Leftovers

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.

Sketch dump

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.

Under the gun

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..

Painting...

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...

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

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.