If you’re an artist and you haven’t taken life drawing, you’re seriously shortchanging yourself.

Tonight I was invited by my arch-nemesis Lewis “Lenny” Jacobs to participate in a life drawing session in Vallejo and I’m ever so glad I did. I firmly believe that every artist young, old, skilled or just starting out can learn sooo much from drawing the human figure. It’s been so long since I’ve gotten the chance to do life drawing and I’m damn happy to say they got a great thing going on in Vallejo. They did a smattering of poses lasting from 2 all the way to 15 minutes so you can practice your mad skills! So from now on, every other Monday from 7-10PM, if you got $10 to spare, I hope to see you at 51 Daniels Ave. I’ll be the one with the charcoal covered hands.

PS… go here to see my life drawerings from the night!

PSS: Sorry that the site is still funky! I’ll fix it soon I promise!

<3 Mynt

The first was 2nd Saturday in Sacramento. Any Sacramentoan (is that right??) should know about this. An abundance of art, music and local shops all open into the night as the people take to the streets enjoying the festivities and food. The first time I checked out 2nd Saturday was with Dyno. He had scored a showing at Havoc Boutique during the event and it was well received. You can probably find the video on his blog, but either way, I was greatly impressed by the amount of energy that was shared that night. Everyone out there for the arts, the music and the local establishments made it feel like a true, grass roots event. I made some friends there and tried to set up a chance for me to display some work there myself.

One of the employees at Havoc Boutique, Jimmy, acted as my contact at Havoc. We tried to set up something for February, but ended up settling for March due to my hectic schedule. It was probably for the best, mostly because the weather was probably better, but that’s neither here nor there. Annnyways, Jimmy was a great host, doing everything from communication between me and the owners of Havoc, to helping me set up shop, all the way to just letting me kick it and introducing me to all the people he knew. I had a great time, and if you’re reading this, Jimmy, big thanks m’man! Despite your age, you were a real professional. Next set of donuts are on me!

Everyone else at Havoc was awesome as well and made me feel right at home. Big thanks to Micky (don’t know if I spelled that right) and Mary, the owners for giving me the chance, and the other guy I met there, who’s name I can’t remember (sorry!) had some crazy ass stories of shit that’s gone on since he’s worked there. You guys definitely made my stay a blast.

I decided that 2nd Saturday was a great place to release my latest print, titled “The Noms” here it is below! (as always, click to biggie size)

Sharks like bacon, right??

For this month only, you can get yours at Havoc Boutique in Sacramento for the on sale price of $20. If I have any left after the month is up, I’ll release them to anyone who wants to buy them, and yes, I’ll ship! I only made 10 so this is a super limited quantity of bacon eating goodness, so gettem while they’re hot!

Below is a (not so) awesome shot of the piece I did live that night

hmm… that looks familiar… Apparently they like donuts too… who woulda thought I have so much in common with sharks?? Annnnyways… if you wanna see some more (really) awesome shots of the night, you can check out a couple of photographers interpretations of 2nd Saturday. The talented Dan Rowan and Ivan Jerick (Jordan, let me know when you get your set up and you, too shall have a linky [edit: Jordan's Set]). I ALWAYS forget to bring my camera, and when I do, I’m usually too busy painting or talking or a combination of the two, to take any shots. So click on the links and make sure you say some GREAT things in the comments box.

This post is getting waaaay to long… So to spare you the trouble, I’ll update next time about the Napa event on Sunday…. Ciao!

<3 Mynt

]]> http://myntcondition.com/2010/03/turbo-weekend/feed/ 2 http://myntcondition.com/2010/01/mynts-photoshop-sketch-setup-tips/ http://myntcondition.com/2010/01/mynts-photoshop-sketch-setup-tips/#comments Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:57:05 +0000 Mynt http://myntcondition.com/?p=272 Hey gang , It’s been a long time, I know, but there’s been a lot going on for me lately. Just to let you know that I’m alive and well, here’s a little somethin somethin I worked on a little while ago. It’s a female rendition of the Soldier from one of my favorite games: Team

Oh yeah...there's more

Hey gang , It’s been a long time, I know, but there’s been a lot going on for me lately. Just to let you know that I’m alive and well, here’s a little somethin somethin I worked on a little while ago. It’s a female rendition of the Soldier from one of my favorite games: Team Fortress 2. I’m eventually gonna use it as a spray to put on walls during matches, hopefully over the corpses of my opponents.

Right now, it’s in the sketch phase, laid out in black and white. I’m gonna share some of my tips for creating this as I go along. Not so much a tutorial, but some helpful hints you can use when you create artwork in Photoshop.

Tools: All my work for this project will be created in Photoshop CS3… even the sketch phase. Photoshop is probably the most useful tools to sketch with, and I’ll share some settings I used to make it feel more like drawing on a sketch pad as opposed to drawing on a computer. I don’t advocate ONLY drawing with one or the other. PS has it’s advantages, such as the ability to undo, layer, and change hundreds of other little options. But I don’t view it as a replacement for actual, physical drawing. Maybe one day, when I get a Cintiq, I’ll change my view on this a bit, but for now, knowing when and how to use both digital or physical drawing is key to getting your project started right.

Right now, I’m using a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. It’s the 6×8 variety, big enough to allow large movements, but small enough to fit in a backpack or shoulder bag. Know and get familiar with utilizing the pressure sensitivity… It will expand EVERYTHING you can do when doing digital work.

Getting Started: First things first, I need to create my document in PS. This picture is only going to be viewed on a computer screen, so, I’m going to make sure the color mode is RGB and the resolution is 72 pixels/inch. Since I’m only doing a black and white sketch, I won’t go into detail about the resolution and color modes, I’ll explain more about those in a later post as it demands an entire article on it’s own. Here’s a peek at my settings.

Beginning your sketch: Even though the end product will be transparent around the edges, I like to create a new layer and fill it with 50% grey. You can do this easily by pressing shift + F5 or going to edit > fill. You could also do this by selecting a fill color for your Background Contents when you  create your document, but I always forget…. annnnyways…

Shift + F5 or go to edit > fill

The reason I fill the BG layer  is that with this method of sketching, I’ll be using a lot of transparent colors. Over a transparent background, they will be VERY hard to see… So I fill it in with either 50% Grey or White. Most of the time I use grey because when I eventually lay color in, it provides a neutral comparison as opposed to seeing the colors against an all white or an all black background. Now, it’s time to sketch.

Here’s where you can start to see the power of using a Wacom tablet combined with Photoshop. I used to just get my Brush tool, pick a color and go right at it, but once I learned how to utilize my different brush settings I developed a method to make it more like natural drawing. Now if you’re drawing with a pencil and press down hard, You’ll get a dark line right? On the contrary, when you press lightly, you get a light line right? If you keep drawing on that light line with the same pressure over and over again, it gets darker and darker with every stroke. We’re gonna re-create that feeling with the wacom and some brush settings.

Select your brush tool or press B to use your brush tool. Then go to Window > Brushes or press F5 to open up your Brushes window. In here you can alter everything that happens when you use your brush tool. When you get a chance, come to this window and fool around with all the settings and experiment to discover all kinds of uses for this window when you’re painting. For now, we’re just going to duplicate my sketching setup. Click on Brush tip shape and reduce the spacing slider all the way down to 1%. When you’re using the brush tool in PS, the program is really just drawing a series of circles. Setting this number as low as possible ensures that all of your brush strokes will be smooth as possible. Set it at anything above 50% and try a brushstroke and see how it’s different to get an idea on what this slider does.

Next, make sure all other boxes are unchecked except for “Other Dynamics”. Then click on “Other Dynamics” the word not the checkbox. Under “Opacity Jitter” click on the dropdown box labeled “Control” and set it to Pen Pressure. Also make sure that Jitter is set to 0%.

Setting the opacity for pen pressure

Now, every time you make a brush stroke with your stylus, the opacity will vary depending on how hard you press down, just like a pencil. You can follow the same steps with your eraser tool selected and it will do the same thing whenever you erase.

Setting up your brush and eraser this way helps me SKETCH in a more natural way over a solid background. It won’t work as well when I start laying down my base colors, but for sketching, it works fantastic. While drawing, change your brush/eraser diameter sizes by right clicking on your canvas and moving the slider, or the easy way, by using the “[" and the "]” hotkeys. Zoom JUDICIOUSLY with Command + or Command  - (Ctrl if you’re on PC). Or hold Command + Spacebar and draw a box on what you want to zoom in on to have more control.

Like I said, there’s TONS of settings you can mess with on your brushes alone, so this barely scratches the surface of PS’s potential. Mixed with the different layer abilities the possibilities are endless. There’s plenty still for me to learn as well, so I don’t want to act like a know-it-all, but if you have any questions, lay em down in the comments below and I’ll get back to you the best I can. Until next time, EXPERIMENT, PRACTICE, AND SAVE OFTEN!

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You can click on the image, or here if you wanted to see more images from the 100 pieces list.

<3 Mynt

“HellaEMO aggregates user submitted blog posts, pictures, videos and quotes; We take those submissions and remix it. This all started from looking at our old blogs and sharing our emo posts. We got a huge laugh from it and we wanted to find more.”

- Nicole

It’s some pretty funny shit… I’m not one to clown when someone is TRULY unhappy, but all too many times, we tend to make mountains out of molehills, only to look back years later realizing how silly it was to be THAT upset over some trivial thing. I can’t help but to laugh every time I open this file so hopefully they’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoy making it.

With all the new mediums and techniques I’ve been trying to learn over the past couple of months, it was nice to dip back into Flash and get back to something familiar. Anyways, here’s the progress shots from yesterday and today. Enjoy!

<3 Mynt

<3 Mynt

My lazy color comp:

And here’s what it looks like now:

Most of the time, I’m content with leaving a live piece as it is when the event finishes. I almost view it like a performance: What you do live in front of people is what you’re left with. But this time the concept was too good for me to leave it as is. I won’t post this in my Traditional gallery till I work it over some more, so hopefully in the next few days I can share a more complete piece with you guys. All in all, I’m really happy with the work SO FAR, and JToddO gave me a great compliment saying it was the best thing he’s ever seen me paint. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I didn’t get a chance to take a lot of photos since I was so engraved in the piece (Shit, I didn’t even drink that night!), but I do have a few snaps you can catch in my Photo section. If you got any photos, and wanna send em up to me so I can post them up (you’ll receive credit of course), get at me via electronic mail  <nick@individualcollective.com> and I’ll put them up ASAP.

<3 Mynt

Hey gang! Sorry about the lack of updates last week, but hopefully as you look around now, you’ll see that I’ve been a busy Mynt. I decided to “re-fresh” my little space a bit. Whatcha think? Hate it? Love it? On top of the color switch, I redesigned my logo (Check it out up top!) and finally redesigned and ordered a new set of business cards. Ok ok… It’s probably not as exciting to you as it is to me, but hey… presentation is key. “Don’t judge me.”

Also, if you peruse around my artwork section, you’ll see something that wasn’t there before. That’s right! ARTWORK in the “Artwork” section! What a freakin revelation! Ok ok… calm down. I’m excited too… Now I don’t feel so bad about sending people to my “Art” website with no ART displayed.

Anywho, take a look around, lemme know what you think, and make sure y’all come back soon!

<3 Mynt

THE RULES

1.) Make 100 pics each pic having a theme listed below. Each pic should have ONE and only ONE theme to it, for it to count.

2.) No time limit so have fun

3.) The main picture should be drawn but not limited to. for all fair purposes, people are allowed to use their paint programs and photo shop to create the pic.

3a.) pics should be of own artistic ability. Your pics can be anything from sketches and doodles to great master pieces. Just have fun with it.

4.) The list below is to be placed somewhere in your journal for others to see that……
A.)You are in the challenge
B.)What you have completed

5.) make sure to update this list and check off what is done and make a link to the pic

6) I go to www.random.org and get a random number 1-100 to pick a subject at random – Mynt

THE LIST:
1. Introduction
2. Love
3. Light
4. Dark
5. Seeking Solace
6. Break Away
7. Heaven
8. Innocence
9. Drive
10. Breathe Again
11. Memory
12. Insanity
13. Misfortune
14. Smile
15. Silence
16. Questioning
17. Blood
18. Rainbow
19. Gray
20. Fortitude
21. Vacation
22. Mother Nature
23. Cat
24. No Time
25. Trouble Lurking
26. Tears
27. Foreign
28. Sorrow
29. Happiness
30. Under the Rain
31. Flowers
32. Night
33. Expectations
34. Stars
35. Hold My Hand
36. Precious Treasure
37. Eyes
38. Abandoned
39. Dreams
40. Rated
41. Teamwork
42. Standing Still
43. Dying
44. Two Roads
45. Illusion
46. Family
47. Creation
48. Childhood
49. Stripes
50. Breaking the Rules
51. Sport
52. Deep in Thought
53. Keeping a Secret
54. Tower
55. Waiting
56. Danger Ahead
57. Sacrifice
58. Kick in the Head
59. No Way Out
60. Rejection
61. Fairy Tale
62. Magic
63. Do Not Disturb
64. Multitasking
65. Horror
66. Traps
67. Playing the Melody
68. Hero
69. Annoyance
70. 67%
71. Obsession
72. Mischief Managed
73. I Can’t
74. Are You Challenging Me?
75. Mirror
76. Broken Pieces
77. Test
78. Drink
79. Starvation
80. Words
81. Pen and Paper
82. Can You Hear Me?
83. Heal
84. Out Cold
85. Spiral
86. Seeing Red
87. Food
88. Pain
89. Through the Fire
90. Triangle
91. Drowning
92. All That I Have
93. Give Up
94. Last Hope
95. Advertisement
96. In the Storm
97. Safety First
98. Puzzle
99. Solitude
100. Relaxation

<3 Mynt