Really glad to have a short break at the moment, and just relax in the sun with a cold beverage and good food. What are you doing these holidays? Hope you are all having a good break too.

If you have Instagram or Twitter you should follow me cause the updates are much more frequent!

Here’s a few recent sketches from my instagram feed

Diptych of the very lovely Aayla Mae

And this is the very last drawing in my sketchbook! Really excited to get into my next book and finish another.

Happy Holidays!

Pretty happy so far, hopefully I can apply what I’ve learnt from this work onto future paintings that are a bit more imaginative.

Here’s a detail shot of the eyes.

600 x 450 mm
Acrylic on Canvas.

Oil on wood panel.
600 x 450 mm.

Hey all,

I’ll be participating in a group painting show and it will be on the 19th November 2011. This is awesome because A) I’ve never been in a real painting show before. And B) I’ve had a huge amount of motivation to paint. The looming deadline has really helped! and C) I will get to meet up with 14 other awesome artists and check out their work too.

Opening Night: From 3PM Saturday, November 19 – with live music on the day

The show is at:
The Depot Artspace
28 Clarence St
Devonport
Auckland 0624

So anyway it would be cool if you’re in Auckland then to check it out, come hang out, have a chat and a drink together.

Here’s a work in progress shot of the piece I will be showing. I’m excited to say that it will be the first in a entirely new body of work.

Here’s a closeup shot of my face. Taken with Instagram. Are you on instagram? find me! ’saminthewolf’

P.S I will be in a group painting show in November, as well as doing some illustration for the Design Assembly end of year event.

Spend more time doing the things you love.
It seems simple, but the reality is that it’s hard to find time to do these things sometimes! Working, social life, recreation, menial tasks & errands always seem to get in the way. Make time for YOU. The guys over at Good Fucking Design Advice make a point of “Do it for your fucking self” – Word. Have ‘Passion Projects’. Projects that are self initiated, and you do them because YOU love them. Not anyone else. Your enthusiasm for your own self motivated projects will also spill over into your other work too. Start Now!

You are what you do. Not the things you own.
It’s easy to get caught up in the material world. Guilty. But owning nice things doesn’t change who you are. Sure it might change others perception of you but does it really mean anything? Think about anyone ever great in history,
whether it be good or bad. You remember them for what they did and how it impacted the world, not what house they lived in, what car they drove, or what shoes they wore.

I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to not buy things I don’t NEED lately. And the questions I ask myself before buying are ‘Will this help me to advance my skill or learning?’, ‘Do I need this for work?’ and ‘how much will I use this?’.
That being said, sometimes I treat myself sometimes. I’ve started buying art that I like too, just because I think as an artist, you know how hard it is to make a living. And it’s important to support the community (And it’s helped to make some cool friends interested in the same thing)

Don’t be a dick.
Seems obvious really. You can go through life being a dick, but it’s not to anyone’s advantage – except maybe your own. But what’s the point of being alive if you are only looking out for yourself. Respect the people around you! Be nice. I often hear the saying, ‘Nice guys finish last’ or ‘You can’t be nice in business’. Bullshit! Why not? Befriend your clients and they will come back to you. There’s no reason why you can’t be nice and still do okay. Unless you have no soul and are willing to cut people down for your own success.

Set goals.
In no way shape or form am I really successful yet, but I think I’ve made the first steps to where I WANT to be. And I think it’s because of goals. Think about them. And also, I think it’s been really important that I never had a monetary goal/objective. My only aim in life is to make a living doing something that I love. And now I’m the happiest I’ve been. Make a living is subjective – to me it’s not exactly about being super rich, just enough to survive and be comfortable while loving what I do day to day – Think about it, the average human spends 22% of their life working. It’s pretty hard to think that you could be unhappy at work for a quarter of your life. So dream big!

Don’t be afraid of failure.
Heard it a million times before? It’s true. It’s almost been exactly a year since I started working for myself. Before I resigned from a full time position, I battled with myself for weeks / months on end toying with the idea. I could’ve done it a lot earlier, but why not? I was scared of failing. Don’t listen to people who will tell you that you can’t do it.
In reality, the fear of failure, is much scarier than the actual failing part. In reality, if you don’t succeed, you won’t die (unless your passion is sticking your head into a shark’s mouth or something). And as soon as you remember that failing does not mean death then the world is not such a scary place. I told my parents ‘I’m going to try my hand at going freelance, I’m not sure how it will go, so if I fail and don’t make anything, is it okay if I come back here’ And I think that took the edge off making the plunge. Sure, I have my quiet and busy periods, and it’s not an easy life not knowing when you’ll next get paid. But it’s the most fulfilled and happiest I’ve ever been.

Value your friends.
When you’re young you want to have a lot of friends, but as you get older you value the closer friendships you do have a lot more. Remember when you had 10,000,000 myspace friends? Then you grew older and had 500 facebook friends. Then you realised that it still sucks and you didn’t need facebook at all in the first place. Your real friends know how to get in touch with you.
Surround yourself with positive people and people that have similar & different interests to you. Don’t be around people that will bring you down and make you have less self worth. We don’t have enough time here on earth for that.

Anyway, that’s all folks. There might be more which I’ll add later If I think of anything else.

Thanks if you read that!

In other news, I decided to start on a birthday self portrait. It’s actually a bit of a joke (I’m not THAT self absorbed) I’ve been learning to paint while I haven’t been working on client jobs, and following online tutorials. So thought I’d try do this self portrait to try painting in a more classical style.

Here’s some progress on the underpainting. Hopefully when it’s done I’ll frame it in an obnoxious gold frame.

Click for larger image.

You might be wondering why I’ve been only doing realistic portraits lately instead of my usual style, but I feel like I need to evolve my style and my technical ability before I can really put some of my ideas into paintings. Portraiture has been really helpful lately to help me understand lighting and form. I guess at the core of it, you have to know the rules before you can bend them. So for now, I’ll probably be doing mostly portraits until I feel that my technical ability is good enough to put some ideas for works that I’ve had for a while into real paintings. Watch this space.

Have been drawing a lot so I will try to update a bit more frequently.

If you do have instagram or twitter follow me! my name is ‘saminthewolf‘ on both.

A point that came up during this conversation was ‘art & ads are both ultimately made to sell’ – this is true. The lines are blurred.

But my take on the matter, is that advertising is selling someone else’s product or service. In art you are selling yourself. In both art & advertising you are both selling a commodity. That is, you don’t NEED anything that these two things are trying to sell you. The point of difference for me is that the need to make art and be creative is something I have to do much like eating or breathing. Art is a tool used to express an idea that you need to put down, much like a writer pens a story. I’m not sure if people think along the lines of ‘I Need to create a 30sec Advertisement’ or not. If advertising IS art, then it’s not always YOUR art. I know every day when I go home from work, I still have that urge to create. Purely because advertising is not my creative outlet, so my desire to make is not satisfied.

The way I see it, Advertising is a means to generate money for someone’s company, and in turn for the agency. Advertisement’s are meant to further the image of someone’s brand. Then this reflects on your agency – ‘Look how we have made all these other people look good, we therefore must be good’. In advertising, it’s also the selling of ideas that makes it similar to art. But, the constraint of advertising, is that it all depends on other people. Others within the agency, clients, media & budgets which all affect the outcome of your initial idea.

As I mentioned before, with art – it is much more selling yourself. Your ideas, your technique, your style and your process. Unlimited time, and only your budget. It is completely self indulgent. Yes it’s true that your art is somewhat made to sell to a degree – at the end of the day everyone has to eat right? I guess that’s why we’re called ’starving artists’. I think the key is to find that middle ground, and hopefully you are not jumping on trend bandwagons and popularity of a certain style or technique just because it sells easily. If you are an artist you should be selling your soul. And I don’t mean becoming a sell-out, but you should be selling YOU, and YOUR work. 100% of yourself should go into each work. But you shouldn’t bend over backwards to become popular and sell work. In a perfect world, there would be no reliance on money to survive, and you’d be able to create anything you please without worrying ‘will this sell?’.

Personally, I make ‘art’ for 3 reasons. 1. as a means to escape from briefs driven by others to indulge my own ideas. 2. Purely to advance my skills in a technical sense. And 3. As a way to record things around me, much like a scrapbook of the times. I guess advertising is almost the same. It is very much a record of the times that it was created in, and it can also push the boundaries of technology and skill. The problem that I have with advertising vs art, is that it seems to me like that it’s selling an idea for profit for profit’s sake.

At the end of the day, you should do what you want, and not what the market wants. And I think that’s the difference between advertising & art. Advertising will always have to appeal to the largest crowd possible, otherwise it is worthless and not profitable. Art does not have to be profitable if you don’t want it to. But it’s a bonus!

What are your thoughts on the matter? do you agree? disagree? Leave a comment!

Here’s the finished result – click to make the image larger.

I’ll throw up a few process shots while I’m at it.

You will need:
rainy day, blanket, pair of novelty hat & slippers, sketchbook, pencil, reference photo and eraser.

Anyway here it is. Click on the image for a larger version!

I’ve just finished my piece to auction for The Easel Project . We will be launching the start of the campaign in a couple of weeks so stay tuned to see how you can bid for this!

It is A4, pencil drawing on paper, and framed in black.

If you like it, please bid on it, and support the appeal to help Christchurch get back on their feet again.

Here it is: