Various Stuffs, Mostly Bad

My last life drawing class ended in May. I'm actually not required to take any more drawing credits to get a degree in graphic design/illustration! Isn't that incredible? I understand that designers aren't draftsmen, but you'd think a basic art skill such as drawing....perhaps THE basic art skill...would be considered very important to design, even in this day and age.

All of my design projects have required lots of drawing. It isn't really fair to students who are weaker or less experienced in drawing that this is so. Nobody insists that they practice at home. Art classes don't have the drill-style homework science and math courses do, and, in fact, I've had teachers complain about me working on projects at home. There's this big disconnect between the reality of being an art student (requiring constant practice, study, and observation on your own hours to get the good grades), and how things go in class (4 hours a week of art in a class of 10 to 20 with techniques taught more by print outs than one-on-one instruction).

Don't get me wrong...I think having to please a professor and work within their limits has helped me push myself and get better. But the art instruction I've encountered seems to rely too heavily on the student being knowledgeable already. When you take math in the lower grades, you're made to do hundreds of calculation drills...and then, when you have to solve your first equation, you're prepared. Primary school teachers make you do spelling and grammar drills so that when you write something original, you don't look like a total doofus. It seems to me that teaching art should be no different. Before a teacher asks you to design or illustrate anything original, you should have had the practice under your belt. Homework: fill a sketchbook page with hands drawn in various positions, cubes in perspective from many different angles, gesture drawings of your family and friends...that sort of thing.

I don't have that sort of intensive practice, and I feel worse off for it. But I do doodle a lot and keep extensive notes. Also, this sketchblog helps to organize my progress chronologically: I can go through it and see how I've improved, what my mistakes have been, what works, and what doesn't.

Skill is a tool. If you are not skilled, it is hard to make something good. Even if you ARE skilled, it's hard, but at least you have the tools handy. Schools should give you the basic skills you need to be good, before asking you to be original and then grading you on your skills or lack thereof.

These are some doodles and sketches from the past 3 weeks, as I've ramped up my drawing in anticipation of the September school term.



These dinos were for another GameFAQs request topic. I tried to find some funny shapes for the bodies and heads. Dino anatomy is bizarre to us modern mammals.



Birds are just dinosaurs highly adapted to flight, and their anatomy fascinates me too. A Kentucky fried chicken doesn't look much like a bird anymore. Figuring out how your meat once articulated into a living, moving animal can be very puzzling if you're not familiar with how the animal is put together.



This page is from a minor league baseball game I attended. I tried to sketch without looking at the paper, but the players were just in constant motion, shifting around, swinging, looking around, etc. Most of my sketches were pretty bad.



This is a self portrait I did in my attic. The lighting was tricky for me. I don't know whether I should lighten or darken the face.



This was just some fucking around, trying to silently express a story...with a dumb goth thing on top.



An idea I had in my head, not composed at all.



I obviously am not well versed in drawing architecture.



My room mate is fun to draw because she's very pretty, and pretty goofy.



These were also for a request topic...trying to draw girls with guns without making the girls stereotypically sexy types. One kind of looks like Pippi. One kind of looks like Peewee from I.C.U., this Brooklyn band. One kind of looks like Doug Funnee...



A goofy animal drawing, trying out appealing shapes for an elephant. Teeth are funny.

GameFAQs requests, cooperation-style

I sometimes take drawing requests on GameFAQs.com if I'm feeling bored and want a challenge (you can see some others if you click the "GameFAQs" label on the sidebar). This time around, I decided to take the first 4 requests and chunk them into a single image. It's easier than coming up with 4 separate images, because in that case, you need to create a context for each one, and it can get kind of overwhelming if you're impatient like me.

So far I've done 5 rounds of drawings. They're often quite sloppy because I was trying to get them down as quickly as possible.

Round 5, a wooper fighting a bear over a shot gun, and that guy from The Offspring eating pretzels, fighting a giant pineapple monster with a ribbon sword, while underwater...Requests from geeoe, the moonlight knight, Cosmic, and da_gee_man:



Round 4 was me eating hands in the middle of a Zerg rush with a pear tree in a partridge. Ideas from Chimpy 4 (it was a slow hour) and HyperRyun:



Round 3 was a hamster riding a penguin while smoking a cigar that fires lasers that turn into flapjacks, with the Spy from Team Fortress 2 disguised as a penguin about to backstab the hamster. Requests from Valkskorn, twinkie daddy, DR583V3, and Lloyd1992:



Round 2 involved a giant catgirl (meganeko HAHAHA) wielding a giant frying pan and a jetpack, a raptor on rollerskates with a flamethrower, a macaroni cheesecake eating a slurpee with a fork, and the user LastExile...yeah. See. Ideas from Lastexile0, the moonlight knight, KageShinobi, and Googloplex.



Round 1 featured a dinosaur, the Heavy from TF2, and the Tank from L4D on a barbecue grill, with the dinosaur firing lasers and the Heavy attacking the Tank, and they're all talking on headsets. Thanks to RE4penguin, pizzaman95, Lifeless, and bigtwo.

Game Boy ad

July 31st marks the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy's North American release.



The Game Boy was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the same guy who created the NES Zapper, the Game & Watch, the directional pad, Metroid...and, um, the Virtual Boy, which was somewhat less successful and led to him leaving Nintendo 2 years before his death in a hit and run.

Gunpei had been with Nintendo since the 1960s, back when they were a dying playing card company. He moved up from maintaining the assembly lines to becoming one of Nintendo's principle idea men, when he came up with an idea for an extendo-grip toy called the Ultra Hand. It was a big hit. Nintendo went on to focus on children's toys, and later, electronics.

He followed a philosophy of using mature technologies in innovative ways, in order to keep costs low and products less buggy. He called it "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technologies". The Game Boy's green screen wasn't cutting edge even in 1989, but it allowed it to run on 4 AA batteries for many hours at a time. Competing game systems like the Lynx and Game Gear couldn't touch it.

Summer school projects

I'm taking a graphic design course over the summer. Right now we're on our third project, redesigning an ad. You can see the ad I'm using over here: [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Game Boy is Twenty.



The inked board with all 3 concepts.


Our second project was the "black and white problem". We had to design shapes in silhouette to express images or ideas. These are my sketches.


This is the final.


This is my first attempt at the black square problem our teacher assigned to us as our first project. I gave it another shot, but that copy is currently being graded. The images represent, left to right (first row) order, increase, playfulness and (second row) congestion, instability, and floating.

End of School Special

Some scribblings from my notebook.


These guys were for an idea I had for a game. The stoner would have special Earth majick powers. The pierced guy would have fire/knife fight majix.


This was an idea for my dinosaur collage. Ancient Greeks plus ancient animals. Ancient gods and legendary animals like the sphinx (man head on lion body) already make no sense, so a dinosaur head on a breasted human body makes even less sense and is even better.


This was an early sketch for my major fair poster.


This was my take on my housemate Pippi's "scary butterfly" cloth book.

Coney Island

I went to Coney Island yesterday. I figured it would be a good place to take pictures. I went to the Mermaid Parade in 2008, and there was lots of great, folky art around. And the parks are going to be knocked down for condos very soon.

I missed the hotdog eating contest, but I did see lots of interesting things. As a matter of fact, there was so much to see, hear, do, taste, and smell, it was a little overwhelming.