gloominati (Christof Grobelski)

[Gloominati]

Hey guys, my Name is Christof Grobelski, some things about me:

Since about 3 years art has become the main focus of my life. Although I want to break into the concept-design industry, my ultimate desire is to end up in fine arts and to be able to make a living in this field.
The reasons why I started being interested in this kind of art, are quite similar to those of the other studends in here, I want to be able to express myself in this visual way, being able to say everything without using a single word. Moreover drawing and painting is just fun and something I am able to enjoy each and every day, exploring new things and techniques. An as "nerdly" as it may sound, I just love the feeling of, yeah concentration and excitement that flows through my body, each and every time I put down the brush onto the canvas.

My favorite medium is definitely oil, and I really hope that this class can help me exploring as many techniques and ways of using it as it possibly can. Digital painting is something I enjoy doing as well, but it just doesnt keep my attention as much as oil is able to.

Here's the link to my sketchbook : sketchbook
and 3 of my personal pieces that I like most:







here are 3 Images that make me feel all fuzzy inside and two that I really hate:

First the awesome ones:

first of all a self portrait by rembrandt:
Rembrandt amazes me over and over again, for me he truly mastered oilpaint, being able to say so much using so little. This is what makes art so exciting for me: It doesn't need to be anything complex as shit, if you are aware of value, color etc. you can say so much using so little words

second, I chose this drawing by Marko Djurdjevic:
Markos drawings stun be both in design and technique.
Having seen his technique Marko really knows what art is all about : freedom . He is able to create these amazing designs because he does not stick to any rules anyone tries to establish, he just does his own thing and is successful doing so. Moreover I just dig how he combines realism and abstraction, getting the perfect mixture for functional and simply exciting characterdesigns. Especially this design represents all of that stuff!

Last but not least this piece by shawn barber:
Shawn Barbers painting technique is just so fucking amazing, I can't even tell. This piece is just what Barber means to me, compressed in one single piece of art : I just dig the subjects/models (simply because they really match with my impression of "aesthetic", or in other words, this girl is so hot ), I love the color palette (freshness and livelyness all over the place), and the technique (representing freedom, not being bothered by making any mistakes).



The following two piecs are pieces that I do really hate:

First of all: I like abstraction a lot COMBINED with realism. Mostly a piece of art that is abstract all over the place seems pointless to me, consequently here is my number one on my hatelist (going on with some kandinsky hate )

As the others have said before : it just seems to be so senseless, or at least as hard as I try I do not get the sense of creating a piece like that. Not knowing the sense I do not have any appreciation for the technique either. I simply do not know how to handle this, thus is simply seems ugly to me..



the second one of my hate pictures is THIS self portrait by van gogh, Honestly, I do not even know why but I simply cannot stand this piece, seriously as soon as I see it I feel this special feeling of disgust in my stomach and I cannot even tell why. Though I must say that there are a lot of pieces by this artist that I like, nothing that blows my mind but the are pretty okay. This piece, however, ....argh.

[Gloominati]

here's my portrait and the reference.
Couldn't finish it to stay in the timelimit. Really screwed up that one, the rendering-process destroyed a lot of the clarity and the cleanliness of this drawing...darn next one will be better...

[AlexC]

Hi Christof!

Thanks for your critique, very excellent, I will try and return the favour
I see a problem with the skull, and the overall outline of his face. You've made the nose and beard too long and there are some small problems with the eyes. I kinda think it looks a bit rushed too, looking forward to what's coming next.

[Barts]

yeah i would agree with alex
not enough attention has been payed to
how the structure of the face is, i think
maybe before jumping into the rendering process
make sure the silhuoette ( i cant spell that word )
is right, great start keep on posting

[Gloominati]

hey guys, sorry that i am too late, but I won't have any internet-connection at home for about the next month, so I have to use the computer at school. Hope that you are okay with my excuse

there we go. one more portrait ( i watched the first lecture after having drawn that one, so sorry for the bad reference).
And a personal piece of art. pretty hard to paint THE ultimate piece ind THE style I want to achieve some time, cause at the moment I am still experimenting a lot, trying to find what works best for me, so here is some more experimenting:
kinda big piece (1m x 1m), oil on canvas. The paint is actually pretty thick, worked mostly with palette knives. most of the effects got lost in the shitty photograph. Gonna try to get a better cam, to shoot some better photos.

[Gloominati]

Since this homework requires quite a lot of thinking and explaining I decided to do all the writing stuff now and post my images when deadline has come. I would love to show all of my stuff and to seperately mention which I want to be critiqued in detail (don't know if exactly this was the task or if I should post two of my images at all only...well).

So here's what I want to achieve doing this homework and how I want to achieve it.

First of all it is really cool that my goal I want to reach and thus my "problems" I want to solve have been mentioned in the second video-lecture, so here we go:

As I already mentioned in my introduction-post I started drawing seriously about 3,5 years ago. I mostly spend this time learning about anatomy, structure and "construction". Unfortunately I noticed that the more I knew about all this useful stuff, the more generic my drawings became, faces started to look the same over and over again, not being able to capture the characteristics in a model's face, and stuff like that. The "soul" in my works got lost. On the other hand my technical skills improved more and more, I became able to (technically wise) draw "pretty good" portraits for example but they did not look a thing like the model that I actually had in front of me because I got so caught up in constructing, drawing guidelines, marking planes etc.
So what i want to achieve in this exercise is to go back right into the other extreme. I want to draw and forget about all the theoretical stuff about anatomy and construction, I just want to draw what is right in front of my eyes and than see what happens, how my drawings turn out. My hopes are that I can combine everything I have learned so far about all the "foundations" with actually being an artist, trusting myself and my eyes to push my drawings and painting to a higher level. I am pretty sure that this method will help me a lot because the artworks that I have done and consider being my strongest until today are the ones that "happend" by using this method.
I decided to menage this exercise by drawing and painting portraits using reference, because I believe that in portraits it is easiest to see if a drawing /painting is successful or has failed in any case.


I want to wait with posting my results till deadline has come, because some of them aren't finished yet and because I want to do some more to fulfill the "gut-testing-factor" of this assignment.

so till monday!