Inspired by Leibowitz

Yesterday I posted an image under this title but almost as soon as I had done this I deleted the image from Flickr - it just didn't seem right. After sleeping on it and then playing around with the image this morning I produced something much more powerful. It is based on a photo Leibowitz took of herself whilst she was pregnant but the more I look at this the more I keep thinking - Jenny Saville - not only the subject matter but the powerful use of shades of red.

I also appear to have given the face a masculine feel to it which might hark back to the contraception campaign image from the 70's. However, as I was searching for that image I also realised that there was a transexual who recently was a bit of a media darling as he was pregnant and this made me realise that I was also aware of that as well.

In short inspiration comes from all sorts of places and at times it is very difficult to attribute one source over any other. One final thought. This is a digital painting and has a luminosity as a result of that - I'm not sure ti would have the same impact if it wasn't back lit.

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Learning to paint

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Inspired by Leibovitz

These two paintings are based on photos created by Annie Leibovitz. Now Leibovitz has a great eye for an image but it is debatable whether she is one of the greats of photography. As for these two paintings I am trying to explore a much looser style where tone and colour have a much greater importance than total accuracy. I'm pleased with the results.

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Lakeside Art Centre, Nottingham

Simon Marchini 

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Nobody at all

One of the joys of painting on the iPad is that you can just sit down and dawn until some interesting face appears without all the mess. I think I'll call this man Erasmus.

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iPad thumb and finger

The things you doodle whilst watching a repeat of House...

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Flooding at Ratcliffe POwer Station

We really have had an awful lot of rain over the past few days.   I captured this image on the way back from Nottingham this afternoon.  I suppose some of the water here may just have been the same water I had stood in last Saturday or more likely not. 

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Still flooding

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The flood waters are going down

Whilst other parts of the country are still suffering from flooding at least around here the water is going down.  This photo was captured on Saturday and both rivers are at least 2 metres above their normal level.

Simon Marchini 

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A bit black dog - Pope Innocent the Fry

One of those days today - nothing for it but sit back and just relax. What better way than to make a drawing from something off the tele - in this case Stephen Fry posing as pope Innocent the third. I used pens for this so there was no real opportunity to correct anything. This makes you think about every mark you make.

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A well known musician

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Hare Doodle

I don't what it is about hares but I find them fascinating - perhaps it has something to do with my interest in pre historic british culture.  Anyway, I knocked this little doodle up this morning just for the heck of it. 

Simon Marchini 

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The Night Shift

One last photo before bed...it has been an exhausting day.

Simon Marchini 

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Cold Feet

There reaches a point in one's life when you realise that you are, perhaps, not quite as young as you once thought.  Well I might just have reached on of these points this morning.  Let me set the scene.  I live above the main flood plain for Leicester which floods from time to time.  So as I'm on a bit of a photo bender at the moment I thought wouldn't it be a great idea to record the flooding.

So far so good.   However, as I was wading through the cold water I suddenly realised that one of my socks in my wellies had come off and I was in fact walking through the water in a bare foot as wellies have virtually no insulating properties.  Now in the past I would have shrugged this off but today I suddenly felt a cold shudder running through my body.  For the first time I thought to myself... "..why the hell am I doing this?..."   In the past I have happily stood at the bottom of a dock slowly sinking into the mud to take photos of eider duck in the middle of one of the coldest January's in recent history and I didn't feel the cold.  Today I did.  I didn't stop but after this every step made me feel colder and colder.   Oh the joys of getting old!

Simon Marchini 

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Battling with the technology

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Inspired by the tele

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I was feeling complicated

Just trying different things when using Brushes - I'm still having difficulty getting a real likeness whilst using Brushes - so this is just a man.

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Face

Another digital doodle.  Now I think it is worth while explaining how this created.  I spent and hour or so doodling line after line on Photoshop.  Many of the lines were incorrect but I decided to not alter anything.  As a result this isn't really the likeness it might have been but that doesn't matter as this was more about the free flowing line making.  In the end I couldn't resist using colour washes to add a little emphasis to try and correct some of the worst mistakes I made.

Simon Marchini 

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iPhonegraphy Book

Time for scratching my head - I'm in the process of creating a new book.  It has been two years since I published a collection of my iPhonegraphs so over the next week or so I will be wrangling something together.  It can be very frustrating for numerous reasons but ultimately very rewarding.

Simon Marchini 

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Ship in a Bottle

Simon Marchini 

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Reflections on Ansel Adams

Well I have slept on the Ansel Adams exhibition at the National Maritime Museum and I feel just the same as I did when I posted my first thoughts yesterday.  I think the main reason for this is that the idea behind the exhibition didn't work for me.  That doesn't distract from the works at all or for that matter the way that they were displayed, just the exhibition curation.  I suspect it might have been just to see the works on their own, although that would probably not have been as accesible as the way that the exhibition was put together.  So in the end I guess the exhibition is very much is in the eye of the beholder - it was just that this beholder was left somewhat cold. 

Simon Marchini 

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Iphoneography

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Waiting for the tube

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Blakemore and Adams

First impressions are always the worst - but here goes - for me the Adams exhibition is a little disappointing. This does not mean the works are in anyway below par, but rather familiarity breads contempt not helped by commentary that wasn't that interesting.

I've just re read the last and I think that is harsh but it is the way I feel at the moment. However one link I hadn't made before but is obvious is the similarity between adam's work and John Blakemore. I need to think about this a bit more. I'm on line at:

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Preparing for the Ansel Adams exhibition

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One final one from the archives

Simon Marchini 

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One from the achieves

Simon Marchini 

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The one that got away

This was supposed to be a very well known and beloved TV presenter, no not Jimmy Saville, but it got away from me. However, it is still a really interesting face so overall I'm quite pleased. To me it looks like a cross between Tom Berlinger and John Noble - not the person it should be.

By the way the iPad spellcheck wants to correct Savile with servile - interesting!

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Ideas

It is amazing how ideas spark ideas.  Having spent another hour or so wondering through the vast expression of human creativity on the internet more ideas have come flooding into my head.  This is just a quick experiment as to how I could combine my two creative strands of drawing with digital image manipulation.  Hardly earth shattering stuff I know, and if truth be known I have been doing this for some while on my iPad.  This time, however, I have decided to try to use my full blown version of Photoshop CS6.  I wonder were this will lead me? 

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Lifted or who to loose even more hair

Well that was a way to spend a day.   I have been working on some photographic images over the past couple of days and I thought it would be fun to make a little video of them - after all isn't that what iMovie was for?  Well maybe but it has taken me most of the day to sort it out to something I'm starting to be satisfied with.

So silly me believed that it was going to be a doddle - just download the images into iMovie - no problem.  Only there was a problem - all my images are managed in Lightroom so I don't touch iPhoto which, of course, is where iMovie looks for the images.  It took me a while to realise I could just drag and drop the images into iMovie.   The next problem was getting my head around the iMovie interface.  I have very little experience with video editing - other than Windows movie maker and some Adobe video editing express package I once owned.  Both of these packages seemed to be more intuitive than the iMovie interface.  In the end I had to start reading the help pages which is usually a bad sign.  To be fair the tutorial videos were really quite helpful but it meant further delays.

Then it was time to choose the music.   I had by chance stumbled across Lifted by the Lighthouse Family when I was trying to make a simple package in Lightroom and this seemed the best tune for my needs.  It loaded easily into iMovies and away I went or would have done if I could get the images to sync with the music.  More fiddling around, I'm still not sure I truly know how to do this which was so simple in Windows Movie Maker.  Anyway, after more fettling around I managed to get the job done and I have to say I'm quite pleased with the results given the contraints until, that is, I came to view it on my iPad.  Whatever compression system is used to compress/configure the file so that it can run on the iPad has made a real mess of the images.

So what have I learnt?   Well first of all I don't think that iMovies is as user friendly as Apple tries to make, no surprise there.  Second, whilst the final result is pleasing it is a lot of hard work to try and make it look in anyway like I wanted.  Thirdly, if you are going to make a movie out of stills then capture/make the stills with this in mind rather than trying to shoe horn images made for all different purpose - it makes things so much easier.  And of course the final thing is I can't publish this to my Facebook, web site, blog etc because I have used copyright music, which I know doesn't seem to bother too many other people but it does me.

Simon Marchini 

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Almost Square

Even my drawings are turning square - almost

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Going all square

There was a time when being square meant that you were using a Hasselblad.  Of course in our digital world this is nonsense - apart from I believe that the Hasselblad digital cameras still produce a 'square' digital image.  I know this is a bit of a nonsense but there we go.  Anyway, a couple of days ago I read something about the square neg of a 'Blad' and it seems to have stuck in my mind.  I used to produce iPhonographs in this format but then I upgraded and they didn't seem the same.  Anyway the square is back and I am enjoying the discipline of trying to make an interesting image in  the square.

Simon Marchini 

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Very interesting article...

Very interesting article - I don't believe any senior executives or editors on any of the papers resigned over this - even after paying out £450k in one case.

Memo to Fleet Street: it isn't just the BBC that makes mistakes
http://www.newstatesman.com/broadcast/2012/11/memo-fleet-street-it-isnt-just-bbc-makes-mistakes

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Oh Billy Brown - an examination of the creative process

Trying to measure the creative process as a percentage is totally useless.  Percentage of what is the most obvious question that would demonstrate this.  Through out the history of art what was thought to be complete was changed much later by the artist to improve it.   Anyway, I feel I am entering the final straights of this digital painting and so thought it might be interesting to produce an image with all the stages of the process captured in one place.  Hardly new I know but I've found it interesting to do.

Simon Marchini 

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Oh Billy Brown - an examination of the creative process

Trying to measure the creative process as a percentage is totally useless.  Percentage of what is the most obvious question that would demonstrate this.  Through out the history of art what was thought to be complete was changed much later by the artist to improve it.   Anyway, I feel I am entering the final straights of this digital painting and so thought it might be interesting to produce an image with all the stages of the process captured in one place.  Hardly new I know but I've found it interesting to do.

Simon Marchini 

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That says it all

Another day gone and things are starting to come together.  Yesterday I thought I was about 30% completed - now I suspect  around 50 - 60%.  I really struggle with the digital domain - in part because I am still trying to understand how the brushes work on Photoshop and partlly because I have great difficulty getting the proportions just right.  However, the one good thing is that I might think this is really not very good at the moment - which I do - but when I come back to it tomorrow I know I will have a much more positive view of the work. 

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That says it all

Another day gone and things are starting to come together.  Yesterday I thought I was about 30% completed - now I suspect  around 50 - 60%.  I really struggle with the digital domain - in part because I am still trying to understand how the brushes work on Photoshop and partlly because I have great difficulty getting the proportions just right.  However, the one good thing is that I might think this is really not very good at the moment - which I do - but when I come back to it tomorrow I know I will have a much more positive view of the work. 

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Beautiful Night - the creative process

One of the most creative things I can do with anything I do is to go away and sleep on it.  Now you would have thought that I might have realised this by now but no.   So yesterday I said I was about 30% complete and I would now revise that estimate to about 25% - clearly many more creative snoozes are required!

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Beautiful Night - the creative process

One of the most creative things I can do with anything I do is to go away and sleep on it.  Now you would have thought that I might have realised this by now but no.   So yesterday I said I was about 30% complete and I would now revise that estimate to about 25% - clearly many more creative snoozes are required!

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Best is yet to come

That's it - I've done enough for one day.  I suspect this is around 30% done - whether I ever get around to adding the extra 70% only time will tell.

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Best is yet to come

That's it - I've done enough for one day.  I suspect this is around 30% done - whether I ever get around to adding the extra 70% only time will tell.

Simon Marchini

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Sarah - she was singing and undoing

So the hardwork continues and I think the image is slowly developing.  My god this is hard going! 

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Sarah - she was singing and undoing

So the hardwork continues and I think the image is slowly developing.  My god this is hard going! 

Simon Marchini 

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And it was all yellow....

Oh why do I try these thing out?  Why indeed.  So in a rush of blood this morning I thought I would try to make a painting using Photoshop.  I had tried this before and it didn't really work out too well.  I have complained before about the problems I have with digital drawings and painting and all the same problems very quickly reared their rather ugly head.   In short the creation of digital art is not organic enough for me - you just can't feel the paper or canvas, smell the paint - too clean.

Anyway I am going to stick at it and try and see if I can work through my own hand ups. 

Simon Marchini 

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Facebook Face

I came across this Face whilst browsing through Facebook and I was immediately attracted towards it - a wonderful face to draw. Well this is the first stage which I'll build on over the next day or so.

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Facebook Face

I came across this Face whilst browsing through Facebook and I was immediately attracted towards it - a wonderful face to draw. Well this is the first stage which I'll build on over the next day or so.

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Not sure what happen

This is what should have been posted but some how it was corrupted by the process. Lets see if this works now.

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In search of the normal woman

What I am about to say is going to sound a bit weird but I am sick and tired of these over sexed images of women being thrust down my throat. Everywhere you look there appears to be the two dimensional smooth woman that doesn't have any relevance to everyday life. I notice this most when I'm trying to find interesting photographs to use to inspire me when drawing. Now it is an interesting experience when you type in the search into the search engine to see what comes out. As with everything the devil is, quite literally, in the detail of the search. Too vague and you get lots and lots of porn. Too literal and you get boring photographs that have no anima. Anyway, after much searching I found a reasonable set to work from - this is based on one of them.

Now this woman is more rounded than the original which is not such a bad thing. I feel this has a more natural look to it; a better reflection on reality, whatever that might be. And of course there is worse ways to spend half an hour or so than trying to make an image of a beautiful woman. It is a hard life but some one has got to do it.

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This made me smile

http://raw.abduzeedo.com/post/35017849486

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Rose - Billie Piper

I've been re-watching old episodes of Dr Who this weekend - I suppose you might call it a whoathon? Maybe not. Anyway, whilst enjoying the action I just had to capture Ms Piper and here is the result.

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May the Four be with you

Simon Marchini 

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