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Showing posts with label David Hockney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Hockney. Show all posts
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
More on Hockney's Pawings
A couple days after making a post about getting my sea legs with iPhone's Brushes app, a really good article about David Hockney's iPhone paintings showed up in my mailbox, via the New York Review of Books. The article is also online, and I highly recommend giving it a read (although there is one piece of genuine misinformation in it: namely, that you can't use a stylus with the app. It's interesting info that Hockney exclusively uses his thumb to paint on the iPhone, but the pogo stylus works just fine).
One amusing detail from the article is the author's equivocal language when it comes to describing the act of digital painting:
At first glance, I thought this was a ridiculous hangup, but in thinking it over, "Brushes" really does blur the distinction between drawing and painting. Maybe it'd make sense to hybridize the words: "dainting" or "pawing," the latter being especially suitable for those who use their thumbs.
At any rate, the author of the article, Lawrence Weschler, displays a nice sensitivity to the technical aspects of working with the iPhone -- the way the black screen can function as a looking glass, and the appeal of the screen's self-illumination. The self-illumination makes the screen a natural for sketching in the dark, opening up possibilities for sketching at dawn or dusk (or in the dead of night). The flip side, however, is that full sunlight (which is a boon to paper or canvas) presents problems of reflection on the glass. I actually tried to make a picture of the beach at Sand Harbor one day, and found it fairly impossible to make headway against the glare on the screen.
Hockney, as usual, makes for a lively source of quotes. It's funny that he doesn't like the new version of Brushes, "Brushes 2" -- I haven't yet tried it out myself, but I'm kind of dying to, since it has layers, something I was really aching for in the original version. I don't know if he's just being cantankerous, but you have to love his explanation that he's not actually painting on his phone: "it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad."
I forgot, in my last couple postings on Brushes, to post a link to the Flickr Brushes group, which has a wide variety of art made with the app. There's a lot of attractive work being posted there. Three participating artists whose work I've enjoyed are:
José Carlos Lollo
fhierro (from Madrid)
Fabric Lenny
One amusing detail from the article is the author's equivocal language when it comes to describing the act of digital painting:
...Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it's not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device's screen...
At first glance, I thought this was a ridiculous hangup, but in thinking it over, "Brushes" really does blur the distinction between drawing and painting. Maybe it'd make sense to hybridize the words: "dainting" or "pawing," the latter being especially suitable for those who use their thumbs.
At any rate, the author of the article, Lawrence Weschler, displays a nice sensitivity to the technical aspects of working with the iPhone -- the way the black screen can function as a looking glass, and the appeal of the screen's self-illumination. The self-illumination makes the screen a natural for sketching in the dark, opening up possibilities for sketching at dawn or dusk (or in the dead of night). The flip side, however, is that full sunlight (which is a boon to paper or canvas) presents problems of reflection on the glass. I actually tried to make a picture of the beach at Sand Harbor one day, and found it fairly impossible to make headway against the glare on the screen.
Hockney, as usual, makes for a lively source of quotes. It's funny that he doesn't like the new version of Brushes, "Brushes 2" -- I haven't yet tried it out myself, but I'm kind of dying to, since it has layers, something I was really aching for in the original version. I don't know if he's just being cantankerous, but you have to love his explanation that he's not actually painting on his phone: "it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad."
I forgot, in my last couple postings on Brushes, to post a link to the Flickr Brushes group, which has a wide variety of art made with the app. There's a lot of attractive work being posted there. Three participating artists whose work I've enjoyed are:
José Carlos Lollo
fhierro (from Madrid)
Fabric Lenny
Monday, October 5, 2009
iPhone Brushes: Sketches and Trials
This summer, I made a short blog post about the iPhone app "Brushes," which David Hockney was using to make morning sketches, and which Jorge Colombo had used to paint a cover for the New Yorker (the New Yorker's website keeps a blog titled "Finger Painting" where Colombo continues to post his iPhone paintings). Since then, I got an iPhone, mostly because I was sick of suffering a barely-functioning cell phone for the past year or so -- and partly because I wanted to try "brushes" out for myself.
These are my first few attempts -- painting with my finger on the screen. I found it really hard to control -- I'm used to drawing with a pencil, not fingerpainting. I tried using thin lines for the pic of my cat, trying to build little nests out of my scribbling -- then trying to go for some blending effects with wider brushes for the face below. I didn't mind the smeary look of the face, but the lack of control was getting frustrating. There are folks who can make amazing Brushes paintings with their fingers -- youtube has a bunch of clips -- but I ain't one of them.
At that point, I decided to spring for a stylus, and ended up getting a Pogo Stylus. That was a lot more comfortable to use -- it felt more like drawing. It's funny that using a stick feels like a more intimate and controlled experience than using my fingers, but there you have it. Sometimes the "extensions of man" really do supersede your actual appendages.
Finally, in the Reno airport, things started to click. I had a few faces to pick from, and enough time to worry them into something. You can actually export quicktime movies of your drawing process -- below are movies of two airport faces. The first was quick & loose, the second one I sketched out in the airport, then finished on the flight -- it took me the better part of a trip to San Diego. You can see me figure out the guy needs an ear at the last second. With some judicious editing, you could actually do a William Kentridge-style animation right on your iPhone.
I've also been enjoying the camera on the phone. I like that it's so susceptible to motion -- you can get some nice washy effects from it if you train yourself have have an unsteady hand.
These are my first few attempts -- painting with my finger on the screen. I found it really hard to control -- I'm used to drawing with a pencil, not fingerpainting. I tried using thin lines for the pic of my cat, trying to build little nests out of my scribbling -- then trying to go for some blending effects with wider brushes for the face below. I didn't mind the smeary look of the face, but the lack of control was getting frustrating. There are folks who can make amazing Brushes paintings with their fingers -- youtube has a bunch of clips -- but I ain't one of them.
At that point, I decided to spring for a stylus, and ended up getting a Pogo Stylus. That was a lot more comfortable to use -- it felt more like drawing. It's funny that using a stick feels like a more intimate and controlled experience than using my fingers, but there you have it. Sometimes the "extensions of man" really do supersede your actual appendages.
Finally, in the Reno airport, things started to click. I had a few faces to pick from, and enough time to worry them into something. You can actually export quicktime movies of your drawing process -- below are movies of two airport faces. The first was quick & loose, the second one I sketched out in the airport, then finished on the flight -- it took me the better part of a trip to San Diego. You can see me figure out the guy needs an ear at the last second. With some judicious editing, you could actually do a William Kentridge-style animation right on your iPhone.
I've also been enjoying the camera on the phone. I like that it's so susceptible to motion -- you can get some nice washy effects from it if you train yourself have have an unsteady hand.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Hockney iPhone Paintings
David Hockney has been using the iPhone "Brushes" app to make morning sketches. Three of those sketches are available for download for the next couple days, as a tie-in with a BBC documentary on Hockney, here.
A recent New Yorker cover was also painted with "Brushes" (Chuck Levitan was kind enough to hep me to that fact via email a few weeks ago) -- visit the "Brushes" link above for more info.
A recent New Yorker cover was also painted with "Brushes" (Chuck Levitan was kind enough to hep me to that fact via email a few weeks ago) -- visit the "Brushes" link above for more info.
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