camera lucida

Nudity I Have Witnessed

I completed the final panel of the final page of my most recent 24 Hour Comic at ten in the morning of Sunday, October 2nd, only four hours behind schedule (according to rules laid down by 24 Hour Comic inventor Scott McCloud, this is an acceptable variant- some projects just take longer, and this one involved a prodigious amount of shading). My final count was 23 pages and a cover image- which I consider a page on its own, but your mileage may vary. As promised, the story is titled Nudity I Have Witnessed, and it is a memoir of my years drawing the figure at Hipbone Studio and elsewhere.
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First Thursday: More Fan Art

It’s the First Thursday of the month, when I post Fan Art on my Patreon page.

This month, it’s two more action figure portraits, done using the Camera Lucida, this figure of Mrs. Potato Head cosplaying as Wonder Woman, and a bubblehead of Rey, a character from the recent film Star Wars: The Force Awakens:

David Chelsea is listening to:
America
by America
<br />
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Camera Lucida: It’s Not Just For Nudes Anymore.

This weekend is the opening of Oakwood Gardens in Hillsboro, Oregon. I quote from the opening invitation by owners Mike & Julie Safley:

David Chelsea is reading
“Paying For It”
by Chester Brown

Continue reading Camera Lucida: It’s Not Just For Nudes Anymore.

Letters To Steve

Another of my far-flung correspondents has sent me a batch of decorated envelopes. I met Steven Abrams when he was an intern at my first publisher, Eclipse Comics. Later Steve was my assistant on Welcome To the Zone, and now he works for the Jimmy Kimmel Live show in Los Angeles.

Steven Abrams with other Jimmy Kimmel staffers

David Chelsea is reading
“The Book Of Dreams”
by Federico Fellini

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More Memento Mori

As a follow-up to the prior post about cadaver drawings, Jeff Burke shares his memories of working as a life model with “Goliath”, the star attraction of Sal Montano’s anatomy classes at the New York Academy Of Art:
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I See Naked People: Camera Lucida Drawings

Nude drawn using camera lucida at Hipbone Studio.

I have just posted a portfolio of pencil drawings done using a camera lucida at Comics Lifestyle. About ten years ago an article about David Hockney’s controversial theory that great artists from the Renaissance on had used lenses, mirrors and other optical devices to project images for tracing made me curious to try it for myself; the camera lucida was one of the devices mentioned in the article (Hockney insists he sees signs of its use in lngres’s penciled portraits), and my friend Steve Abrams happened to have one sitting around that he wasn’t using. He generously agreed to let me have it for an extended loan.
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