Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Chippewa Nature Center

I had a chance to drive down to the Chippewa Nature Center this afternoon to draw some of the stuffed animals they had on display in hopes of eventually working my way up to gesture drawing the live animals at the observation window.

Each took about an hour.

Click to enlarge.


Thursday, March 24, 2011

Horsing Around

I was originally going to title this post "A Horse is a Horse, A Horse of Course" but that seemed like it would be to much work for an obscure reference. Speaking of that theme song, can Mr. Ed really be "famous" if Wilbur is the only one he talks to? I guess television theme songs of the sixties lied to us all the time. I mean, can you really call Gilligan, "a mighty sailing man"?

Anyway, I had a recent freelance assignment that involved drawing a horse. What the client didn't specify is how simple they wanted the horse to be, on par with that of a coloring book page.

So I had all these sketches of horses and as far as the assignment went, all for naught.

Not wanting to waste the opportunity, I finalized a select few with ink for effect.

Enjoy. Click for full size.




Thursday, March 17, 2011

X-Men First Class



These are the character posters that were made by paid professionals to promote the upcoming movie "X-Men: First Class". A Floating Head inside of a silhouette. Wow. 

I can't even look at the the Professor X poster without cringing. His eyeball is being cut off by white negative space!

So when SuperPunch announced they were having a contest to design a  new poster for the movie that would be "sleeker and sexier", I jumped onboard, and produced this:


I will say, that this may not be the best entry, because I did put it together rather hasty and because with only so much information available about the actual story it was difficult to judge what would be important. Not the mention the obvious trouble I had with creating a drawing, but not having color in mind at the time. Others might also call me a hypocrite (and hey, it wouldn't be the first time) for using floating heads as well, but this is my attempt at a "take that" to the original posters, a way of saying "I can do that do, but not only can I make it more dynamic, I can do it better by hand!"

Further Comments and Critiques are always welcome and encouraged.

Mud Bath



I was reading a while back about Howard Pyle and his words of wisdom to young artists about inspiration and creativity. He suggested that during figure drawing classes and poses, don't just look at the model, but use the model as a springboard for a story, or something to that effect.

Anyway, here's a pose I dug up from my figure drawing class and placed the model in the part of a girl down on the farm looking to beat the heat by taking a mud bath with the piggies. I blame the inspiration for this particular setting on having seen "The Wizard of Oz" over the weekend, and having a bit of a laugh at the scene at the beginning were Dorothy, who apparently doesn't do any work, falls into the cleanest pig pen in the universe!

This took up pretty much all of Monday, but I was really into it, and there were a lot of different elements to it, getting the figure right, drawing the pigs, the reflection in the watery mud, the caking texture of mud, which was by far the hardest part. If I could go back and do it again, I'd redo that hair. I think I had a tendency to get lost in trying to draw hair strands rather than take the thing as a whole, oh well, live and learn.

I would have colored it, but things are getting a little busy around here. Maybe later. Enjoy!

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Brush Robes

Melodie the model helps me practice with drapery with brushes.

Expressions and Underwear

Melodie the model poses in her underwear. 



I do like the expression I got to throw in has here on page two. Maybe next time I'll focus on faces.

Drape Dance

I've been working on trying to improve my sketching skills in between jobs, particularly when it comes to capturing motion.

Here are some sketches I did of a model swinging a blanket around.


For this first page, I used a marker to sketch out the figure with a stick skeleton with the tip, before turning the marker on its side to fill in the rest of the body before going back in with a white paint pen to add in the highlights.


Obliviously that process was took too long to really be effective, so on page two I switched gears and just used the markers to draw the shadows, so that I could get a sense of form much faster.

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