Eyes Full of Bees

Well...

2010-07-14T00:38:00.004-04:00

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally switched to a less absurd domain name. My art bloggings will continue from here on out here

yes.

Leftovers

2010-06-24T21:16:00.004-04:00

Still playing catch-up (albeit lazy catch-up) on posting the leftovers from my last semester at Ringling. Featured today we have my last few weeks of Fiore Custode's advanced figure painting class:

In other news this blog may migrate to a new address sometime soon... one that's less embarrassing to tell people while still only slightly less ridiculous... and hopefully less limiting on the demographic.

Back to the Book

2010-06-01T17:17:00.005-04:00

Sketchbook! Media experiments! Yeah!

I've had a couple of these pages sitting in my book as pencil drawings for over a month now, and figured it was time to see how big a mess I could make out of them. All in all I'm pleased.

Right then. Back to work.

Thesis Parade, Part Trois!

2010-05-20T17:45:00.003-04:00

Our young hero and his stalwart cube companion have lost their way! And more pressing still they're being watched! Who is this shifty serpentine specimen scaling the shadowy canopies?

Here our hero has heard a noise! Upon investigation he finds the mighty Bullcube, struggling to pass through the only foe to ever have defeated his unparalleled head ramming capabilities, a locked gate!

I'll tell you, if it isn't obvious, I had a lot of fun with this.

Thesis Parade, Part Deux

2010-05-17T14:25:00.016-04:00

This is Legs (Fig 1.1). He's distressed.

Fig 1.1

Our protagonist (we have one of those you know, this is a story) on his journey through the woods (what woods you ask? you know, the woods) finds Legs (amongst many parenthetical statements) in this state, distraught!

All of Legs's friends, you see, have swam across the river, but Legs is too scared to try to cross. A previous attempt to swim (Fig 1.2) resulted in a terrifying failure!

Fig 1.2

But our protagonist knows better! Keenly noting the tremendous length of Legs's legs (see all Figures) he is quick to point out a serious oversight.

"But you're so tall! You can probably just wade across! Have you tried?"

"I could? Hey! You're right! I can!" And so he did. (Fig 1.3)

Fig 1.3

And there was much rejoicing. (Fig 1.4 et. all)

Fig 1.4

Fig 1.5

Fig 1.6

Fig 1.7

Fig 1.8

Fig 1.Apple

Fig 1.9

Fig 1.Cube

Just the same as in my last post, all photography is by Kenneth Sterling Gronquist

Triumph!

2010-05-13T15:53:00.008-04:00

It's been a little over a month since I posted last, but it's been a very very busy month. A month of finishing my thesis/spring project thingy, getting it framed, putting it up, graduating, packing, and driving. Busytown. So! This means it's time to share!

Today we have the King of the Forest, and man is he thrilled to be here.

I'm not really entirely sure what noise he might be making. I was very solid on the idea that he'd be doing a nice, full throated "Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr," but I'm open to suggestions. Any ideas?

All photography by Kenneth Sterling Gronquist, who was an absolute pleasure to work with.

Sketchbook? Sketchbook? Again?!?

2010-04-12T22:21:00.002-04:00

Sketchbook! Now with additional photoshop playtime on top! That top one may resurface in the future...

Figure Painting! Cowboy time!

2010-04-07T19:55:00.002-04:00

Cowboy time! Yeah!

Sketchbooooooook!

2010-04-04T22:08:00.007-04:00

More Sketchbooktown! Here we have some figure drawings I did over spring break in New York at the Society of Illustrators and the direct result of looking at a lot of McBess, who is wonderful.

Yes indeed. More to come in the future.

Paintings

2010-03-31T20:06:00.004-04:00

Some more souvenirs from painttown. Three hours a piece with varying degrees of finish. Considering that this is my last semester here I'm trying to get in as much figure painting as I can while I can still just drop into classes whenever I have free time. We'll see where this takes me.

Book? Book book?

2010-03-28T13:56:00.005-04:00

More sketchbook! This time with a little bit of computer involved. Yes indeed.

Sketchbook

2010-03-21T15:44:00.003-04:00

More sketchbook time! Yeah!

Painting

2010-03-15T22:19:00.003-04:00

6 Hours

3 Hours

So, this is the annual "I think I'm getting the hang of painting" post, but I think I might really mean it this time... not sure. Anyway, in the grand tradition of posting paintings and then immediately being unsure of their merit, here goes.

Should be some sketchbook I feel much more comfortable with coming briefly.

THE KING OF THE FOREST

2010-02-24T23:48:00.002-05:00

This is the king/spirit of the forest, revealing himself in all of his clichéd glory.

This is part of my thesis. This is ridiculous.

Sketchbook!?

2010-02-20T18:08:00.005-05:00

So, more sketchbook. Lots of media experiments. I promise I'm doing other things too, you'll see eventually, really.

Sketchbook!

2010-02-02T19:15:00.001-05:00

More sketchbook business!

Sketchbook

2010-01-24T15:09:00.004-05:00

Some pages from a new sketchbook I've started. Playing around with ink.

Also the latin is a quote (supposedly) from Apelles and also the motto from the Art Students League. Nulla dies sine linea - no day without a line.

Painting

2010-01-13T22:41:00.003-05:00

Hey! Haven't updated this thing in some time now, so hey, why not some paintings? I'm a bit tentative about posting these as, well, I still have a lot to learn in painting and I feel like it shows in the work.

This is all work from last semester.

Sketchbook? Sketchbook.

2009-11-24T01:36:00.004-05:00

Sketchbook? Yeah. Sketchbook.

That's what some of it looks like.

Senior Portrait

2009-11-21T18:05:00.000-05:00

I guess, right?

More Experiments

2009-11-18T13:50:00.002-05:00

More sketchbook playtime. This time it's mostly pastel and watercolor with a little bit of ink thrown around where it felt necessary.

based on this photograph by this person.

Ink Experiments

2009-11-05T14:41:00.003-05:00

Some ink experiments on a couple old/failed portrait night drawings.

I'm pretty happy with them.

Bones

2009-10-17T19:56:00.002-04:00

Some sketchbook left over from the summer. A little bit of figure from the Art Students League, a little bit of figure from the Society of Illustrators, and a little bit of apartment in Michigan. The scans are a little funny, oh well.

Typewriter Operator

2009-10-14T23:38:00.005-04:00

This is Humphrey. He's journeyed up north to write a book on snow for everyone back home. Right now he's writing a chapter on the pleasures of coffee after coming in from the cold.

He is made of sculpey. There's some paper in there, and some fabric too.

Yes.

Poor moon...

2009-09-24T16:48:00.002-04:00

Yes.

Also, I've looked it up, the moon doesn't actually have another name... it really is just "the moon." So I guess the moon is just being a little neurotic.

BUSINESS FRENZY!!!

2009-09-20T14:47:00.004-04:00

This is suitshark. Careful, just one drop of business in the water and he could go into a BUSINESS FRENZY.

Bird snake is GO!!!

2009-09-15T17:31:00.009-04:00

More sketchbook pop-up madness. This is the majestic birdsnake. Native to the wonderful mountains of southern Canada. The bird snake patrols the wilderness for stray mounties to lead them back to the reservation. Or eat them. Birdsnake sightings are rare, but splendid experiences.

-Rob

Tiny Eyes

2009-09-11T19:03:00.005-04:00

Not a lot of explanation for this. It just sort of happened.

Also, here's part of something else I've been working on:

Over and out.

Hello! I'm going to work!

2009-09-03T18:02:00.016-04:00

More sketchbook enjoyment right here. This little fella is off to work. To do business. You can tell this by his briefcase, which is full of important documents. Yes.

Now in motion!

On another note I've been thinking... there seem to be a few too many Rob Chandlers out there. I was thinking of changing my name to Captain Destruction... thoughts?

Sketchbook Playtime

2009-09-01T11:00:00.006-04:00

Been playing around in my sketchbook with making illustrations from sewn fabric. Here is experiment number one.

New York Grammar

2009-08-25T12:53:00.007-04:00

So here's a bunch of sketchbook work back from May and June. Taking New Jersey Transit in and out of New York every day gave me a lot of faces to pick from. So here's that, some classmates and some models.

The book from July will follow shortly.

After I fell in the river but before I drowned

2009-06-03T22:17:00.003-04:00

This was my final for Junior year Illustration with Thiel, an illustration for After I Fell in the Water but Before I Drowned by Dave Eggars. Sort of a difficult read (the image, not the story) but I think it works.

_.. .._ ._. ._. .... .._ ._. ._. .... .._ ._. ._.

2009-04-17T14:51:00.007-04:00

Gouache

Watercolor

One watercolor and one gouache piece. This was my first time with gouache and it was honestly pretty neat stuff, nice, forgiving and easy to control. Watercolor and I, on the other hand, have a long and sorted history of not really getting along... I think this is probably the first time I've managed to actually make watercolor do what I want it to... sort of.

Also, I was talking to a friend about how gouache was spelled versus how gouache was pronounced. I wound up breaking it down to "gwash" which eventually we mutated to G-Wash, which is, of course, what you call gangster George Washington.

Then this happened:

G-Wash

The end.

Feathers eyes and teeth

2009-04-15T19:09:00.005-04:00

So it's been a little while since I've posted anything. So, in attempt to fix that:

Anyway this was a sculpture for my advanced media class. There are parts of this I'm pleased with, but there are a lot of places where I really feel like I could have done a lot better with a little more time, but it had to be baked and painted for critique so... well, oh well.

These right here are the classy photos Don Brandes took of it, I have some less classy ones I took myself I might post soon of a couple other angles I liked that he didn't shoot from...

Anyway, more soon hopefully.

Droofus

2009-03-17T17:01:00.006-04:00

Another round at stacked paper, this time the assignment was to re-do part of a childrens book. I did my favorite book from when I was a little kid, How Droofus the Dragon Lost His Head by Bill Peet ( here ). Here we have Droofus being nursed back to health after a crash by a little boy he befriended.

Mmm hmm.

For whatever reason whenever I upload this to the internet the color is flattening out, the whole thing gets gray... anyone know what's going on?

Made to Serenade

2009-02-19T17:18:00.006-05:00

So, more robot love themed artwork from back in January. I really wanted to try doing some isometric drawing, so I thought this was a good time to do it.

The lady is based on an Underwood No. 5 because they're awesome.

Figure Painting

2009-02-16T19:44:00.004-05:00

2/2/09 - around 2-2.5 hours

So I took a bunch of pictures of my figure paintings from fall at the end of last semester with the intent of posting them up here. It's like anything else I'm still in formative stages with, something I thought might have been good when I did it is so quickly overshadowed by further development or simply stepping back from having just made it. As such I'm not sure if those old figure paintings will ever make it up on here.

Anyway, this is my best to date. there are a number of things that aren't terribly resolved, or resolved the way I'd like them to be, but it's probably the best I've done to date.

Godzilla in love

2009-02-15T18:49:00.003-05:00

So, if you were several stories tall, what would you use to make a boquet?

Ink, scanned, colored digital, printed on bristol, cut, stacked, photographed, photoshopped. Oh boy.

Thumbs and Faces

2009-02-06T21:38:00.006-05:00

I finally put the last drawing in my sketchbook from the summer. There's a clear dividing line when school starts up where the book gets a whole lot less interesting as it transitions over from faces and paintings to thumbnail after thumbnail. Oh well.

Here's what's worth looking at from it:

Almost the entire book is filled with these, pages and pages of drawings of people in Starbucks (though that last one has some Ringling students in there...). They started out sort of haphazardly arranged on the page, some fully body, some just faces, but as time went for some reason they just sort of arranged themselves into this sort of valley shape and i almost never drew much more than the face (aside from the occasional cactus or pickle body).

I've never been terribly good friends with acryllic, so I made a couple attempts to extend the olive branch... varying success. We have a very wonky portrait of one of my dads friends in green for whatever reason, an some old man I made up as I went along.

And that's that.

Sketch dump

2009-01-24T19:42:00.004-05:00

This is my sketchbook in progress I started sometime in November, I finally got around to scanning it.

Been having a lot of fun with this one, trying different things and playing around. Good times.

A brief story about a carrot

2008-12-08T23:57:00.004-05:00

Quite moving, I know.

Until Gwen

2008-12-01T22:50:00.004-05:00

An illustration for the story "Until Gwen" by Dennis Lehane. If I could find anywhere that seemed legitimate where I could link the story I would, I really recommend digging it up, it's pretty neat. Pretty dark, but neat.

I did this one with cut paper markers and a little bit of photoshop.

Sometime soon I should finally get around to scanning my sketchbook and photographing my paintings for figure painting, that should be a couple pretty lengthy posts...

2001: Playstation 3

2008-11-18T00:31:00.004-05:00

I think I'm finally getting this whole dimensional illustration thing under control, and I'm having a grand old time with it. The prompt this time around was to do an illustration about a product, advertisement of sorts.

If I keep this up I'm going to have quite a collection of little figures...

Digital Illustration

2008-11-14T12:29:00.003-05:00

Some work from digital illustration. Top one was a digital collage assignment. We were supposed to do a book cover, I did Blindness by Jose Saramago.

Next is a painter still life assignment.

Frankenstein

2008-11-02T18:17:00.003-05:00

So in keeping with my last post, here's my next swipe at sculptural illustration. Given my past failures I did my best to learn from my mistakes, this time around I sculpted all of it, so if I decided to change angles it'd work, and I made everything underneath the clothes out of wire, so I could re-pose if necessary. I think it worked this time, definitely better than it has in the past at least... we'll see what Joe Thiel has to say about that though...

Doctor Frankenstein making a shopping list.

I have some videos of the process I might post later, I think they're pretty neat. That and I might be posting revisions, I'm still not completely comfortable with the whole thing.

Experiments

2008-10-30T22:59:00.003-04:00

So I'm playing around with dimensional illustration again, seeing if I can sharpen that stick into something I can actually use... hoo boy. So this here was something I did to get back into the swing of it for Digital Illustration. The assignment was to read a personal add and try to make a portrait of them based on what you've read.

The add reads as follows:

Cougars Only - 24 - men seeking women
Single white male seeking cougars ONLY. Preferably 28+ but willing to go younger if I "like" you. Must be clean. I am 6'3", 210, dark brown hair, blue eyes and have plenty more pics if interested. Your place, not mine.

Now if that doesn't sound like a classy fellow, then I don't know what does.

Honestly this was a lot of fun, I might do more of these just for kicks.

Robots? ROBOTS? AGAIN?!?

2008-10-28T15:05:00.006-04:00

Something I put together for illest of ill. Didn't make it into the show, but hey, what can you do?

A robot graveyard, like an elephant graveyard.

I just sort of imagine that if the robots did become self aware, there's no saying they'd be angry, that's how a human would feel. Maybe they'd just be sad, just go off and find somewhere to rust.

Anyway, there you go.

Digital Illustration - Illustrator

2008-09-22T00:07:00.002-04:00

So, digital illustration class is pretty neat. So far we've just been messing with Illustrator. Assignments one and two right here. One was to make themed icons.

I made fancy animals...

Two was to do a vector portrait.

Got a little ridiculous on that one.

More on the way

Something Political

2008-09-17T22:34:00.004-04:00

We were given a very vague assignment in illustration class: Draw something political. Here's my piece about the disappearing middle class.

And that's our first assignment for the year.

We have a map of the piano

2008-08-10T17:52:00.008-04:00

This is from way at the beginning of summer

My mother had an old broken piano that came with her house. We couldn't get rid of it, so we explored it instead.

The initial plan was to dismantle it completely, but we hit a point where we couldn't get much further without brute force, didn't have enough muscle, and had to call in the cavalry.

All that's left now are a couple strings and a bar I took for souvenirs, the rest is in a scrap yard somewhere.

Occupying my time

2008-08-10T17:25:00.002-04:00

Painting painting painting.
I'm pretending this is done but honestly it really really isn't - I'm just tired of working on it. It's sort of funny how I get to that state, and I might not even see anything wrong with it until I decide to share it. About the moment I look at the photographs I've taken a whole bunch of things jump out at me... eh, we'll see, a revision of this might end up here later.

Starbucks

2008-08-09T00:28:00.007-04:00

Trying to keep busy and keep on with drawing, so I've been spending a couple hours every day in starbucks (weekdays at least) drawing strangers. Some results (most recent at the bottom):

I've done some more paintings and things that I'll probably be uploading sometime over the next couple days... I know you (the audience that essentially comes down to myself, family and maybe a few friends when you boil all the imagination off of it) probably have much better and more important things to look forwards to in your life, but the inherent egomania that comes with writing this sort of thing (LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT WHAT I DRAW!) sort of infects, and I feel compelled to make announcements about future things that I will do and post... man I feel lame...

Your Children

2008-07-29T02:14:00.002-04:00

Summer so far...

2008-06-14T13:05:00.005-04:00

So I've been trying to keep busy over the summer...

Painted a Cyberman for Carina's birthday...

That and I've done a number of self portraits, that number being 3 so far. This is the second of the bunch, I might post the third later, but the first is just... well... clearly the first? Going to see how far I take this, how competent I manage to get...

That's all for now.

Tying up loose ends...

2008-04-29T03:05:00.005-04:00

Right then, so here we have the last assignment of my sophomore Illustration class. The assignment was to do an editorial piece about phosphate mining. We were assigned a lot of reading on the topic and then set loose. Honestly there were a lot of things that I could have made an image about, but in the end I settled on phosphogypsum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum ) and all that.

I had such a good time doing the 3d stuff for my last assignment that I figured I'd give it another go, and there's the result. A step up but definitely still learning. This time I didn't use as much sculpey, it's mostly cell phone pieces, a broken RF switch, paper mache and wire.

Also, the lighting set up I made was pretty ridiculous, so I figured I would share that too. That's outside in my backyard by the way.

And on a final note, I put together a website (as an assignment for my graphic design class) and I think it turned out pretty neat. Some of the stuff on there is just placeholder (see bio + portrait of the artist), it's not really complete in the sense that it's something I would send to someone I wanted to show myself off to, but I'm happy with the tricks and whatnot I learned doing it (translation: Thanks for showing me around Carina).

That website is here

That's all for now. One more assignment by 4:00 tomorrow and a test. The marathon is almost over.

More heads...

2008-04-27T22:11:00.005-04:00

You know what they say about practice...

nowhere near perfect yet, but I'm making ground.

Attempt No 3:

So this one is starting to get towards a likeness, but still quite a bit off. Some features remain generic while others take on the characteristics of the model. I did this in a combination (about 50/50 mixture) of super sculpey and super sculpey firm (the grey and the flesh colored). A step forwards but still not there yet...

If you know the Ringling models, this is Sarah, by the way.

Attempt No. 04:

The closest I've gotten so far, right here, though, after a certain point I just sort of veered off in another direction. It started out looking quite a bit like the model (Allison) but right around when I put the eyes in the sockets and started putting the meat and eyelids on around them I noticed the eyeballs I had made were very much too small... and she started to look like a deranged Asian woman. Since it still looked quite a bit more like a real human being than any of my previous attempts I just sort of ran with it (though I mostly ditched the deranged part).

Anyway, that's how that goes, more to come most likely.

Experiments

2008-04-17T16:37:00.004-04:00

So, for the sake of exploration I've been bringing sculpey to figure class and trying my hand at sculpting from life... frankly it's giving me a lot of trouble (getting any sort of likeness... ugh) but it's a grand old time I've gotta say. Here are the first two stabs at it, probably somewhere around 1.5 to 2 hours of work a piece.

Attempt I:

Attempt II:

So they both sort of look like the same face, and I never got around to giving them hair or ears, but hey, I got a little faster the second time and figured quite a bit out (hah... figure...). Anyway, forward ho and all that business.

we'll see where all this sculpting takes me

Right down to the bone...

2008-04-15T04:58:00.005-04:00

So, illustration assignment, right? Ok. Well this time around it was to do a poster for a play... we got a list, we picked our plays and went to work. So when I got to thinking about what I could do, I got to thinking that Chris Sickels is pretty cool... and... well... yeah, so I sculpted my figure, built my set, hung cotton ball clouds and toy airplanes from the ceiling in my room and this is what happened:

The play was, by the way, called Souvenir. It's about Florence Foster Jenkins (a real person...) who was a tremendously bad opera singer, and famous for it.

It didn't turn out exactly how I wanted it to, and there were a lot of things that suffered from the time available, but all in all it was a lot learned that I can apply to the next time I try something like this (which I'm thinking I might...).

Oh, and because it's awesome, here's some process:

my favorite part is when I eat the sandwich...

by the way, if you don't know Chris Sickels, go here and cry sweet tears of joy

if you thought that was cool, check out Paulo Ventura ... if you can get your hands on it, his book War Souvenir is pretty mindblowing.

We'll see what the future brings...

12, 12x12 paintings

2008-04-10T01:43:00.007-04:00

For painting class we've been working on a series of 12, 12" x 12" paintings for homework. This has been assigned since ages ago, which invariably means that time will not be spent appropriately...

In any case, they were due yesterday, so I thought I would post the result.

The theme I chose for my series was a sort of surreal animal mish-mash thing. Kind of a way of highlighting some of the bizarre things that happen in nature by taking them a little out of context (applying them to another animal). Some turned out better than others.

Vulturephant

Walropillar

Moosetopus

Bioluminescent Peacock

Snigeon

Chrout

Uh... Spamtis? (Hamster Spider Mantis)

Catepede

Fostrich

Mosqiwi

Barn Owlmingo

Beagle

And there (in no particular order) you have it.

Pygmalion

2008-04-08T16:18:00.002-04:00

Something I did for my illustration class. We were to take an old fairy tale or myth and illustrate it in two images. We also had the choice of re-envisioning it if we felt so inclined. I took Pygmalion and replaced the statue with a corpse collage... yeah, a bit morbid I know.

I didn't quite get to get them as finished as I would like, I might come back and refine them when I get time.

Assembly

Presentation

Don't have time to post longer now but...

2008-03-31T18:50:00.003-04:00

Fixed (sort of):

Painter, Graphic Design and ridiculous

2008-03-19T01:00:00.007-04:00

So in my concept class they have us using Painter to produce and... well... I have little to no experience there. The program has it's ups and downs, there are parts of the workflow that I love and parts that... well it's not even worth trying to do some things in painter, it's easier just to pop it over to photoshop and back. In any case, here is the first "finished" thing I've ever pumped out in painter.

These are getting older, but I have some posters that I made for Graphic Design that I'm mildly happy with. We were to make two posters for a hypothetical MoMa exhibition of "the masters of poster design." One of which was to be purely typographic and the other based around imagery. I have this unfortunate love for large blocks of extremely tightly packed type... which are bad so I kind of shot myself in the foot on the typographic one.

And lastly we have the byproduct of reference/source photography and low sleep:

"no!"

Mid term figure dump

2008-02-29T13:19:00.014-05:00

So I have it figured that rather than dumping everything at once in one super long post, I'll spread my figure stuff out a little better this semester.

To start things off, here is my first figure painting ever. Hoo-hah.

Approx. 2 Hours

Some quick pastel gestures:

Portraiture: Approx 3 hrs each

vine charcoal and charcoal pencil

Graphite

Marker (Copic Wide)

Somewhere around an hour and a half

5 minutes

Conte Crayon 5-10 minutes

5 Minute Color Pastel Gestures

Pastel 2-3 hours

And that's everything for now.

Williams bear...

2008-02-26T00:24:00.004-05:00

So yeah, this would be the first time I've ever elected to do an oil painting for an illustration project, and considering I'd say it came out pretty good.

In all his poorly photographed glory

Face Detail

I figured I'd put the explanation after the image, as it's probably better when there's some confusion involved. We were given the option of doing either a satirical portrait, an ironic parody or a glorified portrait of a faculty member of the school. My original plan was to draw Mr. John Williams here standing on a pile of dead ninjas, bears, tigers, sharks etc. shooting lasers out of his eyes at a T-rex, stabbing a shark and backhanding a student... which I was really really excited about doing but the teacher changed her mind on the idea when she decided it wasn't satirical enough (after letting me work on it for a week... ugh). So yeah, this is my replacement idea. I like the other one enough that if I find the time I might just do it anyways...

On another note I have to find a more effective way of photographing paintings.

More Painting...

2008-02-25T19:02:00.003-05:00

So the semester is rolling along. I'm finally starting to make things in painting class that aren't entirely disgraceful, haha. We spent the last couple weeks of class painting downtown, here are the highlights. Compared to some of my peers it all looks pretty shoddy but compared to myself I'm looking pretty good, haha. These are all about 3 hours a piece.

This last one here is part of a series of 12, 12in by 12in paintings we have to do, all thematically connected and whatnot. I'm doing little animal hybrid things, which I realize isn't the most original idea, so to make up for that I'm trying to make sure the pictures are extra weird. This is the first one I have done... at given how many I have to do and when they're due, I should be putting them out at a rate of about 1-2 a week... and on that schedule I'm already one behind... shit.

Roosterfish

When I get the time I have some figure drawings worth uploading, but for now I have a lot to do...

-Rob

Something absurd...

2008-02-20T01:49:00.004-05:00

So this... this is something a little different...

I've gone through cycles on the idea of creating something like a web-comic... nothing with a cohesive plot just random things I think up/think are funny. Every time I go through this cycle I'll just stockpile ideas that I never end up using for anything that I either forget or just wish I would get around to drawing. This is something leftover from one of the times that I almost started.

The strip

100% Pure Awesome

Honestly I don't know if it's funnier with or without the little comic... that... thing might speak better for itself.

Concept - Nemesis - Force Fit

2008-02-13T12:31:00.003-05:00

More work from my concept class... the idea this time around the idea was to force fit two given concepts into one creature or vehicles. My combos were a dragonfly and a ferret and dive bomber and a tiger. This is what came out.

Yeah, it's all pretty absurd stuff... I'm happy with it.

Under the gun

2008-02-12T22:13:00.004-05:00

So for illustration class we were asked to do a quick spot illustration for a visual metaphor. This is my illustration for "under the gun" which I cranked out in prisma markers in about 2 hours or so.

I'm pretty happy with it mostly (considering the time) but there are definitely things I'd like to fix.

Coincidentally... I'm a bit under the gun myself right now... probably have about another 6 hours worth of work ahead of me tonight... hoo boy.

Off to work then..

Graphic Design...

2008-02-11T01:17:00.000-05:00

So they have us taking Graphic Design for Illustrators (or intro to graphic design, I honestly don't remember which it's called) right now. The first real assignment we had was to make a corporate identity for ourselves... business card, letterhead, envelope. This is what I came up with. Hand written font might not have been the best for legibility but I felt like it was suitable and haven't had any complaints.

Business Card

Envelope

Letterhead

I'm particularly fond of the envelope... something about that just makes me smile.

Oh, and on another note, something from wayyyy at the beginning of the year I forgot to post (way back in August or September or something). Pen & Ink Cuttlefish.

I spent an awful lot of time on this one. Looking back at it I sort of wish I had made it a little more about the pose but at the time it was really an exercise in pure rendering... pretty much just wrist down artwork to prove to myself that I could and as far as that goes I feel like it came out pretty good.

That's all for now, should be more fairly soon.

Painting...

2008-02-03T15:47:00.000-05:00

So in painting class the teacher had us paint a still life composed of almost entirely white objects. The catch was that we weren't to use any white in the first stages of the painting. While it was frustrating at first, after a point I was pretty reluctant to start using white...

I kind of like the way it turned out in the end.

I haven't really figured out a good way of photographing my paintings yet, so bear with the image quality for now.

The underpainting

Finished, or about as close as I can get it right now

Shell detail... this is where I spent most of the time... it didn't photograph particularly well but I'm actually really happy with it.

So painting hasn't really been one of my strong points so far... but I think I'm finally starting to get somewhere with it... we'll see how this develops.

First post of the second month...

2008-02-01T02:37:00.000-05:00

So here's the first assignment I've had to do for illustration this semester, it's not actually due until the 7th... she really gave us more time to work on it than she usually does. French gave us all stories, or excerpts from them, to illustrate. I got A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud by Carson McCullers. The chunk of it I got (yeah, it seems funny to cut parts out of a story that short) really just cut out the beginning, where it describes what people are wearing and the end. It started with "The man laid one hand on the paper boy's shoulders, then grasped..." and ended with "was he drunk?"

In any case I tried something new for this one (sort of... really I just tried something that I've tried before with terrible results again, with much better results) and it worked out pretty good. Rather than starting from scratch when I took it over from photoshop I pretty much just colored it and tweaked the value, leaving the initial drawing almost completely in tact. I kind of like it, but if I do it again it'd be better to have a more resolved drawing to go over...

Graphite drawing on tracing paper.

The value pattern (digital over graphite).

Final

The results were nice, method was quick, and it was all relatively painless... all in all it was a pleasant experience... which is good.

After this one month assignment it seems like things are going to be picking up pretty quick, we already have the next assignment with tight sketches due the same day as this final here... and we're already supposed to be thinking about the assignment after that... we'll see how this goes.

Concept - Nemesis project

2008-01-30T18:46:00.000-05:00

So I've been taking a concept class this semester. Mostly all we've really gone over so far are different approaches for getting interesting character designs.

These are from an assignment where we took pictures of textures and abstract shapes and pulled characters out of them:

This is the second method we've used, the first involved making random ink blobs in painter and using them as a loose basis for silhouettes of characters. Those were a lot easier, and a lot more fun but I really got much better results this way... I might fix up some of the silhouette stuff and post it later.

100% Pure Awesome

2008-01-15T01:55:00.000-05:00

Two of my friends and I decided to pull together and do something awesome during finals last semester. We made a life size cut out of our media teacher, Don Brandes, and stood it up in the classroom a half an hour before class with the lights out...

This was about the most awesome thing ever.

More Illustration...

2008-01-08T22:03:00.000-05:00

One last thing from my illustration class last semester. We had to do an album cover based on two songs by an artist. This was based off of Ali Farka Touré, the two songs she gave us (for him at least) were Inchana Massina and Hawa Dolo. I wanted to go for something earthy and "reaching" and this is what I wound up with. It's cut paper painted with watercolor and seperated with foam core. There are some guitar stings in there too.

Sorting...

2008-01-04T19:45:00.000-05:00

Alright, so I have some more pictures from last semester sorted out.

Soooo here's some more figure work, stuff I did outside of class. I did nearly all of my figure work out of class in copic wides which are fantastic fun. It's good to have something that sort of forces you to commit to a line, especially when working quickly. All the marker ones are under 5 minute poses for certain but I don't remember exactly how long they were.

This last one here was a longer pose, in the neighborhood of a couple hours, I honestly don't remember. It's water soluble crayons on toned sketchbook paper - also a lot of fun but not really as valuable of a learning experience as the markers... they're really non-committal and easy.

Also have a couple assignments I did for my illustration class... which honestly I haven't been too happy with. My heart really wasn't in most of the work I've been doing for that instructor... just haven't really been into the assignments. Anyway I felt pretty good about this one here. The assignment was to take a pair of antonyms and illustrate them as self portraits that were the embodiments of the words (the object was not to get likeness). From the options I picked calm and tormented.

Also here are the first two frames of a four frame storyboarding assignment. I did them all in one night... the second two frames... not so good.

The story after that goes: dog starts eating car, man has to kill dog to stop it and is sad... the end. ...yeah.

Got some stuff from my media class I'll be putting up eventually, we'll see.

Plodding along...

2008-01-03T20:56:00.000-05:00

So the semester is over and here I am... thinking. I'm going to be putting up most of my work when I get around to it/find it. This is probably going to be the first of a series of posts... this is everything (of note) from my figure class. I've made some real progress this semester... we'll see where it goes from here.

Gesture

Longer

Portrait

Color

Portraiture has been one of my weak suits pretty much since I started drawing and I'm really feeling pretty good about the progress I've made there. The portraits are looking pretty passable and the likeness is decent...

Just plodding along...
I'll upload the FEWS highlights and shit from my other classes later

FEWS

2007-10-25T21:01:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to go to FEWS more often.
I've also been working straight in with copic wides which is fantastic fun.

Here's a good example.

Somewhere around 2 min pose.

More when they happen.

2007-10-19T19:35:00.000-04:00

Something I made when I was working as an Orientation Leader for the freshman this year. It's a poster for the school international trip to Spain. It's a bit of a stretch but they accepted it. It's 4 pictures printed (glossy) on foam core and then set up to make a sense of depth (IE doesn't photograph well but I wanted to share it anyway).

Not the best picture of it, but I'm not sure it warrents the work it would take to get a much better one.

And again...

2007-10-18T00:06:00.000-04:00

So here's a nice big dump post to get things started right...

Schoolwork:

Sketchbook:

The schoolwork is from mostly this semester. The sketchbook is from about may forwards.

So...

2007-10-16T20:06:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to start one of these for a while now... and now I have.

Watercolor for media class - 10/15

That's all for now, there'll be more when I have more scanned.