Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Ballpen Drawing

(posting twice because I'm behind on my posts.)

Juan Francisco Casas Ruiz drew this out. (his name is red because I just copied and pasted) The fact that this is ball point pen blows me away. It really makes me feel like I'm a long way from my peak when it comes to skill level. More of his work is here: http://www.juanfranciscocasas.com/galeria.aspx?idm=en

All of his drawings come from his own photography of his friends on their more ridiculous nights. I would be even more impressed if these were all from sittings but that would also be ridiculous. If you check out his site his paintings are just as realistic. It reminds me of the photoshop painting that we looked at at the beginning of the semester for the horror movie poster except this is all done by hand.

7 comments:

  1. i like this piece. i thought it was a photo at first but then i looked again and saw the stroke lines. i wondering does he only draw people or does he focus on other subject matters. also is that blue paper he drew on

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  2. Myles - I'm fairly certain it's on white paper.

    He draws people from photographs. These are pretty large scale drawings too(~30"x40"). There is a great technical expertise going on here in terms of knowing your materials. However I must state that the artist first projects his image then goes to work shading. It looks really cool, don't get me wrong, but it's kind of boring if you were to use this as an illustration. What kind of narrative does create? Does it stop you and make you think about it for more that 9 seconds? There's some interesting shapes going on but this would take way too long to be a feasible illustration style at that size.

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  3. On one hand, I am envious of this man's rendering skills but on the other hand, anytime I see something like this I just feel like it's the artist saying "Look what I can do!!" and I feel like the only reaction to it can ever be "Wow, how did he DO that" as opposed to "Wow, how did he THINK of that?". It is spectacular once you understand that it's a drawing. Otherwise I would just think it's a goofy photo!

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  4. I can't believe this is ball point pen. That is such a hard medium to control. It truly looks like a photograph and at first I was confused because I thought it was.

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  5. i love this post. it is hard to decipher whether its a photo or a drawing or something else. i enjoy those works of art because it takes time and a special something to be able to render so exact through out an entire piece to capture that photorealism. to blaquesmithe... i agree with the blurred area of application of this kind of art. it may not really tell a story unless you're this guys buddy and the gallery showing is a giant slide show of photo realistic drawings of your crew getting hammered. cheers.

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  6. This is really quite astonishing given it's medium. It makes me wonder if maybe he used some other things as well to help smooth the image out.

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  7. First, amazing for rendering this with a ballpoint pen. Second, in my opinion this does work as an illustration. It looking like a photo doesn’t take anything away from it being a successful illustration. I could see this being in a magazine for an article about drinking with your friends and doing weird stuff or getting with a crazy girl who loves pushing your face in.

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