Some work from school

All of these are works in progress.



This was for Photoshop class. We had to collage together various scans of fabric to create a summer scene. The boy and the monkey are from an encyclopedia on the events of 1970, and I had to color them because they were originally in black and white. The rest were embroidery with various filters or color gradients applied to make them look more like a naturalistic scene.



This is for Intro. I guess severed limbs are becoming part of my style.



For Adobe Illustrator class, we had to make a building to demonstrate our knowledge of shapes, grouping, and color swatches. I created the double curve on the onion dome by layering two circles over the dome and turning them the same color as the sky, and the arched windows with more circles over rounded rectangles. The soda bottle is a stretched circle. The crescent moon is two circles, slightly displaced. The chain link fence is a group of rounded rectangles. The pennant string is a warped ellipse. I went crazy with the curves.



For Adobe Illustrator class we also have to design a pattern. This is one I did today, inspired by the "Monkey Vs. Robot" song. Oh crap, I just realized the video was made at Coney Island!

Some more from class

This is a collage for my first project, which was to create a figure out of characters. He is a Xerox dog. I like the bad-copy textures on the D, but my professor wanted me to blacken them for my portfolio.



This was for my second project, which was to design a sign for a Coney Island business. Have you been to Coney Island lately? The only rides left are the Big 3: the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, and the Parachute Drop. It is not very inspirational, to say the least. Before, it might have been run down, but now it feels completely gutted.

Looking at this drawing reminds me of how much I hate working in color. I have no knack for it. I had fun with the inking, though. I had to rush the building and the professor hated it.

This was my third project: redesigning the Ford logo. I haven't been keeping up with the news, but I'm pretty sure Ford is heading the same way as Coney Island...I tried to set that aside as I created this. I wanted to convey the ideas of grace and speed, which are things I like about riding in cars (to be honest, I hate cars and don't even have a license). Originally I had the single Garamound f with the road stripes substituting for the crossbar, but I decided that was too confusing, and added the little flash across the f to adequately express that the f was a letter and not just a weird curve. It also makes the logo less static, I think. I had to use the copier's negative function to create the black, because my markers weren't giving me an even color.

End of school special

This was for an aborted typography project. Obama looks like he's swallowed a canary.



This is a sketch from last post, colored. It illustrates the idea of families being mostly cobbled together from dead body parts, string and tar.



This is another colored sketch, illustrating the idea that crows don't like to ride the bus, but Sniz from Nickelodeon's Kablam show is pretty much ok with it.




This is an idle sketch from illustration.



This man's fingers are melting due to his cigarette habit.

Sketches from Illustration

These are some pen sketches I did in Illustration and Illustration Style.





And this, which is for 3 Cups of Tea, a book that reads like an early 20th Century adventure novel. It's about a guy who goes climbing in Afghanistan and winds up wanting to build schools for the poor people living there. I don't think this came out too awesome, though the girl looks like a cross between a purple ninja and a Medieval Virgin Mary.

The Jungle Book

This was for my children's book project. I wonder if I made Mowgli look more African than Indian, though giving him dreads made sense to me. I mean, I don't think a kid raised by wolves would have silky straight hair. It would get frizzy and lock up in spots even if he were Chinese.

Some depictions of Mowgli are quite pale. There's a lot of variety in skin color with native Indians, but a pale, European-looking Mowgli is weird to me. I mean, one of the cool things about Mowgli is that he's an Indian boy, not a English dude like Tarzan. He's not foreign to the village near his jungle. And there are lots of children's stories about English kids, not so many about Indian ones.

I originally used red to denote shading on Mowgli's body, but then I decided it was better to use a 6B pencil. Pressing harder on a regular pencil gets you darker, but with a colored pencil it just makes the color more saturated, which doesn't work well for shading. In fact, I went back over Mowgli and added yellow and pale brown (same as the tree) to his skin, after the intial round of red and 6B, to correct my problem with saturated shadows.

The second problem I had with Mowgli is that I inked him after coloring him, and it looked bad. I thickened his outline, then selectively thickened the lines within his body along more raised forms, like his cheeks. I still think his eyes need work.

I used black ink for Bagheera to distinguish his black fur from Mowgli's dark hair and pencil shadows. I think that was a good choice, because otherwise there would be too little contrast.

The two layers of jungle are cyan with green over it, and yellow with green over it. I didn't have access to much variety of green pencil, so I had to mix it on the paper.

Progress

This is an incompletely colored drawing I did of a witch. I'm thinking of doing some Halloween cards to sell at Everything Goes Book Cafe.



This is a copy of the inking job I did on my Illustration project. It's the same project I was discussing in my recent post on inking. It is currently fully colored, but the copy machine didn't do such a good job of preserving those colors, so I'll be taking a photo of it soon. Unfortunately, scanning it isn't an option yet.



This is quite ancient. Remember when I entered the major fair poster contest and placed second, and was going to take a photo of my fully colored poster? Well, I never got around to it until just now. But that OTHER poster I was just talking about, you know...that'll be TOTALLY different!



Here's a sketch for my next Illustration Style project: a poster for my college's EcoFestival. New York has an annual City of Water day that promotes green initiatives in the city. There are actually kayak launches all around NYC. A boathouse in Manhattan even provides free boats and training. I went to a session once or twice, but I just wound up arguing with my friend a lot and drinking too much afterward.



This is a...version...of my Computer Art ad. I say "version" because I actually did half the design on a copy machine, instead of using Quark. It's really frustrating to me that I only have 4 hours of class time to work with the program. Computer lab hours are going to increase soon, though, so I'll have my pick of time slots.



Here is a bad photo of my completed watch design project. Notice how the flash is artistically reflecting off the glass!



These are some sketches I did for my latest Typography project. We have to transform one letter into another, and tell a story with it. Here I am, transforming a Bookman typeface-inspired P into an R, by making the letters into a stylized frog. I used Bookman because I had a sheet handy showing all the letters and numbers in that typeface. It's the same one I used for my Brooklyn Book Fest poster, and some of the watch designs.

Where I've been for the past 2 weeks

Bacon in a Bottle logo design.

These two are for my Computer Art class. We're learning how to use QuarkXpress 8. I've never even used a Mac before, so it's pretty confusing, but I've done print work and know how to use other image manipulation programs, so it's not THAT bad. Right now, my main nemesis is Bezier curves, cuz I want to do some bacon fat white and yellow stripes under the logo text, like the Coca Cola logo.



These are for my Typography class. My professor wants "practical" yet "nontraditional" watch face designs, which drives me kind of crazy, because it seems like she likes my designs better when I just scribble a jumble of numbers together. She would probably disagree with this and say she prefers asymmetry and sophisticated compositions. I missed class one day because I was working the primary elections, so I'm out to sea on what she expects. I just started playing with the numbers for these two and crossed my fingers that she likes them.




Speaking of which, these are some subway studies from Primary Day. I wasn't interested in being very realistic. I just wanted to copy down as many little details as I could.





These three are from my first day of Illustration. We had to wander around campus and sketch interesting compositions. My professor didn't like my compositions very much and said she'd prefer more cropping and asymmetry. I actually think one of my faults is that I often don't include the whole figure in the frame, so I've been working against that to make my pictures clearer. But I agree the mongoose picture could benefit from tight cropping on the two opponents' faces. We actually DO have a stuffed mongoose and cobra on campus, right next to my old Art History classroom.



Right now we have to design a poster for the Brooklyn Book Festival. This is my sketch for it.





These are studies for my poster. The last one includes a sketch I did of Housing Works when I went to see Dr. Frank at his book release show for Andromeda Klein. MC Chris was there, too, and was awesome. There were also a bunch of other folks, including a pretty good band that played 2nd. I never caught their name but they rocked.



Finally, this is the latest version of my first Illustration Style project. We had to paste our images on to the article. My professor recommended I add gray to the background. She liked the grassy texture I used for the gray. I think I should have grayed in the foreground, too, but oh well. It's turned in.

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.

Screaming Yellow Something

This guy needs a Xanax.

I think the background should be cooler...

I used a yellow watercolor pen for the body, then went over it with a green pencil for shading. I like the effect.

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.