First post of the second month...

So here's the first assignment I've had to do for illustration this semester, it's not actually due until the 7th... she really gave us more time to work on it than she usually does. French gave us all stories, or excerpts from them, to illustrate. I got A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud by Carson McCullers. The chunk of it I got (yeah, it seems funny to cut parts out of a story that short) really just cut out the beginning, where it describes what people are wearing and the end. It started with "The man laid one hand on the paper boy's shoulders, then grasped..." and ended with "was he drunk?"

In any case I tried something new for this one (sort of... really I just tried something that I've tried before with terrible results again, with much better results) and it worked out pretty good. Rather than starting from scratch when I took it over from photoshop I pretty much just colored it and tweaked the value, leaving the initial drawing almost completely in tact. I kind of like it, but if I do it again it'd be better to have a more resolved drawing to go over...

Graphite drawing on tracing paper.


The value pattern (digital over graphite).


Final

The results were nice, method was quick, and it was all relatively painless... all in all it was a pleasant experience... which is good.

After this one month assignment it seems like things are going to be picking up pretty quick, we already have the next assignment with tight sketches due the same day as this final here... and we're already supposed to be thinking about the assignment after that... we'll see how this goes.

Concept - Nemesis project

So I've been taking a concept class this semester. Mostly all we've really gone over so far are different approaches for getting interesting character designs.

These are from an assignment where we took pictures of textures and abstract shapes and pulled characters out of them:

This is the second method we've used, the first involved making random ink blobs in painter and using them as a loose basis for silhouettes of characters. Those were a lot easier, and a lot more fun but I really got much better results this way... I might fix up some of the silhouette stuff and post it later.

100% Pure Awesome

Two of my friends and I decided to pull together and do something awesome during finals last semester. We made a life size cut out of our media teacher, Don Brandes, and stood it up in the classroom a half an hour before class with the lights out...

This was about the most awesome thing ever.

More Illustration...

One last thing from my illustration class last semester. We had to do an album cover based on two songs by an artist. This was based off of Ali Farka Touré, the two songs she gave us (for him at least) were Inchana Massina and Hawa Dolo. I wanted to go for something earthy and "reaching" and this is what I wound up with. It's cut paper painted with watercolor and seperated with foam core. There are some guitar stings in there too.

Sorting...

Alright, so I have some more pictures from last semester sorted out.

Soooo here's some more figure work, stuff I did outside of class. I did nearly all of my figure work out of class in copic wides which are fantastic fun. It's good to have something that sort of forces you to commit to a line, especially when working quickly. All the marker ones are under 5 minute poses for certain but I don't remember exactly how long they were.

This last one here was a longer pose, in the neighborhood of a couple hours, I honestly don't remember. It's water soluble crayons on toned sketchbook paper - also a lot of fun but not really as valuable of a learning experience as the markers... they're really non-committal and easy.

Also have a couple assignments I did for my illustration class... which honestly I haven't been too happy with. My heart really wasn't in most of the work I've been doing for that instructor... just haven't really been into the assignments. Anyway I felt pretty good about this one here. The assignment was to take a pair of antonyms and illustrate them as self portraits that were the embodiments of the words (the object was not to get likeness). From the options I picked calm and tormented.

Also here are the first two frames of a four frame storyboarding assignment. I did them all in one night... the second two frames... not so good.

The story after that goes: dog starts eating car, man has to kill dog to stop it and is sad... the end. ...yeah.

Got some stuff from my media class I'll be putting up eventually, we'll see.

Plodding along...

So the semester is over and here I am... thinking. I'm going to be putting up most of my work when I get around to it/find it. This is probably going to be the first of a series of posts... this is everything (of note) from my figure class. I've made some real progress this semester... we'll see where it goes from here.

Gesture

Longer

Portrait

Color

Portraiture has been one of my weak suits pretty much since I started drawing and I'm really feeling pretty good about the progress I've made there. The portraits are looking pretty passable and the likeness is decent...

Just plodding along...
I'll upload the FEWS highlights and shit from my other classes later