execute consistently. When they create a new piece, it’s immediately recognizable. Personally I’ve found that “style” amounts to many of the quirks that an artist has worked out over years of practice. In the case of the best artists, those quirks happen to be things that work really f$^king well.

At one point in 2021 I started smudging the background of my pieces with graphite powder because I found that a gray backdrop made the highlights pop even more in a piece. I’ve done that fairly consistently ever since. Now I suppose it’s a hallmark of my style. As for whatever else I do, that’s mostly me winging it every time. I go into each piece as an experiment. With each one I might try something I never did before; a subject I never drew before, materials and lighting I’d never played with, an extra level of detail I had ignored previously, etc. Rather than obsess over perfection (which I’ll still do nevertheless) I try to see what works, see what people think of it, and assure myself that someday, maybe I’ll do another version of it just a little bit better.

So, in my case, I expect my style will be ever changing in small and large ways. So, to turn this little rant into something resembling some sage advice: rather than try to copy me, every artist should just work on whatever works for them, and do what feels right to their eye.