Illustration
I’ve been meaning to photograph these since finishing up, so here they are! It was really difficult to get a decent photo, I definitely lost some of the details.
These are my three big projects from the Color & Design course I took over the summer. They were all done in gouache paint, the self-portrait was around 4″x7″, the mandala around 10″x10″ and the landscape 15″ x 9″ .
I had really been dreading the class, but I had a blast. I really enjoyed painting and felt I learned a lot.
Well there I went again, falling behind in posting my daily images. Feels nice to be up to date again. How can I keep on top of it? Just need to draw earlier in the day! Invariably the reason I fall behind is by doing any of these drawings in the last twenty minutes before I go to bed. By that time I’m crashing fast and do a quick sketch, then collapse. So here’s to continuing to work towards not doing that anymore.
I had my first Pixar class last Tuesday evening, I’m really not used to night classes any longer! When I first started at this school I had lots of night classes, but eventually shifted towards early morning. It was much harder to actively concentrate, I need to have coffee a little later in the day and make sure to eat a good meal before heading to class. That’ll keep me charged up!
The class is really focused on the fundamentals of animation. My animation classes the past few semesters have been focused on more advanced topics and it’ll be really helpful for me to get back to the core skill set that I need to build.
Over at Sketchoholic they’ve started running drawing marathons during the week. The format is very similar to the Intensity Club or ChiuStream, in which there’s a topic that you have one hour to draw or paint for. In the case of the marathon, whoever gets the most votes chooses the next topic. They’ll run these back to back, usually doing around 2 to 3 at a time. I’ve started attending as much as my schedule allows and I want to keep up on it as much as I can, it’s really helpful to work with these types of deadlines.
I was cleaning up my desk yesterday and came across some of my animal drawings from last semester. We had five anatomy projects during the semester. The idea was to do a drawing based off a particular animal and then do a drawing overlaying the bones and then the muscles. I couldn’t find the renderings for either the bovine or cat.
I sure have fallen behind in posting my daily images. I think I’m almost three weeks behind, ouch! I’m taking a summer class, Color & Design, and it has been extremely time intensive. Last Thursday I was painting one of my finals, this one a landscape, for almost 13 hours straight. It has been hard to make the time for my personal drawings, so I’ve been doing a lot more sketches, rather than paintings.
I’m almost done though and while I had initially had no interest in this class, I’m very glad I took it. I’ve taken color theory before and so the thought of retaking such a class sounded like a drag. This class though ended up being more of a painting class and we just applied color theory to our projects. I like that.
I have a few work related projects that are really coming together, I’m having fun drawing in my style, but for others projects.
My main computer got hit by a virus of some sort yesterday, so I’m in the process of getting that taken care of. I really hate it when my computer goes down (for whatever reason). It ends up being a splinter in my mind that I can’t really forget about until I’ve fixed it. Luckily there’s a lot of scanning time involved so that’s allowing me to step away and get other stuff done.
Some exciting news, last Friday I got an email that I had been accepted into one of the Pixar animation classes. This class is taught at the Academy of Art, but has instructors from Pixar coming over to work with us and run the class. I’m looking forward to really nailing down my core set of animation skills and building out from there. A good goal for myself is to do more animation “studies”. The same idea as quick sketches in drawing, I need to be exercising my animation skills in smaller, easier to finish, projects. My drawing skills have been really benefiting from that type of exercise, it’s really time I applied that to animation as well.
This is finals week at school, my last day of classes is on Thursday. Today I had my last day of animal drawing class, I got out an hour and a half early, so now I’m at home getting ready to work on my animation.
First, a cup of coffee and some relaxing in bed, I feel so tired! I have a lot to get done still, but I feel okay with where things are going. My animation is the farthest along I’ve gotten on any animation project, although even there I see how much better I could have done. Just shows me where I can improve!
For this piece I need to finish the lip sync, smooth out some awkward movements, finalize the arm motions, finalize the ending and then polish, polish, polish!
This animation is for my Lip Sync Animation class; I find it funny that it’s only in the last week I’m tackling the lip sync side of things. When a character speaks, the actual lip movement is such a small part of the whole. I’ve been so much more focused on body language and expression changes.
Beyond my animation class which finishes up tomorrow at 12, I have both my Character Design and Clothed Figure classes on Thursday. For Clothed Figure, I have to choose 12 of my in class pieces and snazz them up a bit. For character design I have to get all my model sheets together in a portfolio, get together my sketchbook and mainly I need to finish my maquette of the Great White Giraffagator.
There shall be much posting of school projects in the next week!