Pastels

It's gangster Brandon!!!! Apparently I need to learn what a cigarette looks like when it's burning...

And here is Brandon's portrait of me! I'm so eeeeeeevil! I should start working on my evil laugh...

I love all his color, he has a much more painterly approach than I do. Check him out at http://brandonpikeart.blogspot.com/

Clothed Figure Dump

I love clothed figure drawing! These are all 20 minute poses, from throughout the semester...

Cattle rustlin'

Come an' get it!

Ok this one was 30 minutes...

An evening (or two) with Mike Mattesi

So I had the opportunity last week of going to a two night workshop with Mike Mattesi, author of a book called Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators. He has worked for Disney, Dreamworks, Marvel (and many others) and is now teaching at Pixar. His philosophy revolves more around the movement of the figure rather than finding accurate shapes.

So these are the drawings I did at the very beginning of the first night, before he taught us anything. These ones were two minute drawings.

So these are 30 second poses, where he told us we could use only ONE line to find the "biggest event" of the pose. So each line here is a different pose. We did a TON of these, pretty much spent the entire first night on this. 

By the end of the night we were allowed to add a few more lines, while still focusing on the main action. (One minute drawings)

So the second night we focused on the rhythm of the figure, while still holding onto the principles we learned the night before. He showed us how the forms flow into each other... (all of the following are 2 minute poses)

Almost.....

Getting there....

Yes!! Got it!! Finally!!

Aaaaaaaand then he made us do blind poses.... (drawing without looking at your paper) yuck!

But after a ton of those it finally started to click! It actually looks like a person! I swear I didn't cheat and look...

Some final 3 minute poses (we could look for these)! So although it started off a bit rough... it was a great experience!! My quick poses improved a TON! Plus it was great to learn a different way of thinking about figure drawing. Yey!

Editorial Portrait

Watercolor portrait of Chris!! I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, I spent a lot of time on this one. Plus now I know how to paint smoke and fire! Yey!

I wonder what will happen?

A pen and ink assignment from Illustration 1, emphasizing pattern and texture. This is a little bit of a play on Alice in Wonderland... a very little bit.  So what do you think will happen when she pulls the rope? Hmmm... DOES she pull the rope?

ZOO!

Another watercolor assignment. Why I chose to paint a polar bear against a white background? I don't know... perhaps I like to torture myself. And once again... terrible picture quaility, blah blah blah, I'll get a proper camera someday.

Perhaps not so Wicked after all...

Who'd have guessed that we'd ever be rooting for the wicked witch? I LOVE this play, so when we got an assignment to create an entertainment poster, I knew what I wanted to do before our teacher could finish explaining the project. This one is done in pen and ink, and then colored in photoshop.

Freaky

I love circus freaks... they're so...freakish. Ugh... sorry again about the terrible picture quality. My camera hates me.

He's very emotional...

So here's an assignment from Heads and Hands 2 where we had to practice expressions. Happy, sad, disgust, anger, surprise and fear... see if you can guess which is which!

Character Design

Some drawings and final character designs from my Digital Imaging final. It was an awesome assignment, we worked as a group and were given a story-line and a list of characters that we had to design for it. It was basically a futuristic roman society. So the characters I designed the were the evil emperor and slave. Other characters included the hero, soldiers (good and bad),  and senators (good and bad).  A big part of the assignment was learning to work in a group and figure out a way to unite our personal drawing styles. It was a great learning experience if nothing else.

Watercolor!

My first watercolors! Well... since kindergarten. These were for my Illustration 2 class, we had to show two different types of light. I chose to do one night scene, and one artificial light source. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. The gnomes were really fun to paint and I've discovered that I REALLY like watercolor. Sorry about the crummy picture quality, my poor little camera is on its last legs.

First Post!

Ok, so I guess it's time for me to jump onboard with this blog thing. I don't have much to put on here yet, so I'm afraid you'll have to settle for some oldies for now. I HOPE that this will be a good way for me to keep everyone updated on what I am working on in school... we shall see how that turns out. So here we go....