Wholly Weak

Yup, that's Old Dive …
It's Holy Week and I can't even work up a good rant against the Godbotherers.
Hey ho.

So instead, I shall do what any gentleman surely would under such circumstances and give the ladies another glimpse of cock.

Here's Gary again.

As it's Holy Week, this time he's posing as "Jesus Having A Bit Of A Lie Down".

Sorry, ladies, but he's married.

I wonder if Jesus was ticklish.
Stuck up there on the cross with his naked feet at eye level I know I'd have been tempted to find out.


Addendum: Katherine has posed some splendidly silly questions today.

Painting With Mud

Hokay … No naked and floppy male genitalia for the girls today.
And no jiggly and perky teen boobies for the boys (dammit).

Today we go painting with mud.
I've not done any oil painting for years, but that's what it always felt like to me; sliding around in slurpy mud. I never really got the hang of it.

Here's one of my old ones: the ruins of St.Benet's Abbey (is there a Saint Benaut?), just down the river from my village.

And a slightly closer view (at least it is if you click on it).

I no longer have the spare time to paint in oils, so I gave up a while back.
But Robyn tells me that painting in acrylics is like oils but that you don't have to wait three weeks for the bloody things to dry enough to overpaint, so I might have a go at those.

Has anyone else tried acrylics?
Lynn? You're a successful painter; you know these things.
Advice, please.

Something For The Lay-dees

Well, this is for Lynn and Mme B and I must say you've both earned it with your lovely compliments yesterday.

As it's Holy Week I suppose posting a picture of someone who looks like Jesus is fairly apt.

Click on him for more detail.

And as Lynn would pout (most fetchingly, no doubt) if I kept his genitalia hidden, here's a quick pen study of Gary with his cock out.

Enjoy.
Hee hee

More Stiffy Trouble

Rich has been running an occasional series of posts about his art classes (and the girl he had a crush on), which are not only excellent in themselves but have the admirable side-effect of taking me right back to university and my own art college days (and a girl I had a crush on).

So I dug around in my studio and found some dusty portfolios (I never throw old crap away) stuffed with my college work and fired up the scanner.
Today I present to you a Monday bonus:
Gratuitous Nudity, a pretty girl and a Dive stiffy embarrassment story (what another one, you ask?) … Yes, another one.

Hokay … Let's hit the swirly effects and head back in time to 1978 (cue Kate Bush singing "Wuthering Heights" and a suddenly slim and hirsute college-boy Dive).

And here we are in life class (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays), where we get to sit and chat with Gary (who drums in a rival band to Dive) while he poses, stark naked, for us to draw.
It's either Gary or Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a lovely, middle-aged woman who always starts each session holding herself in; all firm and slim and upright. But we soon learn to anticipate "the sag" and draw accordingly, her body gradually surrendering to gravity until at the end of the session she actually looks like what we have drawn … What looks to me now like a wonderful, soft, rounded and beautiful middle-aged woman's body but back then just looked saggy and old (sigh).

So now we take a quick sidestep back to school and Dive being in the same class as a certain Louise, for whom he has the unrequited hots …

Are you still with me?
Then you'll have already guessed what happens next.

Sure enough; Elizabeth goes on holiday and we get a stand-in.
We're milling around in the life studio when in walks Louise, all jaunty and "Hi, Dive! How are you?"
"Wow! Louise! Are you joining our class?"
"No. I'm modelling today."
Cue what must have been the most comical expression my face has ever made, which reduces her to a fit of the giggles.

And the next three and a half hours pass chatting and catching up, whilst trying desperately to hide my whopping stiffy.
Sitting nekkid in front of me is a girl with whom I have sat in class, mentally undressing her many times in my spotty teenage schooldays.

Of course, Louise knows full well how I feel - and the trouser mayhem I am suffering - and flirts outrageously.

Anyhoo … This is my favourite of the half-dozen poses from that morning, because it actually looks like her.
And because moving round to get her in profile meant that she couldn't keep catching my eye and grinning and staring at my crotch, so I could actually concentrate on drawing her.
Click on the pic for more detailed perky teen … er …

After class we shared lunch in the refectory and had a damned good laugh about it all.
But my feelings remained - inevitably - unrequited so we just stayed on chatting terms.
And she never came back to life class, no matter how much I tried to talk Elizabeth into taking another break.

I wonder where she is now.
And if she's as saggy as me …
Sigh …

Robyn's Art Circle Pt.2

I thought I'd do something suitably seasonal for today's Art Circle post, so I tried making an autumnal-looking Japanese maple and drooping it over some water.

Trees are a bugger to make in 3D, but tremendously satisfying when you get them right.
Water's a lot easier.
If you haven't got a programme that makes good water, you just get a Photoshop airbrush with a very fuzzy edge and make some splodgy patterns like waves seen from above in black and white. You can save these as a mask and use it in your 3D programme as an alpha channel mask to create your wave pattern. Then mess about with bump mapping to get the wave heights.

This water's a very simple reflective one with a slight pinky-orange specular tint to offset the blue sky where it reflects the broken cloud I put up there.

You can make water as murky as you like. I wanted this one to be very transparent so you can see the lake bottom where the tree shades it (click on the detail below for a bigger view).
I gave it quite a high refractive index though, to blur the bottom a bit and make it look a bit more realistic.


Sadly, I really enjoy doing this type of thing. I should be out chatting up girls and trying to get my life back, but yesterday afternoon I sat tweaking parameters until my 3D water made me go "Oooh".

Then I went out to a party and totally failed to chat anyone up, but more of that later …

Robyn's Art Circle Pt.1

Robyn has been posting her lovely watercolours and has suggested that we all post examples of our own artworks to form a little art circle.

I'm attempting - so far with little success - to photograph my oil paintings and drawings (they are way to big to scan).
Until I figure out how to do that properly, I'll post some of the things I make while dicking around in 3D programmes.

Some of you will already have seen the stuff I do for a living. To get those results requires a lot of failed experiments.
These start off as felt pen sketches, then get worked up on the Mac into the kind of stuff you see here. Then the real fun begins.
Making the actual models in 3D is only half the battle. Getting light, textures, water, glass, metals, reflections, etc. right takes lots and lots of time and not a little jumping up and down and swearing.

These are a couple of the experiments I did a few years back on "how to get water right in 3D". It's pretty easy in most 3D programmes to make spaceships and sci-fi stuff and crap like that, but to make something which can fool the eye into thinking it is real is frustratingly difficult.


This one was just a simple exercise in trying to balance reflections, refraction, light on the water and transparency.


And this one was trying to get still water right, while experimenting with rock textures.


The things I really like doing in 3D are abstracts. This one was a series of geometric shapes made from glass and metal which I tortured for a bit, then shone coloured lights onto (hey, it was a rainy weekend). The result reminds me of the generators on "Forbidden Planet".

I'll try to dig up something more adventurous later (most of this stuff is scattered across several old computers with none too helpful numbers instead of titles … I've always been crap at filing).