Friday, January 4, 2013

Friday Night Sketching

Had a bad migraine all day and I need to be back to work this weekend, so I did some light sketching instead of my usual masochistic labor camp-style art training. It was also a good opportunity to refresh my memory on Peter Han's dynamic sketching methods.

I attempted to draw different versions and poses of a tiger from reference (random images I found on the web). Doing it digitally allowed for some cool quick rendering effects which would've taken forever with pen and markers. Hooray for my tablet.

Coolest thing about tigers: nature already put contour lines on them. They are like a walking drawing aid with big teeth and an appetite for mammals. 




Thursday, January 3, 2013

Good Time

Reduced the value study painting time to 2 hours. I'm comfortable with that for now. I'll need to pick another subject for my next attempt.

Here's the new value study, 100 gestures sheet, and another row of skulls. My goal is to draw 200 of these before I switch to drawing faces.




Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Good Start

I'm off to a good start. Completed my 100-a-day gesture drawings (takes about 1 hour to complete with pose rotation set to 30 seconds), a full value study based on Matt Kohr's tutorial (ref is on the left, my study is on the right; took me approx. 4 hours; still too slow) and managed to put in 30 Loomis face construction iterations.

The original size for the 10x10 sheets is 4000px  and the vase from the value study is approximately 2000x1000.

Head construction requires a lot of ellipses, which is a challenge, since my hands are still wobbly with the tablet *argh*. More practice should take care of it. Anyway, not a bad start for this new year.




Friday, December 21, 2012

Success and Failure

This has been bugging me for quite a while. The issue is too well-known to many artists: (un) supportive environment.

Regardless of your circumstances, there is one thing to be aware of : if you don't give up on yourself, you will always win in the end. If you have the desire to create, you need to know that it's a rare gift; few people have the courage to practice and develop it.

I'm sharing this with those who have the same drive and passion as I do, yet are not blessed with the loving and supportive environment that almost every successful artist had by virtue of having a caring family, or by creating it themselves. Becoming a good artist is not easy; some say it's as difficult as becoming a neurosurgeon. It goes without saying, there will be many setbacks and "failures" along the way. But those are not real failures, they are lessons to show you what you need to improve in your art; we all have to deal with these problems: hours and hours of additional practice makes those flaws go away. It's not impossible.

The only real failure is to stop trying, surrendering and giving up.

Being an artist is not just a profession or a craft, it's who you are. It's a lot like being left-handed: you can be re-trained, you can learn to act just like everybody else, you can write with your right hand all your life, but it doesn't change the fact that you were born and you will die a lefty. 

Removing the negativity that robs you of the energy and the will to create, surrounding yourself with courage, strength and inspiration: that is the only way an artist can overcome the environment and develop the full potential of the creative being inside.

Never stop trying, never give up.


Tuesday, December 18, 2012

End of CGMA 2012 Fall Quarter

My Dynamic Sketching class is coming to a close. It was incredibly tough and extremely rewarding. I feel I've made tremendous progress in the last 8 weeks. This week is dedicated to tidying up all the work done through the quarter and completing the final redesign.

On that note, here are some highlights from the last 2 months of my training:





Not only did I make a few nice drawings, I also get to put my design skills to good use.

For the final redesign (the submersible craft) I decided to make a full circle and use a very basic organic shape. My goal was to apply all the techniques and principles that I've learned in the past 2 months and turn a simple abstract shape into a representation of an object. I hope the final result makes sense.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

2 weeks of animals

Hi everyone! I've spent the last 2 weeks studying animals. First skeletons and then the real thing. After drawing relatively still subjects for a few months, I was shocked by how much everything moved, especially when I wanted to draw it.

A trip to the zoo gave me new insight into drawing from live models.

In this case, my models were peacocks who couldn't decide if they were more interested in me or pails full of deer feed. It was good to see that bears are as lazy in captivity as they are around my house: lounging around and scratching seemed to be the order of the day.

Here are a few sketches from my time spent at the museum and the zoo.




Tuesday, November 6, 2012

It's all about bugs

My new CGMA quarter started. I'm taking advanced dynamic sketching and principles of perspective.

This past week my sketching class was all about bugs. I had to produce 6 pages of drawings with 3 final pages being clean renderings of bugs and 1 page featuring a bug-based conceptual design.