Clara Lieu's Blog, page 4

My History of Portrait Sculpture

[image error]

Last week we released a video course on sculpting a portrait using air dry terracotta clay from Clay House Art. I didn’t have any hesitation when I was planning out the tutorial. I knew right away that I wanted to show a small scale portrait so the technique wouldn’t be too overwhelming, and I wanted to use air dry clay so that you wouldn’t need access to a kiln or know how to cast to end up with a permanent piece.

I remembered today that as an art school student, what a complete disaster my education was in terms of figuring out the materials and process that would make figure modeling into a smooth and stream lined process for students.

When I was an undergraduate art RISD, there was literally one figure modeling class, and I didn’t get to take it because I was an Illustration major and it wasn’t at the top of my priority list at the time. I did audit the figure modeling class one summer since I knew the professor, but the technique that was taught was using plastilene, creating life size portraits and 12″ tall figures.

Learning to cast the plastilene pieces in plaster was such a nightmare at the time. We did plaster waste molds which can be tricky, and the process is such that you end up destroying your original plastilene sculpture in the process which is incredibly stressful if you’re inexperienced.

We didn’t get much instruction in terms of cast repair, and I was so bad at the technique that my cast wasn’t very accurate and needed a serious amount of repair.

[image error]

I remember spending time digging up books that looked like they were published in the 1960’s, trying to find any shred of knowledge to help me figure out the casting process.  All I found were textbooks with thick, outdated paragraphs of text with no images or photos to reference.

So when I got to graduate school I had a really negative association with casting, and was petrified of diving back into such a bad experience. I was incredibly lucky that one of my classmates was a master at all types of casting, and so I absorbed everything I could from him.  He was really generous about teaching me and taking the time to fix all of my terrible habits. I was blown away by the techniques he showed me.  Now I can cast a figure in my sleep and I feel very confident in that area.

I was pretty angry with the professors at graduate school for refusing to teach us casting. I asked the professor for assistance in learning to cast and all I got was “Don’t you people teach each other anything?”

[image error]

Which is why it feels really good to release our video course on portrait sculpture.  If I had this video when I was an art school student, boy, would I have saved myself endless hours of grief and frustration. I do believe that to a certain degree, students do need to learn certain things on their own.  There are technique though, that you really shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel for. It’s so simple and easy explain to someone that you should fill your armature with styrofoam to save on clay!

An Oyster, or a Black Pit

[image error]

Yesterday I woke up with an overwhelming feeling of optimism.  I looked at the world and saw it as flush with opportunities that were just waiting for me to snatch up. Artprof.org is the main reason I can feel this way on occasion. When I think about all of the new people I’ve interacted with since the project began, it’s really quite remarkable how much bigger my world is now compared to several years ago.

In the morning yesterday, the world was my oyster and I felt a rush of energy to get up and do something. I shot off at least 30 emails to a number of journalists and local arts organizations. Reaching out to journalists usually feels like a fruitless endeavor; until you get that ONE email that makes it all worth it.  I’ve had days where I sent over 60 emails and got nothing but tumbleweeds. As I sent the emails yesterday, I didn’t care whether I got any response or not, exactly the mindset you need when you put yourself out there.

[image error]

On the other hand, I’ve had so many days that are at the opposite end of the spectrum. I feel like all I see around me are iron doors which are permanently locked for me, while I watch other people effortlessly open those doors and coast through. I imagine that everything I try to do is invisible, and that it all goes into a black pit, never to be heard from or acknowledged.

Unfortunately, between the world being my oyster and my big black pit, the pit usually dominates. Although these are extremes; the vast majority of the time I try to stay numb to these inclinations and refuse to indulge in either. Sounds depressing, but I see that as a survival mechanism. If I was constantly riding these extremes of my oyster and black pit. I don’t think I would be able to sustain this long term.

That’s what it is so much of the time when you’re a creative person. You need the endurance and tenacity to wake up everyday, and try.

Passion & Compulsion

[image error]

If there is anything that I am certain about in my life, I know that I’m passionate about being an artist. Deep down, that’s really the core of why I’m an artist despite all of the challenges of this chosen career. At the same time, lately I’ve been noticing that (at least for me) there seems to be a really fine line between passion and compulsion. I seem to fluctuate between the two in a way that can sometimes be confusing and frustrating. I want to be able to tell people that it’s all about passion, but actually it seems like passion is only a small percentage of why I work the way I do.

When I’m producing artwork, I can be free and loose, that’s never been a problem for me. When it comes to Artprof.org and creating our video courses, things couldn’t be more different. When I’m editing the video courses, I find myself shaving off 1 second here, another second there. I remove “So” from the beginning of a sentence because I’ve taken the time to question that word, and have concluded that it isn’t important in terms of the sentence making sense. It’s to the point that when I do a the last passes of editing through the video, I’m proud of myself for shaving 20 seconds off of a 40 minute video.

On Artprof.org  I get really hyper nit picky about every image that is posted. (if you’ve seen our site, you’ll know how image heavy the site is!) I’ve been known on many occasions to post a photo, thinking to myself that I can ignore that one dot in the upper right hand corner, that tiny sliver in the lower left, only to return within 10 minutes. I delete the old photo, go back into Photoshop, remove that dot, and upload the new image. In fact, I’m surprised when I don’t do this.

[image error]

Part of me resents the minutiae I obsess over to get the website and our videos just right. I go through moments where I question whether any of these tweaks are even worth the time. Does anyone really care if a sentence has a redundant “so” at the beginning?!? I hope it does, but at the end of the day, I know that it matters to me, and my compulsive side can’t and won’t leave it alone.

I’ll take time out of my personal time to stay the extra 15 minutes at work to make sure that every single blotter in the intaglio shop has been hung up to dry.  Do I do these tasks because of passion or compulsion? They’re so tedious and seemingly trivial it seems like it has to be compulsion, but then I start thinking that my compulsion is a result of my passion.

It’s incredibly time consuming to take this approach to the website and editing process, and there are moments where it really drives me up the wall.  I’ve tried in the past to ignore that dot in the photo, but to no avail. I can’t help my remind myself that in my min, these tiny adjustments are the difference between being good and really good.

 

Learning from the Gouache Master

[image error]

Alex Rowe and I wrapped three days of intensive shooting on a gouache course where Alex produced a gouache painting for a wrap around book cover for the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Any painting course we produce at Artprof.org is always very labor intensive due the complex nature of the techniques. We joked that Alex was my “art prisoner” because he sat and painted at my house for 3 days, while I checked in on him every 20 minutes or so to reset the cameras and double check that the footage was coming out okay.

In the past, gouache has had a strong association with foundation Design courses at art schools.  If you ask any art student about gouache, their first association is probably super tedious color mixing charts and/or color study paintings that are all about producing flat graphic shapes.

By the time Alex and I finished up his gouache tutorial, I actually developed “sympathy” for gouache as a medium.  I had made all of these assumptions in the past about what I thought gouache was capable of. I realized that when I thought about gouache, all I could think of was how limited and frustrating it was, and I never took the time to think about it’s potential.  Like many other art students, in my eyes, gouache has always had this bad reputation for being really boring and tedious as a medium.

[image error]

Alex had a totally different take on gouache, I’ve never met anyone who has such an intense passion for gouache as a medium. We realized through our discussions for the tutorial is that the difference was all in terms of your mindset with gouache. Where I all I could see was gouache’s limitations and problems, Alex saw flexibility and substance.  The difference was that Alex paints with gouache, whereas I always saw it as a sterile paint for laying down flat colors for boring color charts.

One of the reasons I love working on Artprof.org so much is that it’s as much of an educational experience for us, as it is for our viewers. I’ve been familiar with Alex’s astonishing gouache paintings for a while now, and getting this very close intimate look into his process was so exciting. Seeing Alex’s decisions and actions in his process and hearing him explain his rationale for his process was great. In many ways, Art Prof is a way for me to be a student again.

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

 

Social Media & Websites for Artists

[image error]

Two years ago the RISD Museum invited me to give a lecture on social media for visual artists.  This came completely out of the blue.  I was surprised that they asked me, and I didn’t think at the time that I knew that much more than the average artist about social media. However, once I started preparing for the presentation, I couldn’t believe how much there was that needed to be explained.  I had no trouble figuring out what needed to be said.  If anything, one lecture felt insufficient for everything I wanted to cover!

Later, I realized that if I could lecture on social media for artists, it only made sense to have a companion lecture about websites for artists.  You really do need to have both social media and a website today. While the two are very different, they do need to be thought about as a complete publicity package that support each other.

To my surprise, both lectures have been really popular in the Boston area and my events schedule just keeps getting more full. I think a large part of the popularity is that the content is very specific, and also that this is a topic that isn’t covered very often.

On top of the lectures, I taught the Senior Print Workshop Seminar last fall for the RISD Printmaking Department, where I designed a number of assignments, discussions, and exercises which all revolved around social media and artist websites. Between the lectures and this course, I feel like I’ve hit my stride with these subjects.

There are tons of workshops and content online about how to use social media/build a website, but most of that is for companies, businesses, retail stores, etc. The needs of a visual artist are so incredibly specific and different than what a retail store needs.  Therefore, the advice that a retail store might find useful is practically useless to a visual artist. I’m an odd combination in that I’m a practicing studio artist who is highly versed in social media.

I have Artprof.org to thank for that experience; building the site prototype from scratch by myself, doing countless usability testing sessions, eventually working with the web developer and maintaining the site have all given me the skills to see what needs to be done.

One of the greatest challenges of Artprof.org is that we cater to a gigantic range of ages:  parents have told me that their 11 year old watches their videos, all the way to lifelong learners.  While this is wonderful and exciting, it triples the amount of time I have to invest into our social media since there are big generational differences between what age group uses which platforms.  I always joke that we should have built a website that is for teenage girls, we wouldn’t have to do remotely the same amount of work spreading ourselves across all the platforms!

 

Mixed Media with Image Transfers

[image error]

Now that I’ve gotten some familiarity with the citrasolv and wintergreen oil transfers, I’ve started drawing other media like charcoal and soft pastel on top of the transfer. Mixed media is an area I have very little experience with, and I do think that mixed media is a lot harder than most people think.  The classic problem with mixed media is that people don’t layer, mix, and blend the various media enough. Consequently, each media becomes isolated and the piece ends up looking like a bad patchwork quilt.

[image error]

That’s why doing mixed media on these image transfers has been shockingly easy, there’s the illusion of a ripped sheet of paper from the image transfer, but no actual physical paper to deal with. The soft, hazy look of the citrasolv transfers lends itself beautifully to atmospheric qualities you can get when smudging soft pastel and charcoal. The transfer and the pastel/charcoal merge together seamlessly, these media were made for each other!

[image error]

Next, I want to xerox some of my drawings, transfer the drawings to another sheet of paper,  (using wintergreen oil since citrasolv only works on magazines) and then draw over the transfer. Who knows if this will actually amount to anything, but I’m really enjoying the experimentation with this new technique.  Perhaps it will eventually translate into something?  Only way to find out is to try.

[image error]

Citrasolv Transfer Technique

[image error]

Eloise and Lauryn have mentioned citrasolv to me several times. Given that I was going to teach my Painterly Prints course how to do transfers with wintergreen oil, I figured it would be nice to have a second transfer technique under my belt. Citrasolv wasn’t easy to find, so I ended up buying it on Amazon. You only need a very small amount to do a single transfer, so I imagine this bottle is going to last a while.

Wintergreen oil transfers have to be a xerox or a newspaper to transfer, so the advantage of Citrasolv is that you can do transfers from magazines. This opens up a whole new world because you can get really vibrant colors.

[image error]

The technique itself is pretty straightforward, although I did figure out a couple of minor tricks that do make a difference in the result. You can somewhat control the results, but ultimately a lot of the image is completely out of your hands.  I like that though, every image is always a surprise and it’s nice to completely give into the medium. You know that you won’t be able to control the results, so you totally give up and let the medium behave the way it wants to.

[image error]

I absolutely fell head over heals for the suggestive, atmospheric, grainy quality of the citrasolv transfers. The technique is so simple that I actually felt “guilty” for doing so little work for an image that felt so complete in the final results.

And of course, every time I learn a new technique my mind starts racing about how this technique could become a video tutorial on Artprof.org. Lately I seem to have developed an immediate reaction to everything new: I recently learned how to do meandering and lotus folds for my RISD Pre-College class this summer and I knew for future reference how useful it would be to have as a video tutorial.

For the past few days I’ve been on a citrasolv transfer marathon, it’s quite addictive to just sit at my dining room table, flip through old magazines, and then pump out 10 transfers at a time right outside my front door.  I don’t take it too seriously because I think about my experience with the citrasolv as one ongoing experiment.

On top of that, the transfers blend beautifully with other drawing media.  I started adding charcoal on top of the transfers and the charcoal merged seamlessly with the transfer. You really cannot tell where one material ends and where another begins, an unusual quality for a mixed media piece. (I feel like the default mixed media piece separates media too much so that the ultimate result ends up looking really fragmented.)

[image error]

The next step is to figure out how to incorporate this technique into my studio practice.  Seems like a natural fit considering the style of some of my past drawings.  I may try printing out images of my reference photos and seeing how they react in the citrasolv transfer.

I once had a friend who once said to me:  “You don’t do anything half way, do you?”  She was right, once I get started learning a technique I won’t let it go until I’ve really spent time with it.  I love immersing myself into a new technique, going through tons of trial error and trying to figure out the nuances of the technique so that I can get the most out of the technique.

Stay tuned, if all goes according to plan, we’ll shoot a citrasolv transfer tutorial at the end of this month!  Until then, you can see some of these transfers in my shop.

[image error]

 

“Too Many” Ideas

[image error]

One reason I love working on Artprof.org so much is that my mind is always racing with a flood of ideas.  The site has only been live for a year and 9 months. We now have over 30 video courses and that still feels like a tiny drop of water in an ocean of ideas.

Some days I literally feel like every single activity I do in the studio should be produced as a video.  Last Friday, I did a direct trace technique with my Painterly Prints courses at RISD; it was the first day of class so there was a ton of information to go over like the printshop guidelines, supplies, setting everyone up with a flatfile, etc. I knew I wanted to do a monotype technique that didn’t involve a press so we could just get acquainted with the shop. The direct trace technique was the perfect fit for that day.

[image error]

Direct tracing couldn’t be easier:  ink up a plexiglass plate, place a sheet of paper over the inked up place, draw on the sheet of paper with anything: a pencil, a fork, a plastic knife, a pen, a stick, a scraper, a palette knife, anything that can create pressure on the paper. Lift up the paper and on the back side will be your print.

The results are incredibly unpredictable; you literally cannot see what you are drawing as you create the piece, but that’s exactly why it’s so exciting.  You completely give up on trying to retain any level of control in the process and give into the spontaneity of the technique.

[image error]

We have printmaking videos on Artprof.org which are really long and involve a lot of technique and explanation, like the linoleum block course using the elimination technique which allows multiple colors on top of each other from the same block. The monotype course with gel printing plates is pretty fast, but still involves lots of explanation to do it right. A video on this direct trace technique would be even faster.  I like the idea of having a range of length in our tutorials; some are super long and involved while others are quick and easy.

[image error]

Having too many ideas is a “good” problem to have, I never have a moment where I wonder what to do next. Rather, it’s a matter of prioritizing what is high in demand in terms of content and technique, what are the “staples” of studio art that we can’t live without.

Up next on our shoot schedule: gouache & illustration, finishing up the oil painting course, and gesture drawing with anatomy.

Of the top of my head my immediate wish list includes: transfer techniques with citrasolv, wintergreen oil, etc. a portrait painting video talking about how to paint different skin complexions, a casting technique. (silicone rubber or plaster waste mold)

Where Does Artprof.org Belong?

[image error]

A strategy that I’m employed in the past is looking up established artists who have similar artwork as me, and analyzing their resumes to see where they exhibited their work, what publications have written about them.  In terms of my studio practice, that proved to be an effective approach; I had no problems finding artists who were doing work that was in a similar vein and artist resumes are not difficult to track down online.

Artprof.org is a completely different story. I’m not sure whether this is a sign that we are truly onto something unique, or that we are just plain misfits.  Or maybe we’re a little bit of both.  I’ve had a really hard time trying to figuring out where we fit.  We’re not a gigantic platform like Skillshare and Lynda.com. Most of these sites boast of having over 3,000 courses in over 500 subjects! When I first envisioned Artprof.org, I can’t tell you how many people kept saying to me: “Why don’t you just teach on Skillshare?” To me those huge numbers make for a very cold experience, as if you took a one time workshop where you simply cannot build a relationship with the people there.

[image error]

We’re also not a single artist producing tutorials that feature only them.  We’re somewhere between:  a small group of artists that interact with each other in our video tutorials.  Our aim has always been to foster a close relationship to our audience, to create a situation that’s as close as we can possibly get to bringing people into my classroom.

In terms of press, it’s been even more confusing.  The art reporters largely focus on gallery exhibitions, museums, and public art. I thought we would be a shoo-in for education reporters, but that definitely has not been the case.  Most of the education reporters seem more interested in the politics of education, and the learning process isn’t covered much by comparison. With the release of our Taiwan travel video, and our upcoming Guangzhou video, an area I’ve been targeting recently is travel reporters.  But travel reporters seem to be mostly people who travel to the country themselves, and then report on the experience.  I haven’t found any travel reporters who report on other people traveling somewhere.

[image error]

I always imagined Artprof.org as a website that would fill a gaping void in accessible art education.  I do believe that we are still fulfilling that mission.  However, it also seems like we are creating our own place in the world, our own genre that seems to defy the categories that currently exist. I like to think this is a strong aspect of Artprof.org, but trying to find the right people to spearhead our project has me banging my head against the wall.

Lectures Abroad

My lecture schedule has been filling up fast for the past two years.  In the last year, I went to China twice, Seattle, and Vancouver!  Here is a video that Foresight Academy, an art portfolio prep school, produced about my visit there last September.

[image error]