46: Odds and Ends

Here's a few things to make up for my absence from Blogger this semester. In a week or so I should have a more proper junior year wrap-up with all manner of giant pieces of paper. You know, assignments and things.

 

I've been fiddling with my watercolor and colored pencil technique a bit more, and I've found that my preferred surface is hotpress watercolor paper.  Now I'm simply testing brands.  :]

A sketchbook doodle that turned out quite nicely!  I doubt I'll ever get rid of turtle-drawing-disease...

An experiment with masking fluid and india ink.  "I'm glad that worked." - my art motto.

And some aardvarks because they are obviously the best animal.

43: A Slapdash End of the Semester Post

I said I'd update by the end of the year, and by god I will. First up in this motley lineup is some of the character-based work I completed for my Illustrative Drawing class- I ended up calling the childrens book project 'Ruby & Dun: Arborfall' to insinuate that it's part of a series which could be expanded upon.

I was intrigued by Angela Rizza's technique of traditionally inking and digitally coloring her pieces, so I decided to try it out for the last two projects of the semester. The scenes above and below were completed in this way...it's definitely something I'll have to try a few more times to really get.

Trying to print this image gave me hell- another reminder that I need to work on my fluency with the digital art process.

Some adaptations of medieval gargoyle designs into characters. I didn't have to change much about them at all- gargoyles are truly one of my biggest inspirations in character design.

An extremely quick Christmas card illustration, and a mini-test of the digitally colored line technique.

And on a much more fine artsy note, here are my two favorite pieces from my landscape painting class, both oils on illustration board. The second is a 1-2 hour on-site study while the first is a studio adaptation of another study. Painting has always been a struggle for me, but I learned a lot in this class. Mr. Riley's passion for his craft and acceptance for different majors and skill levels was infectious!

Next semester should see an increase in the amount of art I produce- this one was clogged with a lot of liberal arts credits and slow-paced illustration courses. See you then!

39: A few More Floating Things

My art has become the Menagerie of Floating Animals, so my next post will be filled with environments and backgrounds and all sorts of fun stuff. Hopefully. 8|

32: Super Rag-tag Post

Two WIPs/color mocks for my final project in McKissick's Electronic Illustration class. In short, I'm illustrating a few images of Leshy, a mischievous Slavic woodland spirit...the finals and preliminaries will get their own blog post in due time. :]


A few experiments with ink application from figure drawing.


A commission and media experiment- who could pass up the chance to draw a flamingo in a fedora? India ink, colored pencil, and watercolor.

Iconography for my Design for Illustration class with Walter King, created in Illustrator.


Some bus-scribbles related to re-reading Pullman's 'His Dark Materials'. These are Mulefa, creatures with a diamond-shaped limb structure. The wheels/seedpods they use for transportation are pictured incorrectly here- they're supposed to be more like this. Ah well, at least I got the body structure mostly figured out.

In closing, a cute little 'yote for you!

30: Vulturoo

It all started with this guy. In Mr. Kovach's illustration methods class, we were to design a narrative sculpture, creating a character or scene and a schematic to accompany it. Admittedly, I was rather frazzled at the time it was assigned, so I chose two guide words for myself and went with it: Kangaroo vulture.


Since it had to be narrative, I decided to give the newly dubbed Vulturoo some prey, which was initially a rabbit, and evolved into a sort of springhare-sparrow to fit the mammal-bird theme.With the final schematic on display, I set about making a wire and foil armature, sculpting directly onto it with Super Sculpey and gluing it to a wooden board for support. I didn't get any photos of the sculpting process, unfortunately, but here's a few of the final sculpt and the primed sculpt:
good movies

And here we are all finished up! It was painted with acrylic paints accompanied by loads of matte fixative, a dash of pastel, a small portion of nail polish, and some moss I found at Michaels. The vulturoo's coloration was based on a king vulture and a tree kangaroo while the springhare-sparrow was based on a white-throated sparrow.


This was my first real attempt at full-blown sculpture, so it was very much a learning process. Things could have gone a lot worse, especially considering I had no idea what I was doing with the wire armature supports, so I'm thankful the entire thing didn't break under its own weight!

Vulturoo wouldn't be smiling anymore!

25: Oops

Well. All of this stuff is from the end of last semester, but I completely forgot to post it. Forgot I drew all of this, even. Didn't realize I had lost THAT much sleep.

Some weird thing for digital illustration class.

Studies from my last class with Mr. Pirasteh! Charcoal on toned paper.

Later this week I'll spam the blog with face studies and things.

18: That Case of Sameface

Story time! A friend showed me a wonderful little font, Kingsthings Gothique, and when we had a label design project, I HAD to use it. A barn owl came to mind when I was thinking of design elements, so, in a brilliant stab in the dark, I searched for a barn owl beer. Lo and behold! I am such a lucky person sometimes. This is my first completed project in Illustrator.


We have to CRAM for our advertising and graphic design classes, so it's truly surprising when things don't turn out half bad. I drew and inked these by hand and scanned them into photoshop for a quick coloring job. Type was added later, but I left it out for presentation purposes [read: it looked better without]. My roomies and I have affectionately named the pelican piece "Our Oceans are Filled with Tank Tops", as I cannot properly render a plastic bag. B)



And now regarding the title of this post...If you pay attention to my sketches at all, you'll probably notice that I draw the same face [or same-face-BASE] over and over and over again. Peoplefaces have never been my forte, but as an illustrator, I NEED to overcome this crutch. Here's my first real exercise; I copied and attempted to slightly caricaturize some faces in a photography book. They're mildly horrifying right now.


This is just dumb stuff from my anthropology notes. Check out that self portrait on the top right, oooh.

15: Birds and Sketches Everywhere

Holy mother of god OWLS. Their faces are full of fantastic design elements; I have a fun personal project coming up involving various species and shapes. Above is a page from my sketchbook completed yesterday. These owlmen are a bit creepy looking...trying to work that out. The strangely stylized central one is definitely not a homage to Erika Signini...

These are some very quickly drawn preliminaries for my lammergeier painting a few weeks back. I really do like the kori bustard guy; might have to do something more with him someday.

HEY LOOK, I committed one of my biggest pet peeves; drawing the figure at a 3/4 angle and the wings in profile. Silly me. The point of this angel was to develop a wing design which has been flopping around in my brain for a while.

This, dear viewer, is the horrific land of my anthropology class notes, all 'shooped together in one foul mess. You'll quickly note that I draw the same thing over and over again: "EVERYONE LOOK TO THE SIDE AND MAKE A WEIRD FACE."

14: Schoolin' Once More

My second finished project for Illustration methods class, "Lammerguyer", 9x12 in acrylics on illustration board. The assignment was to create a human-animal hybrid (hehe) and use good lighting reference to make it look realistic. I based mine on a lammergeier, or bearded vulture. There are things I did decently and things I did flat out incorrectly in this piece, but I consider it my first successful acrylic painting! Here's the graphite value study I did beforehand.

The school gave us these cute little planners with toned paper covers. More of my dragonbeastie!

My figure drawing instructor had us use charcoal on watercolor paper for an hour-long exercise. Definitely going to try this more often...In real life, you can see the awful smudgy grays created when badly using white and black charcoal together, and I plan to be more attentive next time.

4: Centaurs and Such

Look, I've lied already; there's no centaurs here, just cardinals being mean to a sparrow. This is the sixth part of my sparrow series for color concept, the goal this time being to take an analogous color scheme and 'break it' with a compliment (red, in this case). I'd upload the seventh part, but it's embarrassingly ugly. I hope you understand. That aside, I feel that this is one of my most successful pieces to date. Working on it felt good, and it was fun. I'm not sure if that feeling comes from the massive amount of experimentation involved, the amount of planning I did beforehand, or if it was just one of those things...The media used here were gesso, watercolors, india ink, micron ink, colored pencil, and gel pen, and the size is 6x9" like the others in the series.

I'm all about the birds lately, I guess! This was for an art card trade on Deviantart. A lammergeier-caracal character. No quips from me!

Below is me learning how to draw horses. The horse-bodies are mostly photo referenced (which I can thank my friend Katie Langford for), and the human torsos are not. The hands are so appallingly bad in all of these, I NEED to apologize. This will not happen again. Also, the levels of seriousness between each picture fluctuates greatly.