Mirror image ~ egami rorriM Intensity

One useful tactic to check if your drawing is proportionate and an overall solid drawing is to mirror your image. Flip and rotate your canvas or see it backwards or upside down to see if there are any distortions in your artwork. If there are any fix them and learn from your mistakes or miscalculations. Or just leave it be if you want.

Traditional and Digital artists alike use this technique to determine is something truly off in their drawing.

In Photoshop and Photoshop I have the keyboard shortcut set to

Ctrl-Shift -H for Horizontal
and
Ctrl-shift- V for vertical.
It is set on my both my wacom tablet keys.
Use whatever combination works for you.

I drew a character with almost the same silouette before but the character, personality and persona is different. Nobody will know until its done

Started painting but no finish yet.

Flipped version I still need to fix. Notice how
the cheek on the left doesn't seem proportionate.

A few weeks ago this lady although she was over 80 she sat there quietly and practically smiled the entire time. Which is rare and difficult to do whether it is a fake or natural smile. When I modeled people were like smile dangit! She had such a calm powerful aura of a woman who lived her live with no regrets and anger and painted whenever she could. It was a struggle at one time but she made it through. I felt honored to be in her presence and learn about this delightful stranger in a single 3 hour session.

So with this other drawing the backwards woman I remembered I painted her before with greens and reds because she had a reddish tone to her skin and I wanted to play with interesting colors. In a way she was tough and had an edgy intensity as well as being a female firefighter that was on call to travel anywhere for months except the winter.

I did this portrait drawing the other day. I thought it was a pretty decent drawing but something was off and bothered me and I could not pin point it. My mentor Gramps said it was a fine drawing. Normally he doesn't sugar coat my critiques and is brutally honest and saying something is nice means a lot. At a quick glance he didn't see anything.

I didn't think much of anything and kept wondering about it until when I was carrying the canvas outside to leave, I realized when the sun shone through the other side of the canvas the drawing looked distorted. This time during the drawing session I was so focused and in the zone I forgot to flip the image around and the mirrored version of the drawing and realized what I was lacking. After seeing the reverse I can pinpoint issues I had on the non-mirrored version.

One time I was speaking to Sherrie McGraw and she noted one of her favorite models Jf was although he had a huge pot belly, thin muscular legs and he had big bold strong arms because he is a rancher.

No. 16 by Mark Rothko

To be honest I do get upset, cranky and highly emotional maybe too seriously when I don't want to go as far as to say fake artists or shall I say posers? Whom just throw paint around with no emotion or intention to their artwork. Like for example Mark Rothko he was one of the spear heads of the 1950's abstract expressionist movement. Rothko did paint colors but as he painted his huge wall sized canvas was to make one feel the color and be overwhelmed by the scale and size of his ginormous pieces and break the predictability of adding another complimentary or another random color to make people think of why he placed that stroke at where he placed it. There are so many rip off of Rothko its ridiculous and others do not even know who they are copying from. Respect your art history.

For me I paint because it is a way to express myself. It was a sublimation technique for my rocky childhood years and when I was young that I didn't speak much and didn't express myself and kept everything bottled up internally. I feel my paintings can speak louder than what I can ever can say in words or in volume level. I paint my life story and what I see everyday that I find fascinating and what I need to show others. That is my mission statement.

Just because I'm proud of this and haven't received a critique yet.
Last weekend I was working on how to UV map a 3d box. Used photoshop to put the textures together and had to import and wrap it back to Maya. At first people describe it as a mundane task but after the learning curve it wasn't bad. I wanted to make a wet box look. I don't know how to manipulate shapes to well in Maya yet. I kept on thinking about Metal Gear Solid and the game's use of boxes.