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TheTooginator
♂️
[27610936]
[2013-07-24 17:26:08 +0000 UTC]
(United States)
# Statistics
Favourites: 863; Deviations: 299; Watchers: 58
Watching: 978; Pageviews: 15874; Comments Made: 2639; Friends: 978
# About me
I was born in the house my father built.# Comments
Comments: 186
Hey, Tooginator! Just finished an informative article in this week's New Yorker (Sept 3) about color you may like. Titled 'Blue As Can Be', written by Simon Schama, it spotlights the Forbes Collection in the Strauss Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at Harvard University.
Hey, sorry about the color monomania: I remember too well the endless indecision I had at art school when buying oils on a limited budget, not knowing which white to buy and what brand.
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Thanks for the tip! I saw that article in The New Yorker and I said “I have to remember to read this!” - which I immediately forgot when I saw another interesting article. The New Yorker is packed with great articles!
Fortunately, you reminded me, so I’m reading it right now while enjoying some yummy vanilla-raspberry ice cream. Wait! What?? Eeewwww!!
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Thank you, Tooginator, for the inclusion of my illustration of the Spanish proverb in your favorites! As you've probably guessed, this one took awhile to do.
By the way, I've borrowed a new book (for me) of Christopher Moore's, 'Secondhand Souls' from the library. So far, I've enjoyed the first chapter.
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I liked your Spanish Proverb drawing because it took me a few seconds to notice the characters in the orange. It’s a great drawing on its own, but the characters in the orange made it fun and interesting.
Be sure to let me know what you think of “Secondhand Souls” because I haven’t read that - yet. I’ve been reading “Jeeves and Wooster” stories lately, which are fun and historically interesting (to me at least). I like to imagine what pre-Depression Americans must have thought of those stories as the American middle class readers watched their stocks went up and up - until the end of 1929 of course.
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The translation of the Spanish is something like "You are the other half of my orange", so the faces in the orange are the best I could come up with. Since this series of drawing are for a Spanish class here in New Mexico, I'm trying to utilize local locations for backgrounds. For this one I took a foto of my hand holding an orange in our entry looking out to our front yard.
Sorry it took so long to answer - I was up in Denver visiting my Mom for a week and away from my computer. And, I forgot to pack "Secondhand Souls" to read while I was there.
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Now, my turn to recommend a good read: Sacré Bleu, by Christopher Moore. It, too, is about color, and is very informative. I found it at our local library here in Albuquerque. It made me laugh out loud. I think you may enjoy it.
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I was thinking of recommending “Sacré Bleu” to you! I read that book as soon as I saw it in the bookstore because I am a pretty big Christopher Moore fan. That’s the book that got me interested in pigments. I gave the book as a gift to all of my artsy friends and I doubt any of them read it, which is their loss IMHO.
Have you read any other Christopher Moore books? The ones I read were really funny and very creative.
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To complete the loop, I think I was more open to buying 'The Brilliant History...' because I had just finished 'Sacré Bleu'.
No, I haven't read him before, but now I'll check the library system here to see if they have Moore (heh).
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Sorry for the late reply. Since I read your last note about “Sacré Bleu”, I have been thinking about how interesting it is that you had the same reaction I did: pigments are interesting!
I bet that book on pigments owes a lot of its sales to “Sacré Bleu”. Can I recommend a Moore book? “Fool” - it’s a really fun take on King Lear from the point of view of the jester. I am pretty confident you would like it.
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Hey, remarkable coincidence - I just finished 'Serpent of Venice', which has, I surmise, the same protagonist. Witty and scatological dialog, nefarious villains and outrageous story line, I enjoyed it a lot.
My problem with Christopher Moore is that his writing is more fun to read than working on this project I'm doing. And... I want to continue to do the Zooly Challenges. I think my problem here is better time management.
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Wow! I’m glad you mentioned “Serpent of Venice” because I had heard that the character from “Fool” was in a new book, but I forgot! Well, I fixed that - I just ordered “Serpent of Venice”.
I hope I’m not embarrassing myself, but what are the Zooly Challenges? It sounds like an animal-drawing challenge, which you will ace. If that’s what it is, I should get off my derrière and try it. I’ve just been playing with abstracts lately and I need to get back in the drawing game.
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No, you're not embarrassing yourself. The 'Zooly Weekly Art Challenge' is a group on FaceBook that gets a weekly prompt of an animal, generally on Sunday. To join, all you need to do is give me your name or email so I can put it in the 'add member' field. Then, just do a search within FB for 'Zooly Weekly Art Challenge'. There aren't really any rules besides treating each other with consideration and not using the group for rants (political, religious, etc). People are free to post old stuff that they've done years ago, or just a quick sketch; it just needs to be relevant to the prompt. Often, it seems, that when the prompt is a favorite animal of the artist, he/she will post more than one.
I can't guarantee it, of course, but since I've been involved with it, my confidence and skill/technique have improved immeasurably. Besides, I've been having a blast doing it.
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Hey, Tooginator, thanks for the book recommendation! It arrived this morning, and now I've almost finished it. A very readable book. Fascinating.
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Cool! I’m glad you liked it! After reading that book, I was struck by how lucky I am to have access to any color I want at very affordable prices. I don’t even have to prepare the paint.
I enjoyed the stories about how important certain colors and pigments were to ancient cultures.
I think you’ll appreciate this: one of my nephews likes interesting rocks, so I gave him a bag of lapis lazuli rocks from Afghanistan(!) as a Christmas present a few years ago. I told him why those rocks are so special and the story of how people used to have to pay for the rocks (or just the pigment) to be shipped all the way from Afghanistan to Europe, which is why that shade of blue was only used for important (and expensive) paintings up until the 20th century.
I’m really happy you like that book!
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I only have one complaint; it was much too short.
One of the most interesting things to me was that absolutely anything was a possible source for color - rotten shellfish, minuscule bugs, mummies! I couldn't put the book down.
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Thank you, Tooginator, for the favorites on the Mountain Gorilla drawing and the photo of the oldest house! Someday, I want to make the photo into a drawing.
BTW, I ordered the book you recommended.
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Thank you very much!
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Hey, Tooginator, thank you for all the encouragement! I'm gratified. I'd probably still be drawing without the appreciation, but not as well and not as much.
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Excellent! Frankly, I’m surprised and a bit disappointed that you don’t have more people commenting on your work because it clearly takes great skill and time. The problem is that DA has so much to see, even talented artists like you get lost in the volume of submissions.
I don’t know about you, but I’m generally not a fan of digital art because it’s VERY difficult to tell how much true talent the artist has. Sometimes it’s obvious that the artist would be great regardless of the tools he/she uses, but that’s usually the exception.
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Thank you, Tooginator, for including my recent drawings in your favorites! I'm not sure where this recent compulsion to draw is going, but it's getting more enjoyable with each step.
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I think you’re like me - we do this for fun and as a personal challenge. I’m a retired computer programmer, so art is a really fun hobby. I also like making electronic circuits when I’m in the mood.
I really enjoy getting feedback, but my main motivation is fun and seeing the end result of a successful art project. The process itself is very relaxing for me, so that’s a factor.
I enjoy looking at your work to see how you did it. You have a great eye for reproducing what you see, but you also have a bit of Impressionism in your work which makes it even BETTER! Hyper realism is impressive, but it seems “cold” to me. I like how you use color to shade your drawings - instead of using shades of gray. I’m trying to get better at that technique, and your drawings give me good ideas.
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I agree - we have a great deal in common. I'm retired, after 19 years of doing computer graphics for the yellow pages. I bought my first Apple in 1987, taught myself Adobe Illustrator, and went from there.
When I retired, I had been turned onto Deviant Art by a couple of the other designers at work. I started by compiling some of the stuff I had in sketchbooks on dA just to see the reaction I'd get, but also try to self assess. I have to credit the Zooly Art Challenge, last year, with reigniting my creativity; doing a drawing a day somehow freed me from self doubt and my tendency to be hyper critical. It also led to enjoying the process more and seeing each piece as a step on a journey, instead of a product that had to be perfect.
I also agree with your assessment of Hyper Realism. When I first saw the various canvases people were doing, back in the 1970s, I admired the amount of labor involved, but it seemed to me that tediously copying a photograph of a shop window distilled all the personality of the artist out of the piece. I couldn't see the attraction of having one of these on the wall and living with it. Too, I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at that time and in thrall to the Northern European Renaissance paintings I saw there.
About your feeling about digital art: I had an editor of one of the magazines I was doing illustrations for, when I admitted I was getting into computer graphics, tell me that he thought that it was a mistake; that other artists he knew had gone that route and lost touch with the realness of traditional drawing, and their output suffered. He felt that the computer made some things too easy, and opportunities to learn were lost. Looking back, now, I think that he was right.
My Dad had a theory that each tool that you use in producing a piece causes a separation, a distance, between your inspiration and your canvas that reduces its final impact. This admonition was when he gave me his Thayer Chandler air brush, when I had admitted I liked Vargas' work in Playboy, and wanted to try my hand at it.
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Thanks very much, Tooginator, for including my Churro drawing in your favorites! I'm thinking of purchasing some of their wool and needlefelting the pair. The horns are amazing.
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You did a great job capturing his unique features. Your drawing was also a wonderful tribute to a cool actor. I like how Landau decided to take some challenging and interesting roles as he got older (like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood). Landau really showed his excellent acting chops as an older actor.
Again, great work on that drawing!
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Thank you for your kind comments. As you can guessfrom the drawing, I always admired Martin Landau's work.
I had no idea that he had just died in the last day or two. But it gave me the want to watch Ed Wood again...and I think I enjoyed it more this time, I can not imagine anyone else portraying Bela. A great job, although the language was a bit strong, but I'm sure Mr. Landau did his research !!
Thanks a lot for your other favouring, glad you like them.
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Thank you for the watch, the faves and the llama!
My gosh! Thank you again 
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Thank you very much for the deviant watching 
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Спасибо, Олег! Год прошел быстро!
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thanks for ading me to your 
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