It's almost Christmas themed.

One mo' painting. Putting in the color jitter and atmospheric effects I picked up from a friend. Now I just need to do something that isn't so flat looking...

Spoke too soon!

Some friends pointed out some major flaws going on with the value structure, I fixed those up and now I think I'll tentatively call this thing done.

Finally, a finished painting!

Over the last few days I've been working on this guy. Tried to put everything I learned last semester into the piece, from ideation, thumbnails, value structure, edges, color, and composition. For once, I have a finished piece I feel confident represents where I am right now with my work, and I plan on doing a few more over break to see just what I can do and where I'm severely lacking.

And the Final from FIgure

Here's also the final long pose from my Figure 1 class. Took an entire semester, but I finally made something in that class I don't want to burn. Learned a lot from that class as far as edge control,  designing shadow and light shapes, and patience. So much about patience.

Tuscan Landscape Study

The title's self explanatory. Trying to go further with simplifying forms while still indicating depth.

I'm a Lazy Bum

Been up to a lot of sketchbook scribbles, but too lazy to go scan them all in. Also finished up the Massive Black workshop, so that's pushing me to get myself into gear. That in mind, here are some sketchbook hand studies, a robot, and a photo study.

Orthographics

A friend who knows how to sculpt digitally wanted to model one of the robot thumbnails I made. So to help him out with that, I've taken the thumbnail and made an orthographic view of the robot.

Sketchbook Shenanigans

So I found a happy balance between the freedom and flow that I have when sketching in pencil and the line work that pen brings. Basically, for these pages I just sketched loosely in pencil, then went back over with pen to refine and add shadows. I'll have to work lighter in pencil so the lines are easier to erase, and ideally this is only a temporary crutch until I'm able to just sketch straight in pen and maintain the fluidity I have with pencil. For now, this is a fun process and I'll stick with it. As a bonus, I'm drawing slightly more original robots. Helps to break away from a humanoid body plan.

Robotic Rapscallions

Some more robots in the sketchbook. Noticed I was doing this hunched, bow-legged pose with the first three so made the last guy tall and lanky. Robots are fun, I just need to be neater in my sketchbook, or at least try to do most of the ideation in my head before I start making marks to avoid having to erase so often.

Mechanically Delicious Thumbnails

Robots! One hell of a subject, covers a lot of different bases. I think I can spend years studying this and still learn new things. The same basic principles of functionality, large shapes broken up in panels to suggest detail, and general construction stay constant, but aside from that no two robots (should) look the same. Every artist has their own approach, I'm just trying to find mine. A few months ago, the idea of drawing a robot was just unpleasant, but now they're very entertaining. Solving the design problem of how to take the overall large shapes and make them look functional is a great exercise. About 15 minutes on each of these, most of that time was spent just thinking "how should that leg joint function" "how will the head look" "how will the arm work?" etc.

Impractical Augmentations

Messing around in the sketchbook. Currently focusing on getting a better understanding of robot and mechanical subject design. From the resources I've found (basically just looking at other artists' work) it seems to be a matter of having a large shape that reads interesting, then going into that and designing little panels, lines, and anything else to break up the surface and hint at detail. For research, I'm looking at  the work of Calum Alexander Watts, Keith Thompson, and Izumo Jyuki. So yeah, hopefully going to have a lot of robot thumbnails to put up soon, but for now, here are two fun sketches.

Tweet Tweet

So the story behind this guy is pretty interesting. At the studio, we had an exercise where we drew a still life and then made an imagined piece based on elements from the still life. The one we did had, among other things, a model crow, a venetian plague doctor mask,  and tree branches. I took all those, and made a rough sketch of a skeletal bird man with a crow perched on his finger. Took that idea, then developed it more in photoshop, added values, overlayed color, refined and and refined, and this guy was the end result. I definitely need hours upon hours more of practice rendering digitally, as well as figuring out a workflow, learning better anatomy, lighting...the list goes on and on. For now though, here's the first of many digital pieces I hope to start posting regularly.

Art Dump!

Ok, need to try and update more regularly. I know what the problem is: a combination of laziness to take the time to upload work and an insecurity that everything I make is very amateur, but honestly, that's something I just need to face and get over. It's only been four months of art school, of course everything is going to be amateur. The point of this blog for me is to keep a record of a lot of my work in one place, and dammit, I'll update more often, for better or worse. Enough of my rant, here's a lot of pages from the sketchbook, some homework assignments, and a self portrait.

Getting Started

Started classes with The Art Department and here at the Lemens' San Diego studio about two months ago. Before this I wasn't as serious as I could have been about improving, so any progress I made was clumsy and mostly guesswork. Anyway, here are some old works from high school and things I've done while I'm out here.