Francois Sagat Smiling

Just a little homage to that handsome French guy, Francois Sagat. Can't say to much about him as I don't know anything except that he seems like a really good guy. What I do know for sure is that he is to me the ultimate modern specimen of the male ideal.

Strange thing is that I have never seen any of his movies, only photos, but I like how he has also used his talent for other endeavours and inspired numerous artists. He obviously has a creative streak himself. Visit his blog and see for yourself...

How did you find Drawfellas?

How bizarre... Over the last 7 days, you have found Drawfellas via Google looking for the following search terms:

fella (857)
jacques sultana (84)
muscle art gallery (48)
hairybears (35)
hottlead (30)
human anatomy lessons (20)
figure study (16)
jacques sultana (16)
humplex (14)
jungle boy (13)
jacque sultana (10)
male artist background (10)
the humplex (9)
how many male are there in gauteng in the mid 2007 (7)
philip swarbrick (7)
cast of the loin king (6)
jockstrapped (4)
i've graduated at the (4)
drawfellas (1)
lz hewitt (1)

Philip Gladstone Fine Arts

"The Cellist Elevated by His Bath", Acrylic on Canvas

Philip Gladstone lives and works in a home on a quiet lake in rural northwestern Connecticut and spends his days at home with his family and, of course, painting up a storm. His work is available on E-Bay - buy some before I buy all of them (I wish - maybe one day when I can afford US dollars). Visit his amazing galleries: Philip Gladstone Website and Blog.

Portrait of Alex

Just some practice with ink... fine black ink pen on A4 white paper. The textured paper was added later in Photoshop. I don't know anybody called Alex... the name just popped into my head and stuck.

The quest for art that excites...

At the moment, this artist is still learning to produce pretty pictures of attractive guys. It dawned on me recently that in order to ultimately produce memorable works of erotic art, I will need to investigate the very definition of the concept.

Erotic art was one of mankind's first handicrafts. The Paleolithic "Venus of Willendorf" with her "unbridled erotic force" is considered a traditional symbol of potency, more than a work of art. Today, the term erotica is often seen as neutral or even good, while pornography is always bad. Finding a workable definition of erotic art seems tricky. It seems to have a lot to do with chemical desire and concerned with sexual stimulation, or arousal.

Freud is famous for his theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego. Later in his career he scrapped this theory and supplanted it with drive theory. He said that everything boiled down to twin urges toward Eros and Thanatos, best translated as pleasure and aggression. So erotic means the desire of pleasure, and only sometimes sexual pleasure - or in the case of art, art that evokes desire. Simple pleasures can have sexual overtones. One example is the zipper - considered quite erotic when it was introduced. Opening something is inherently pleasurable, for example, unwrapping a gift.

Morality or drawing the line between the "erotica" and "pornography" is not the goal of this post, however "erotic art" seems to hover somewhere between these concepts. The definition is highly subjective, varies for different cultures, and changes globally every year. Luckily each person can decide for themselves what they consider to be art and whether they find it erotic or not.

We have become bombarded with an daily avalanche of images, it becomes hard (no pun) for aspiring artist like myself to produce art that still touches us where it counts. How do I translate the erotic charge or thrill of a glimpse, stolen in the locker room and share that experience through my work, while still keeping it in the domain of "popular" art.

So erotic means the desire of pleasure, or in the case of art, art that evokes desire. The successful artist should give us enough hints to allow the viewer to find the erotic in the work.

Just some of my thoughts... Let me know yours.

Related Links:
Wikipedia: Erotic Art
Wikipedia: Erotic
Wikipedia: Homoeroticism

Drawfellas Studio

More of a desk really... its not always this tidy. The metal tin keeps all my pencils and other bits away from the cats. They like to play with them and hide them from me. In the other tin you can see a large soft brush used to remove eraser filings from the drawings.

My favorite drawing tools - some pencils, erasers and an erasing shield. The cotton buds and compressed paper stick is used for blending and the bulldog clips keeps sketches in position.

Modern Eros

Eros, mischievous and charismatic is the Greek god of lust, love, and intercourse. He was also worshipped as a fertility deity. In some myths, he was not only the force of erotic love but also the creative urge of nature, the firstborn light that is responsible for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos.

He had two kinds of arrows: one was golden with dove feathers that caused instant love; the other was lead with owl feathers that caused indifference.

I wanted to make Eros a bit more modern and opted for feather tattoos instead of traditional wings like his Roman equivalent, Cupid. He could be someone you run into on the street, crewcut and funky facial hair but still classical features. The background is a bit cheesy but I ran out of ideas for it.

Give me your comments and let me know what you think. Hope you enjoy...

Paintings by Jacques Sultana

Do yourself a favour and check out the beautiful work by French artist, Jacques Sultana.

Jungle Boy: Final

The Loin King catching some rays in a sunny spot of the forest. The object of this project was to learn how to abstract a figure to a cartoon style image and try and create a more espressive face. Also, to try and create the illusion of depth with the fore, middle and background. Not a traditional loin cloth, realized too late it should have been more of a tattered flap of cloth, but some VPL showing. There should be more cast shadows and colour on his body from reflective light, but I am bored with this for the moment. (Click to enlarge)

Jungle Boy: Preview

Jungle Boy: Part 3

The third and final installment. To eliminate the hard edges between colours I do the following in Photoshop. Using the colour picker, I pick one of the two colours next to each other (or hold down Alt while in brush mode to toggle between brush and picker). Now the brush gives me a value in between the two colours which can be used to blend them together. The next part involves colour picking and blending like crazy until the transitions between colours are smoother but still looks "painted" (image 1). Some more detail gets added to the background (image 2) and I am done with the small version of this image. The image is scaled back up to its original dimensions. Some pixelation will occur but I am left with a good guide to start painting on at a higher resolution. Now the real work starts. I delete the line art layer and replace it with the clean line art from the original file. The next part is hard to describe but basically involves lots of colour picking, blending and smudging to make it a lot smoother and remove any pixelation. More detail is added and working in other colours for reflective lights and shadows. Working in Photoshop also allows me to play around with different filters and effects. The final version will be posted soon...

Jungle Boy: Part 2

Next I need to decide where the light will be coming from and what my basic pallete will be. On seperate layers, I start defining the areas for the dark, mid and light tones using a hard round brush (images 1 - 3). No mystery here, just use common sense or some reference photos to guide you. The lighting does not have to be 100% accurate. The "cartoon" style of this drawing is very forgiving and you can get away with a lot more than you would be able to normally. Our eyes are easily fooled... Adding another light source also help to make the forms seem more "rounded". The reason the tones are done on different layers is so that I can easily adjust the colours for each. Just "Lock Transparent Pixels" on each layer in Photoshop, choose a colour and use "Alt+Backspace" to fill the layer until colour tones emerge that work together. I also play around with the "Opacity" slider on each layer to harmonize the tones (image 4). On the last image you can see I have added some highlights and tested some pinks and greens which I may later use to add reflective light and shadows (image 5). After this all the layers for the character gets merged to a single layer. So now I am left with only three layers - the background, the jungle dude and the line art on top of him. This process may seem elaborate, but it helps me to solve problems early which later makes it easier to work on the final large scale version. NEXT INSTALLMENT: Blending the character and adding detail to the background.

Snow in Jo'burg?

Many parts of the Witwatersrand were blanketed in a layer of icy crystals when we woke up this morning. In Johannesburg it was our first real fall since September 10, 1981. Roads have been closed to motorists, some shops have been closed and airport traffic was delayed for hours. Very strange indeed! This may not seem significant, but it is a big deal to South Africans. Above you can see images of Johannesburg, the back of my car and our garden.

Jungle Boy: Part 1

The next project... a wild young man, before he was king. In an attempt to share my process, I will be taking you step by step through my digital coloring methodology. It is by no means cast in stone, in fact, it changes regularly. Each piece seems to demand its own approach. Maybe it will be useful to others, else it will at least be amusing...

	The pencil drawing comes first. This was done on A4 paper with a medium pencil and as you can see I still suck at drawing hands. The drawing gets traced with a black fineliner on a new sheet and scanned at 300dpi in greyscale. To get the line art pure black on white I adjust the values "Image, Adjustments, Levels..." in Photoshop, it also removes the paper texture. Next any unwanted marks are erased manually.
	Use the "Channels" tab and click on the "Load channel as selection" circle at the bottom. Create a new layer, invert the selection and fill it with 100% black. Deselect and go back to the original layer. Fill it with 100% white - you now should have a layer with clean line art and a seperate background layer. Change the file "Image, Mode, RGB or CMYK Color" and save it.
	Loverboys taught me not to work on a large scale early on. I get lost in the detail and take too long - but that could just be me! For this I resize the image and reduce it to a more manageable scale. On a seperate layer below the line art I create a base colour using a large round brush and trim it to match the outlines. I choose a basic palette for the background, and lay down a few rough brush strokes (brush set to 50% opacity). Save often!

MORE LATER...

Deviations

Drawfellas has opened a gallery on DeviantArt. So if you want to see all the artworks so far in one place, just go to the gallery for DrawFellas. There are so many very talented people on this art community, but you have to become a member to see the "Mature" stuff.

Loverboys Revisited

The digital version of an earlier pencil drawing. This one took forever... needs a bit more work. Trying to teach myself how to get a "painted" look but I am still not happy with the skin tones and the contrast. There is still a lot to learn... The background is a photo I took in Zanzibar on holiday a while ago.

The Art of Darren Engleman

ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My art makes a definite statement about my life, in that my approach to painting is a reflection of the way I view the world - full of beautiful and strange surprises and hidden connections. Art is about seeing things that are difficult to explain and examining what I value or find beautiful, or even just what I notice in something - what captures my attention.

I am fascinated by the abstractions I find everywhere I look, and so my paintings are filled with geometric patterns of vibrant color and texture. I am drawn to interpreting the human figure in sometimes controversial compositions, as well as flowers, clouds and landscapes.

Visit his website for other great Male Art and more information. Copy and images used with permission.

Vintage Beefcake

Lately, pictures of pretty boys are a dime a dozen.

Don't get me wrong - I am all for photographing virile male specimens. Sometimes these modern photographs make the guys just seem a little too polished and merits little artistic appreciation. Their physiques seem to lack the burly quality and virility of the masculine ideal.

Maybe I am a little old fashioned but few images beat the raw and unpolished quality of Beefcake shots from days gone by.

Many of the models were as rough in reality as they looked, and attributed their physiques to hard work as boxers, athletes or construction workers. Most of them are excellent inspiration for art - great composition, good contrast and classical or provocative themes.

Sure times and the concept of masculinity change, but please bring back the rugged men!

Lover Boys

Just something I'm working on... Promise to upload the coloured version soon. This drawing is very small and the paper was too coarse so it was quite difficult to get a lot of detail. Next time I will use different paper and start drawing on a larger scale. But hey, this is how we learn - from our mistakes. Pencil drawing on A4 paper.

Romance Illustration

I have been very bad. It has been a while since my last drawing. Here is an illustration I finally completed for a gay-romance story by Andrej Koymasky.

"Sure. All you want, my love."
"They washed off, then Alain emptied the tub and with the shower nozzle, rinsed off their bodies. Then he got out of the tub, took Jacques under his arm and lifted him from the bath. Taking the towel, Alain started to dry Jacques and himself. Then he took his lover in his arms and brought him to the bed."

You can read more of his stories here.