Figure Painting - round one!

This semester, I'm taking Figure painting with Danny Robbins. ( http://dannydoodle.blogspot.com/ - he does some awesome stuff, and is having a show at Glave Kocen Gallery this month (opening Friday)!) He was my teacher last semester, and I wanted to keep up the painting, and I love love love working with the figure, so this was the perfect class.

The first half of the semester's been painting a model in class, and then wiping the canvas out, and for homework doing studies of specific assignments. Here's the first half, with all the paintings from class. They were all done within the 2 hour period of class.


4 quick studies, each about 20 minutes



One of two planned studies, that turned into... just one. XD (assigned that way, not on my accord.)


For this one, each stroke had to be mixed on its own, as a way of introducing more color. I got too focused in on the one area, though.



Classmates modelled for each other


A whack at doing a full composition


4 compositional studies of the same scene



A whole composition and start of a painting. I really love this one!


Another full composition


uhh... another one? Not too wild about the face, but the stomach's great.


No model this day, so two of the students went up and modelled for us - each for one half of class. Good clothes practice.


Finally, a two-day painting!! This was the start...

And this was the result!
It could be better, but it turned out pretty well. Not sure if I'm going to keep it as it is, or possibly work with the painting a bit...

Our next assignment, we're going to be working on for two weeks, so that's four classes and 8 hours! I've got to figure out a composition and build a panel for it this weekend, so it should be exciting to work on.

Unfinished business!

Here's the piece I started for typography that I mentioned a few posts back- a visual interpretation of the song "Bottom of the Death Valley" by Dir en Grey. It took a lot of work to get it to this stage - a challenge working in Illustrator, for one, and two, in order to get the effect and shapes I wanted- but it was well worth it.
(Credit goes to Hibbary on DA for the texture- really helped pull it together!!) Unfortunately... I didn't put it into type. I may sometime in the future, but I get the feeling it'll be difficult to translate into type? I do want to work with the lyrics though. The image was based mostly on how it looks to me musically (listen and guess which elements are what!) though no doubt the watery descent in the lyrics plays a part in the image too.



For the longest time, when I didn't know the words (and even now), what stood out was the repeated "I, I, I, I." I thought it was the word "ai" for love (which for all I know could be a play on words..) I just love it how this man's voice is able to express such heart-wrenching emotion.. I wish to do that with my art - Kyo gave me a goal.
I don't know if this piece succeeds at that, but it's my tribute nonetheless.

This is a test

So... I came to realize I hadn't drawn any of my characters in the style I use in SOCA - Society of Communication Artists, in which we do figure drawing every Friday. I've developed a watercolor-and-brush-pen method that works really well for me, and I like experimenting with the colors, line width, using blacks as shadows, blending the lines with more colors, etc. But I rarely use this for anything other than at SOCA, instead opting to do clean pencil work of my characters. I think it's one part I'm afraid of the paper in my 'fun' sketchbook bleeding, and... well, ruining the picture. I attended a demo by Sterling Hundley, who's working on a whole "controlled chaos" theory, and totally destroyed his drawing... which I think made this whole thing click.

Also, talking with my friend Erin about the topic brought up the fact that you often want to show precisely what that character is when you draw them - there's a certain fear in obscuring the features, etc. It's rather interesting...





These first two were my first attempts at applying this technique to fictional images, done about a month ago as studies for a painting (which I may or may not do) for honors. The first was just goofing around, the second being the real idea. I was surprised to find it that she looked like she was laughing...



The first attempt today. It's Sean, and I was going at it half-heartedly. (only doing it in ink...) And even though his face isn't showing, it's still so much Sean. It's one of those where I didn't like it too much when I did it, but now I do - I especially like his hair, and its emotion quite a bit.



Trigger!! I was listening to Lady Gaga, and for some reason, Trigger thought he'd show his fantabulous self. :P I hated how this one started, but I kept painting over it, and it developed into this. The hair and anatomy are way off (wtf are those shoulders???), but I like how lively a portrait it became. It's pretty close to accurate for how he looks.... I think...



And more Trigger! I love how this one turned out so much. Trigger is a demon, and can shape shift- so here, he's taking a form somewhere between demon and human, hamming it up. The anatomy's off, again, but I'm really happy with the looser coloring. And I need to draw Trigger like this more often! I love exploring all the different forms he could take.

We'll see where this method takes me. It's in its infancy, and these were all very quickly done, so I'm curious as to how a more planned-out piece would turn out!

Digital Drawing

This semester, I'm taking a digital drawing course from Tin Salamunic - so I'll be posting here a few of the exercises and assignments that I do for that class.

Our first assignment was to do a self portrait.
Having just finished one, I was slightly bummed, but alright with the idea, since it was a different media. These were both done from the webcam on my laptop, not photos.

This was the realistic one. I did it using both the knowledge I gained in painting, as well as some helpful advice from a friend - use 100% opacity!! I was driving myself nuts trying to use different opacity brushes. It's like the digital equivalent of my painting teacher's oft-given advice - "use more paint!" It works beautifully, but for this one I got a bit carried away with the harsh lines.

This was the more abstract version. I drew myself with the hair I soon imagined I'd have (and now do have) - a short, spiky 'do - and did the style in mimicry of Patrick Nagel's work (which has been ripped off a million times by nail salons.) Very 80's work, but you should check him out if you don't know about him - very clean, dynamic, sexy work. Of course, mine is somewhat silly, and using colors that are brighter and more to my liking... though my teacher said "Tank Girl?" about it. It wasn't intentional, but there is some sort of odd similarity there.

Then, there's some in-class work.

These two were the most impressive ones from a series of exercises from photos.

Kikuchiyo from Seven Samurai!
We had to draw this one using only shapes of black, and we could erase out as well. The next one, (a drawing of Mad Max) we had to do using only line. Tin said artists were either line people, or shape people - and thought more in line or shape. I'm DEFINITELY a shape person! I realized that's why I like painting, and why my drawings are so sketchy - I build up shape, and then outline it. (Though I don't need as much building up as I used to!)

Alfred Hitchcock!
We could use different opacity brushes on this one.


From a different day, a still life from objects we brought in.
My favorite part, hands down, is the hard drive, particularly the glow on it! The glowstick itself, however, gave me absolute hell. I have to study glowing objects some more!
The texture is of particle board, for the table, distorted in PS. I don't have the source, sorry!!

Going along with more exercises, here's some more recent ones.


A geisha from a photo, colored cel-shaded style, with a color palette from a Mucha piece. Definitely not as clean as I'd like, but it's still fairly nice.


Old man, also from a photo! We had to use custom brushes, and this was really my first time experimenting with them. I made my own, some of which were more useful than others. Not finished, but it got really entertaining playing around with the brushes for different effects!

Now for some more finished work!

This was an image of my character Madge, a 1950's... entrepreneur, let's call her, that I did for a tutorial showing how I work. It's a picture I've wanted to do for awhile, so I was glad to get it done. She needed a glamour shot - she was a glamorous woman!
...was...
The image was for an icon for use on the forum for the RP.
Photo texture/image was free-for-use stock from texturestockbyhjs on DA.


Vault billboard, which went from concept sketches to final. My idea was to market the soda more towards women, or be more gender-neutral, anyway, without alienating the current audience. Not hugely satisfied with it, I need to fix the text so that it's smaller, and I want to hand letter it so it's wispy like her, and the figure needs more tweaking and refinement as well.



Casablanca poster - we had to redesign a movie poster. The sketch got approved Tuesday, and this was turned in that Thursday! Short turnaround! I still haven't gotten my critique back on it, but I can see a couple of things that need tweaking (like the oddly placed windows that make "Ingrid" hard to read, tangents... that design around the lettering...) The idea was to do it more like paper cutouts, evoking more of a 1960's design/illustration vibe.
Texture by pareeerica on flickr. I really, really need to use textures more inventively. This one was just to get the look of it being old and printed, but I'd also like to try different textures on the cutouts themselves..

Anyway, more work will be posted as I make it! No more art dumps! Sorry about that!

Final paintings

I forgot to post the finals of these paintings!

Here's the self portrait, all finished. So much work went into this... it's crazy. I'm very proud of what I did, but.. I do want to move on from it!


This is more of a tentative "final." It's as far as I got by the end of the semester. Perhaps I'll pick it up and finish it sometime, but not now!

I got extremely frustrated, somehow, with these portraits at the time. I was trying to force too much from them, instead of letting them be. I was way too stiff, and way too straightforward. This semester, I'm working on curing that!

Winter Break!

Winter break was fairly productive artistically! I got really into actually working on things I was interested in again. I felt like I hadn't made anything that was from my stories or, more importantly, from the depths of my heart in a long time (as corny as that sounds) and these resulted:


"...What do I do now?"

"In a time like this, where is God? For all of their fuss, where are the powers at play? They are not here. Here is a forgotten child.

There is no right and there is no wrong - there are no excuses. There are only reasons.
Nothing will absolve you of this. But there is plenty to explain it."

A storyboard sketch, as it were, of a scene from a story I wrote/ended up finishing off over the break. It's not perfect, but it got me started.


"Why so sad, fair maiden?"

What is she about to say? She seems afraid...

I did what started as another sketch of Strych... and I let it come out as she wanted, instead of forcing it.

I also did this as a digital inking practice, trying to get it very, very clean - because my previous work was extremely sketchy, often left at the pencil sketch if scnanned.

I'm playing around with the ideas of how to do animation cels, in the 'true colors' of an object (like if it was in bright white light,) then adding shadows and light in different colors, and seeing what texture could do.

Texture from hibbary on DA


Black or White?

I always was really hesitant to make Strychnine super white.
I knew she wasn't the same skin tone as Sean, but the yellow-ish weird color I made her never seemed to fit right...

I think she's actually mixed... her mom being a redhead, of Appalachian Scotch-Irish origin, and her dad being from a middle-class suburban African American family... though I'm pondering if his dad might have been from another country...
They were both hippies, I've known that from the start. And her dad had dreads. :D Probably still does.

But now, looking at it, I feel so much more comfortable looking at the black Strychnine.
That's how she should be. A lot of sketches I've done of her, she looked more black. But I was too afraid to write someone of a different race than my own, too afraid I'd fuck it up.

And I'm not saying I won't, but I'll try not to.

(Texture also from Hibbary. XD)



Lastly, we have a trade! This was done as a secret santa for flarekitty on DA, of her character Blink. I also had a lot of fun with this one, doing really clean line work and such, and playing around with different color inking.


You can read the full descriptions and see some older work over at the DA page: http://seira-chan33.deviantart.com/gallery/

HAVE SOME TYPOGRAPHY

I took a typography course this semester, and man did it throw me for a loop! I went from being totally clueless about the subject, and extremely frustrated in critiques, not knowing what we were talking about, to knowing good typography when I see it. I went from "It's just words on a page, I don't understand!!!" to thinking about negative space, composition, typefaces, how to use them for different applications, what is the most legible way to arrange things... all sorts of very very helpful information. I learned everything from how to properly make colors in illustrator for printing (SLIDERS!) to the flow of type on a page. I learned a lot of it in the process of mistakes and critique, and in the end, I feel like I can really use what I've learned in any of my future pieces, in everything from typography to paintings. Hey, maybe comics won't be so confusing to lay out for me anymore, either!
Mr. Meganck, if you are reading this, thank you so much!

Here's my final assignment, a poster displaying a typeface. I picked Futura, because let's face it - my typographic heart is owned by this font.

I looked at both Swiss-school grid typography and Bauhaus typography for this, to evoke something similar to the time it came from. Futura for me has always held this sense of vintage futurism, and hope for that future- like the type used on schools and buildings at NASA in the 1950's and 60's... but here I was going for more of what it really began as.
Also, listened to Benny Benassi music while making it.

Now, to compare...
Here is my second assignment (we don't talk about the first one.)
We had to make a composition with gray rectangles:

and then convert that into type.

Aaack look at my bad handwriting.
I lettered this all by hand, meticulously. I got a little bored, so if you're curious, try reading out some of the nonsense words I put in the boxes... Though one segment is text from my book.
Also done in Futura... I can see that my typography work has some sort of... modernist? slant. Minimalistic, "retro." Which is a little odd, considering my drawings are so sketchy and cluttered. I think part of this course was me learning how to simplify, and pay attention to negative space, and understand that style of typography I admire, and that's helping with my figurative work.
We started off hand-lettering so that we could better appreciate the shapes of the actual letters themselves, and... that worked!

Then, we had an assignment where we made compositions with one, two, and three letterforms. The second was my best.

A 2 and a J from the American Typewriter face. I chose them specifically for their curls.

We had to then design a book cover with the title "The Letterform," and do a composition with letterforms.

I used Univers on this one, and made a sort of character/Chinese-chop-style shape out of "LTFM.", which I'm fond of. This was put in the hallway with others from my class, an honor!

We also had to design three interjections- I did "Oh GEEZE," "Oh SHNAPS," and "oh NO." The latter two turned out the best.

Meganck didn't understand it, but that's ok. I used Hattenschwieler, which, let me warn you, needs careful examination of its letter spacing. You have to watch it!

On this one I got the critique of "It looks like you just murdered someone..." which I consider one of the best comments I've gotten on a piece ever. XD

Then there was an abbreviation to do - I chose "LED" - light emitting diode.

I varied the color in the letters so that it'd sparkle a bit when you looked at it, and it really startled my classmates when it was in printed form, which is just what I was going for. I went through so many color/design options, it was ridiculous. The type is based off of FUTURA again, but I did all of the circles in illustrator.

Then we had a series of three assignments we had to do in which the type was legible, creative, and a combination of the two.
Legible was Times New Roman and flush left, pretty boring.
I loved my second piece, though.

Again, I was going for a minimalist style. I was listening to a lot of Franz Ferdinand, so that was a part of it - thinking of Russian Constructivist typography and such. Also, it ended up looking sort of 80's(or 90's)-inspired...
The third part, though, wasn't as successful, in my opinion.

It works, but it isn't amazing. I don't know... Around this point, I lost confidence in what I was doing with this class, and suddenly became lost - probably worrying about the things that I'd learned, and over-thinking my pieces.
Also, these are intended as a parody of Richmond weather - it's really not too far from the truth!

The next assignment was to do a composition around an important historical date.
I had wanted to do something related to Vlad the Impaler (this being around Halloween...), but Meganck suggested Dracula would be more well known.

I really struggled on this one a lot, trying to come up with the best way to do it. I kept tending to go more illustrative with it than I should. In the end, it's abstracted from illustrative ideas, if that makes sense. XD The idea was a crowd of people, London, and Dracula in their midst. Even if that's not how it reads, the feel is finally appropriate, and I'm happy for that. It just took it awhile to get there.
The typeface is Isabella. I have some issues with the type running upwards (it shouldn't) and uh.. the grammar on that sentence there, but I'm not too sure how to word it otherwise. (Stoker didn't publish it, the company did...) The copy I used was my own overly-dramatically-poetic text.

Now, for the second to last. We had to do a poster with a quote by a famous person (movies were ok too.) I HAD to do a piece for Fight Club, I just had to.

I love this movie, and I had to make something that would do it justice. After going through dozens and dozens of quotes, I settled on this one, which was the best as a stand alone "quote." I love the narration in Fight Club, but it wasn't as powerful as this. I had a much worse composition of this, and after suggestions from the class, I ended up using Helvetica Neue Condensed Black for "Everything" instead of Hattenschwieler, and Myriad Pro and Helvetica for the rest. I also distressed the font a lot to achieve a more appropriate look for it, which I hope isn't TOO distressed...
I'm so glad I got the acid green look of the film into this piece as well.
I think this marks the turning point where I saw "Ok, I AM getting better at this,"and got my confidence back in my typography... Also, it makes me wonder if what Tyler said was true? I was going through a rough patch at the time, and wondered that...

So there you have it. A semester of typography work. I hope it shows how I've come along. I struggled along the way, but now I'm feeling like I'm on a better track.
I'm working on one more piece for extra credit, based off of a song. I'm going to do it on "The Bottom of Death Valley" by Dir en grey. It's a song I always tend to go back to of theirs, a haunting piece... But I am having trouble with it. I can see the piece in my head, but it's not drawing properly. We have to do one piece with abstract marks, and another with type, and the first part's being difficult. Hopefully, I'll succeed, and you'll all see the results here when it's done.