Two WIP's: Book cover and alla prima cityscape

Missed a post yesterday! grrr...

Anyway, here's my rough draft comp of my book cover, a development of the thumbnails I put up a few posts back. The first is a rough color comp with some re-working, the second is the original layout, no color. Any opinions as to which works best would be appreciated.

The last thing is something that was done from the 4th floor window of the fine art's building, for my landscape class. It's been fun so far-- don't consider it done yet. It's pretty small, I don't know the exact measurements but I'd say 7" x 10", perhaps a little smaller.  No preliminary drawing-- just went right in and painted.  It's taken about 4.5 hours so far...

More structural stuff

(Sorry a couple of these exercises are a little dry... blame the obligatory feeling about posting them on my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.!)

The first image was drawn for fun during class, during a time where our teacher let us run free. It's supposed to be a hybrid of a catamaran (boat with two hulls) and a submarine, in which the submarine (part in the center) can be lowered into the water with the top part remaining afloat to pull it back up. Maybe for marine biologist experiments?

I may pursue this design further in terms of speed though, because this layout would probably mean less drag on the water overall. And it would probably HAVE to go fast because the surface area is too small to hold up that weight if it was going slow.

I didn't develop much in the way of technical details, and from an engineering standpoint it probably wouldn't hold up too well, but I was going for style and concept, so no biggie.  Done in colored pencil and colored in Photoshop.

Anyway, the 2nd is some 2-minute bottles. Our teacher timed us to draw pop/water bottles around the room, and made it into a competition for us to see who could make the most design-ey bottle in that amount of time.

The one with the star ended up winning. I was pretty surprised!

The last two are just some homework, more turning shapes in space, this time with freehand ellipses. While it is all freehand, I used rough geometrical guides in the first, and none in the 2nd. Faster with none, that's for sure...

More figure speedpainting, and a crappy palette knife landscape!

Mmkay... here's an update!

Some more figure painting and step-by-step of one of them, this time without captions because they would probably be pretty similar to the one I already posted above.

The first image was an interesting experience, because it was an attempt to get good color despite low lighting (it probably looks even darker on my monitor since my monitor is darker than average), as well as a combination of natural and artificial light.

Followed by some gestures and a shorter drawing.

I also uploaded another crappy "all palette knife" painting, this one done directly on location (river in Downtown Columbus) instead of from a small value study.
I think I spent more time riding there, unpacking, setting up my new portable easel, then packing up to get out of the rain, wait for the rain to stop, move back to my spot, and then clean up and unpack, then ride back, than I did painting... Seems like it anyway. Probably an hour and a half of honest-to-goodness painting, less if you count mixing all the colors.

Palette knife landscape study

Well,

When I made this blog, I decided to include the failures along with the successes. While I don't think this totally fails, I'm not really happy with it, either.

It's an acrylic painting applied entirely with a palette knife, based off of a small graphite sketch I did on location at a park in Columbus. An exercise for my landscape painting class.

(The technique is so far from my comfort zone that it has a different area code!)

But it's actually quite fun, and I want to learn how to get better at it. Perhaps not to paint entirely with the knife, but to use it as a way to make a more dynamic painting.

Labor Day Picnic Speedpaint

Here's something I did at my late grandmother's cottage on a man-made lake. It was during a family gathering. This was the view of the lake from the picnic table in the back yard.

Kept having relatives telling me to move my laptop...

I knew I wouldn't have much time to do color, so I kept it black and white. It was a pretty quick one. I'd say 25 mins. Part of it is my imagination. I started it earlier, then finished it when it was almost dark, so, being without well-lit reference, I BS'd in some of the trees on the right to make it look a little more grand and epic.

Actually, come to think of it, it doesn't really look much like a lake. More like a field. Perhaps I should finish it and add some reflections... nah.

Belated zoo drawings

Here are some more zoo drawings. They're from this past Monday actually.

Gray prismacolor marker on watercolor paper. This worked out pretty well when I tried it, because I was able to lay the marker on the top of the paper tooth, creating nice rock/tree texture.

The second pic was a study of the rocks at the penguin exhibit. They were real, and interesting. I thought I'd try learning a couple things about the light on them.

The second is an indoor exhibit of real mangrove trees. They're awesome! Like, almost as awesome as banyan trees. This is kind of a strange vignette sketch, but I did run out of time.

Advanced Structural Drawing Basics

Hmm, title is kinda oxymoronic, haha...






Mmkay, here's my first official homework assignment for advanced structural. Two things about this class:
1. No rulers allowed
2. No erasing allowed. (We're only allowed to use colored pencils.)

First, we had to draw a ton of lines and circles-- fill 10 big pages (18" x 24") with lines, 10 with circles/ellipses. The first images is an example of the line exercise. Good for warming up.

And then rotate two shapes into 9 different views, according to a blueprint showing the top, front, and right views of the shapes. It got a little tricky when you're just looking at a front and side view and having to figure out the back view, while rotating the entire thing 180 degrees on one axis, and 90 degrees on the other, and trying to keep it in proportion! (Luckily, correct proportions aren't crucial to this assignment.)

It was kind of fun actually, if you treat it like a puzzle. It was like some of those spacial problems on the IQ tests.

I just dumped 9 posts right now!

(Well, 10 if you count this one.)

Ok, for all 13 of you who got your watch box flooded, I'm sorry.

My goal is to keep my blog current with my conceptart.org sketchbook, and I was just catching it up.  (They're now both synced.)

If everything goes according to plan, you can probably expect about 1 post per day.

Book cover project thumbs

Here are some thumbnails I did for a book cover project.

The book is called "Hellstrom's Hive" by Frank Herbert. It was written in 1973. It's about a "hive" of technologically advanced humans living as social insects in immense chambers deep underground.

Luckily, Herbert wasn't very descriptive of the architecture so I've got some freedom in that department. I wanted to use lots of 60 degree angles that will have the whole "hexagonal shape" look. I think it's convenient that that's the shape in common with bee colonies and 70's futuristic architecture.

Anyway, the final cover is going to be a combination of a couple of these thumbs, but mainly the top right one.

Figure Life Painting Tutorial #2

Here's a tutorial about my approach and process, which will likely change with every time I do this.  I'm pretty new to it myself, so I hope I don't come off as being too experienced based on my wording.

(Because Blogger appears to have condensed the image beyond readability, here's an outside hosted one:
http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/5337/tutorialformatflat.jpg)

Figure life painting: Final and gestures

Mmkay, here's a figure painting I did on Sept. 3rd. My figure drawing teacher (Mr. Kortlander, if you're a CCAD student) is pretty open about medium of choice. I'm glad I skipped into one of the upper level figure classes for this reason-- the teacher already assumes you know kind of what direction you're headed and lets you run with that.

Anyway, this is the longest I ever spent on a digital life painting (except for one I did plein air). About 2 hrs.

It was also definitely the trickiest, due to the fact that it was lighted entirely naturally, resulting in more subtle effects, greater effects of bounce light, etc... 

Marker doodle

Just found this under some papers.

First thing I did since I got my grey markers. Just testing 'em out. Linework is kinda stinky, and it's not an original concept (Toyota PM concept car) on my part, but I was really just doing it to use the markers.

Figure life Painting Tutorial # 1

Aw, what the heck. I'll post a step-by-step progress.

I usually like to build up tone slowly, but lately I've been trying to take a more alla prima approach and try to get accurate colors in at 100 opacity. So this isn't usually how I work.

(By the way, this was a 40 minute pose, so you have an idea of the time frame.)

Step 1: Try to nail the silhouette. Generally if you do this, everything else will fall into place nicely.
Step 2: Block in the areas where the light hits directly. It'll help to fill in everything later.
Step 3: At varying opacity, add color.
Step 4: Deal with subsurface scattering and bounce light by adding saturated color at low opacity.

Digital figure speedpaints (Continued)

Ok, here are a couple I'm more happy with. They were a little longer poses.

I didn't focus as much on the anatomy as I did on the play of light and color, though I think I have a lot of room to improve in both.

Quick digital figure gestures/speedpaints

Design markers + figure drawing = fun!

For my advanced structural class, I just put down a pretty penny on a set of 12 prismacolor warm gray design markers, and some graphics 360 paper. It's the stuff that industrial, fashion, and interior designers use. 

I decided to give it a try for fine art.

I was pleasantly surprised by how nicely one could blend without the aid of paper texture. It was buttery smooth paper, but by constantly changing markers, I was able to lay up gradation.



The first two images are of 5 minute quickies. They aren't very good-- still trying to get a handle of the markers.
The last image was about 2 hours, give or take. Pretty happy with it. Too bad marker can't erase though-- couple anatomy issues...

Self Portrait

Here's something I started last year for introduction to watercolor in my illustration class. We only had a class period and week to finish it for homework (I didn't really finish to my liking.)

So I finished it in the summer.

I'd say caricature is definitely not my comfort zone. Looking back, I probably could've tweaked the features I exaggerated.


Anyway, what I do like about it is it counters a lot of the serious, moody, and downright emo self-portraits I've seen done by a LOT of people. I want to show my enthusiasm for stuff, like right in the middle of my commonly exclaimed phrase... "THAT'S AWESOME!"

8.5" x 11", watercolor, color correction in Photoshop. Didn't record how long it took.