I fancy myself a Linux aficionado. I also like The Gimp. Lemme set something straight – The Gimp is like Photoshop but doesn’t seek to replace Photoshop.

Lemme set something else straight: I used The Gimp in a graphic design class that required Photoshop. And I got an A in the class and the instructor (and everyone else) was none the wiser.

Now that I got that out of the way, I have to say that about 9 months ago I discovered that The Gimp had brushes, and that was the way to do the best stuff. Forget importing images and tweaking them – brushes have it down pat! So I messed around and my first image was a halloween drink menu for my wife (she’s a private bartender when she’s not in nursing school).

I got a new laptop at work so I had to reinstall my apps… along with The Gimp, obviously… so here’s what I did today after grabbing all the new brushes I wanted.

I’ve been eager to paint again but my time has been consumed with my main job at a Fortune 100 company, with my side job working for my mother-in-law, with my side job as the CIO of a startup with my Navy buddies, and, finally, as a painter. I’m pretty fucking busy, to say the least, but what I really want to do out of all this is to make art. So today was slow at work… and I used the time to do this. Not a total waste of time, mind you, because I use The Gimp all the time to whip out a quick graphic (logo, banner, icon, etc.) at work, so I do need The Gimp up and running well so I’m ready when called on, but the image started as I was playing with my new brushes and sorta blossomed from there. You artist types know what I’m talkin’ about. Dig.

So to counteract that, I’m doing some drawing basics – copying Loomis drawings using his technique. Not my favorite technique, but a good technique nonetheless. And good to put charcoal to paper again. I’m dating them so I can see the progression (if I do this more than a few days in a row).

But I’m really no good at copying drawings that aren’t real people. I’m flat-out terrible, in fact. I’d love to get the Bargue book – but it’s a cool hundred bucks. Not in the cards for the time being.

So, in the mean time, I’m still here, I’m still drawing, trying to make it every single day, even though that ends up being 10pm or later. If you want it badly enough, you’ll endure. Or you’ll delay by doing anything but what you should be doing because your last painting was successful. And that sucks.

Some notes: I realize that I’ve never done an Asian portrait before. I made this girl look caucasian. She’s Indian (East Indian, not Native American).

Her glasses are crooked or her eyes aren’t on an even plane. I’m not sure which. I’ll have to measure a few more times to be sure what it is. Also, her mouth has a grin/smile thing going on that I didn’t capture here that well. And her neck is darker than what I have. My stump did more erasing than blending. And I need to get the direction of the head correct – she sort of looks like her head is turned a bit but sort of doesn’t look like it. Her nose is off-center if her head isn’t turned. I might take a creative license here and do it how I think it looks best. It isn’t, after all, a commissioned portrait – and Karin Jurick (it’s her site!) said to have fun with it. Well. Um. Fun, here I come!

But I did get to do a charcoal on toned paper with both black and white charcoal. Which I’ve never actually done before. And I really like the effect – it gives a realistic glow to the image.

I’m going to take my study and overlay it to the original image in The GIMP (Photoshop alternative for Linux) and see where I went wrong. I did do this while watching about 4 episodes of The Office. It took me about an hour and that hour went by really quickly. So it goes.

Sometimes I just look at them in The GIMP. Sometimes I digitally manipulate them – increase brightness, contrast. Sometimes I blur them so I can see the masses better.

Today, I applied a GIMPressionist filter to simplify the image down to color swatches.

So you get the idea – it breaks down the colors. I also spent about a half hour using the “eyedropper” tool in The GIMP to pull out colors. I’m ALWAYS amazed – “Really, that’s the right color?” I ask myself. Sure enough, if you isolate it, it’s right. But looking at the picture as a whole, you don’t see that. The color swatches you see with this filter actually help quite a bit – you can see what looks like detail but it’s actually very washed out. And I can see that I need a traditional portrait palette, so it helped me decide on:

• Cad Yellow Light
• Yellow Ochre
• Cad Red Medium (not normally on my palette)
• Alizarin Crimson
• Burnt Sienna
• Burnt Umber
• French Ultramarine
• Viridian Green (yes, this is a new color to my palette)
• Ivory Black (okay, I’m mixing this from Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna)
• Titanium White

**NOTE** Some important stuff – no white in her eyes. All greys. Don’t believe what your noggin’ tells ya. There’s actually NO pure white on this whatsoever. Though I’ll probably make the brightest brights from straight-from-the-tube Titanium White.  I bumped up the contrast so there’s a wide range of values here. Probably 1-10, though I’ll likely simplify the values and not quite use all 10 of ‘em. Or I’ll wait for the hot whisper in my ear as I’m painting it to tell me what to do. Yeah. That’ll do.

I’d like to do a value study – I’ve already desaturated the image digitally so I can see what’s to be expected. I’ll probably spend a LOT of time getting the landmarks place correctly – pupils, nostrils, corners of mouth. Once those are in, I can fudge the livin’ shit out of it and it’ll still look decent.

Above all, I’m scared that I’ll fuck this up. I don’t know why. I just have high expectations for myself and I end up convincing myself that I’m never going to achieve the vision I have for this piece. But at least I *have* a vision, so that’s something most people never get to.

I might have to take my advice again – break the toy. I should trademark that shit.

Seriously, though, I’m probably going to have to do a few. I haven’t painted a serious portrait in years. Except my 5 self-portraits, which I still have to finish #5 (my mother-in-law told me to leave it as-is and I’m seriously considering that – talk about knowing when to stop painting!). But those weren’t stuff that I’d do on commission. They were revealing, personal inquiries into myself. They told me stories and slapped me around like a Nancy-boy when I deserved it. They were friends, except when they weren’t. They were trysts in the night. They were harlots and she-devils and succubi come to tempt my flesh.

They won.

But enough about me. Now to grab the charcoal and work up some sketches for the DSFDF challenge/swap/skull basher.

Update: here’s the picture I’m painting. I hesitate to post this because now I’m on the hook for a likeness. Ouch.

But in the spirit of Art Every Day Month, you don’ t have to actually do something every day, so I watched the rest of the movie, “The Cool Kids,” about art in the 70s in southern California while the world was going stark raving mad over the New York gallery scene. It was a good movie and I always love seeing people explain their breakthroughs as mere epiphanies brought about from just plain working at their art – like the guy that reduced his paintings to simple horizontal lines over a solid color because “everything either contributes or takes away from the painting.”

I love those moments. Just wish they’d happen to me more! But I suppose they will if I keep at it.

Today’s gonna be another hard day for Art Every Day Month – I had some cleaning to do, some errands to run, and a party to go to later (which is when I’m usually painting). So I may not get the chance to work on one of the 4 canvases I have prepped. Then again, I might. I’ve got some other ideas I’m forming, some themes.

One such theme is challenging people. I’ve got this Atheist group at work and I’m a pretty vocal member. One of the things I’ve been talking about recently is surrounding the arts and whether the government should sponsor them – and since the government DOES sponsor them (the NEA, et al.), should the government sponsor such things as Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” I say that if you’re going to do it, go all the way. Art is SUPPOSED to make you think, make you question.

Then I thought… “Hmm, does MY art make you think or make you question your beliefs?” No, not really. Sometimes, maybe, but not always. I just make most of my stuff intuitively and, moreso lately, just let myself go with whatever’s in my head at the time and let the artwork speak to me as it’s in the process of being created.

Now that I think of it, my old manager might be at the party tonight and her husband, apparently, has been taking painting classes and getting into art. If he’s there, I’ll definitely have to drag him aside and bend his ear. Ed, you should hope I don’t drink too much or you’ll never get me to shut up!

There’s a powerful moment when I ride my motorcycle, when the man-machine connection swells up and washes it all away, when I am. When I just fucking am. I arrive and put on the mask. I reject this.

There’s a part of me that does it because I must. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to. There’s a part of you that I see and I think as I narrow my eyes at you, “Liar.” There’s an inner monologue that just won’t quit. There’s a little bit of it that I wish I could just turn off. The nag chooses me and I begin to melt into the mould. I reject this.

I look across and see the danger and the white triangle consumes my thoughts. I push it down. I reject it. I reject this.

I see what you’re doing. I hear it in your voice but I go on like I didn’t notice. I see the sacred path unfolding. I hear the “musts” and “shouldn’ts” and I hear you whisper, “Conform.” I reject this.

The fire burns cleanly when it’s hot. But looks can be deceiving. That’s why, just when you think you’ve got your shit figured out, that god-forsaken deck of cards comes tumbling down around you.

Only thing is, most of the time, for all your stalwart appearances, nobody notices. You quietly control the countenance. Just enough so you’re allowed to be alone in your inner fire. Just enough so it’s only you that knows you’re falling.

Those are the words I said back in 1987, my freshman year of high school, to my guidance counselor. I was 13 years old. He was a dull-looking man with pale skin, well-trimmed beard, short, black hair, and a glass eye. I don’t remember his name but I do remember that glass eye.

I wonder if glass eyes have gotten any better since then?

I was asked what I want to do “when I grow up” as a way of mapping out the classes I should take in high school. I ended up taking a LOT of art classes. I think that sometimes Mrs. Hammerman really disliked me but couldn’t do much about it because I was her little star pupil (much to my chagrin – I didn’t really like the attention, which made it all that much easier for me to push her buttons). In my senior year I had 2 study halls and always managed to get a pass to go paint. I was in Painting II and Directed Study, which was where I painted some more.

I would stand there in my backwards, oversized button-up shirt, Walkman on, and paint.

And, boy, did I love it.

Things went downhill after high school – the military left me bereft of art opportunities and I had built up a nice salary and a corresponding lifestyle by the time I left the military 8 years later.

Then I settled in and put the dream on ice.

Then I started to write out my ramblings and ideas on Facebook last year. As more and more people joined, I got more and more heat about it, and I eventually stopped. Now I’ll still write but I’ll do it on a scrap of paper that will promptly make its way to the recycle bin. My ramblings haven’t stopped, I’ve only stopped sharing them.

However, what I really wanted to untap was the artistic flow that I had stopped up all those years ago. Gone were my lame excuses. It was time. I STILL wanted to be an artist. I still WANT to be an artist. I AM an artist.

So I dove in one September night and painted a picture, Summers End. I was hooked.

It’s been just shy of 2 months and I’ve completed a decent number of paintings.

I work at a Fortune 500 company. I can’t say I hate it, because I don’t, but it’s mostly dull but mostly pays the bills. I’ve been coming to a slow realization as I read Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal” and reading Seth Godin and catching up to successful artists on Twitter that I’m a wage slave. I can’t quit my job. I can’t stop working today. I’m a slave to it. And a deep, dark loathing bubbles up inside of me to even type out those words. This isn’t who I was supposed to be.

So what should I do?

I should be who I’m supposed to be. It seems pretty obvious, but, like all things that seem easy and obvious, it’s all-at-once difficult and simple. It’s its own paradox.

I will break out and continue with my themes. I will capture the fleeting thoughts and ideas on my blog, on scraps of paper (that I’ll keep instead of making them grist for the 80% post-consumer waste mill), and on the voice recorder in my cell phone. I will continue to draw, the watch inspirational art movies (I just watched “Helvetica” and I could really relate to the guy that said “bad taste is ubiquitous”), I will continue to PUSH myself.

Sometimes I have an idea and I’m afraid I can’t reach that one quite yet. Sometimes I paint total crap and share it, anyway. Sometimes I see myself through perspective of dissociation, sometimes I sketch it. I have some ideas that I pursue and they become impractical. I have some feelings I forget before the shower is over. I have drawings in canvas where I’ve lost the muse; I have others where I’m afraid to destroy the drawing with paint.

Above all these things, though, I have a goal: I want to be an artist.