More stuff from class

So the bunny picture from April is finished. Trees are scary!


I'm so used to drawing in cramped notebook margins, I have to remind myself not to crop things unnecessarily. Like the top of this guy's head. I like to draw ear whorls accurately when I'm sketching from life. They're not particularly important to establish a likeness, but everybody's is different.


Our drawing classes have thrown us into the deep end with nude models. I had a hard time with her. I couldn't seem to get everything down within her 15 minute poses, and then she'd shift a little for the next round.


The naked guy was somewhat easier. I walked into class late, but I basically had this drawing done by the end of my first 15 minute session. Once again, I cropped out the figure unnecessarily.


I don't think this is as good as the first, but the pose is leaning less and he has some feet.

Design I Assignments

This was my first project for Design I. We had to use stipling, which I despise, so I picked a high contrast image with lots of black and white. It was traced from a photo in Natural History, a magazine I loved to read as a child. Stephen Jay Gould wrote monthly essays for 'em. The original had 2 more birds in the middle, which I removed for clarification.


This was my second project, based on a sketch I did of my housemate, Pippi. The assignment was "line". My teacher insisted I do the contour drawing, although I had second thoughts about it and wanted to work on the below project instead.


This is still in progress. The trees are from a photo I took of Battery Park; the rabbit is from Teniel's illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I had wanted to do this one instead of the contour drawing because I like creating textures and shading with line, and also the Pippi drawing just seemed too easy and simple.

Major

My college is holding a poster contest to promote one major or another. My original idea was some shitty watercolor concept involving fishies. I bought illustration board, I took out a book from the library on painting, I practiced, I did a wash, I sketched in the elements I wanted, I colored it in with pencil over the paint...and I hated it so much I started completely over.

Look, I don't like to paint. I like drawing cartoons. So I decided that the best concept would use the fact that that I can draw in ink halfway decently. It would also have to be something I cared about. Not fishies. I mean, I like a nice lemony tuna or salmon, but mostly I don't give a shit.

I made the original sketch for this in art history class. Then I did an extremely rough, light sketch directly on the paper I was using, shaped it up a little, and inked it, without transferring it or doing any more preliminary work than the notebook drawing. I've been reading John K's blog, and I am impressed by how he preserves spontaneity in his final drawings. He does construct his characters, and very carefully, but they never come out looking stiff. I also kept in mind his theories of how to draw facial features and expressions as I inked.

I attempted to give some idea of hierarchy by using Sharpies of varying width, but I think I could have done a better job on this. The monkey's hands should have been done entirely with a smaller marker.

I tried digitally coloring it, but it didn't work well at all. The colored pencils I used instead were surprisingly good. I'll take a picture of it later.

Scribbles (moreso)

Arm

Howling Black

This was supposed to be the title panel of a comic I was working on.

Flyering @ the Ferry for the Lighthouse Museum