Planes!

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Well it's been a while since I last posted but it's been one of those times when I've just felt uninspired, it was all I could do to just get the projects done that I was working on for school.  That said, I didn't really like much of what I was doing.  But I've been getting out of that slump and am doing some fun sketches.  Lately I've been getting into drawing old WWII planes so that's what I've been doing for the last couple of days.  I've also got a pen and ink sketch I did of an old mill that is in the town where I grew up.  I hope you like them.

School Sketchbook Stuff

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I had a lot of school stuff going on today so I didn't get a chance to work on digital stuff.  I'm hoping to get something done tomorrow though! In the mean time I thought I'd share a page from one of my sketch books.  This is for drawing for illustration.  I was having fun with different plane designs.  Anyway, I hope you like it and I will have something more for you tomorrow!

Why are they called FUNdamentals?

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So for the last little while we've been doing fundamental stuff. wheeee.  But even if it's not the most fun thing in the world to draw cubes floating around in space it will make all the difference when I'm working professionally.  Right now we are working with linear perspective, which is to create the illusion of three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface.  It's all very mathematical.  (and here I thought I was getting out of math by going into art).  But it's interesting too.  We started with isometric perspective, which is where all of the sides of an object are the same length (think Escher)  It doesn't exist in the real world, but it is a good start to working in perspective.

Right now we are working with one point perspective.  That is where everything in the image recedes to a single point on the horizon line.  The horizon is your eye level, so even if you can't see the literal horizon (where earth meets sky) the image still has a horizon line.  Cool stuff.  I've got some sketches that illustrate that a bit.  Hopefully over the weekend I'll have some time to start painting again...we'll see. I hope everyone is having a great week!!

Back From the Dead!

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So it's been kind of a crazy week, sorry I've dropped off the face of the earth.  But the good news is I do have some awesome classes lined up for this semester so I'll be getting some good stuff for you all to see.  So be sure to be checking back because I will be posting pretty regularly, and I'll all sorts of different things so it should be fun!  This is a sketch I did for my drawing for illustration class. I'm doing some studies of hyenas for a project.  Hope everyone is having a great week!!

Bumblebee

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Today I've been doing some preliminary concept work for a new painting.  I'm trying to set myself strict parameters to work in on this project.  Most of what concept artists and production designers do, like in most jobs, is to solve problems.  For instance, maybe the producers want a functioning monastery for some Buddhist monks, but they want it on the bottom of the ocean, so the concept artists need to figure out how that might work and how it might look.  Today I'm doing an activity where I combine two unrelated things to make a cohesive design.  I decided to combine a front end loader with a bumblebee.  The idea was that there is some precious mineral, but it is in an environment that makes it so ordinary mining equipment cannot be used.  The mining company needed excavation equipment that could fly into where they wanted to excavate and hover there while the machine worked, similar to how bumblebees will fly around flowers and hover slightly over them if needed to harvest pollen.  So this is the idea I came up with.  It's still in the rough sketch stage so I hope to have more up on it later today or tomorrow.

Stuff I've Been Doing

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For the past couple of weeks I've been working with a cool program called Drawing the Human Figure from Your Mind.  It's been extremely helpful.  Since I started with art I've always had issues with people.  There are so many little finicky things that you can get wrong with them.  So I've always had to look at a person to be able to draw him or her.  But this program works with a different way of thinking.  Instead of drawing what you see in front of you and thinking in 2D, you construct the human figure in a very scientific way, so that you can then recreate it in any angle you want.  This process helps your mind to shift from a 2D approach to art to a 3D approach.

Thinking in 2D is fine when all you want to do is paint or draw whatever you are looking at, even if you want to mix it up or change it, you have a reference.  But to truly master something so that you can draw it at any time, from any angle, without a reference, you have to change your thinking to 3D, so that you can think of the object you want to draw as a three dimensional thing, and not just as different values. It's been a hard shift at times, but I'm starting to get the hang of it.  The picture I'm showing is of a sketch of the muscles of the torso and how that in turn affects the way the torso looks with the skin and everything.  I want to apply this "constructive", 3D approach to drawing in more of what I draw.  It really makes me wonder why they didn't talk about this in any of the art classes I've taken.  But, maybe farther on in the program we'll get more into it.

Cool Tourist Junk (sketchbook)

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Been a busy week this week, I've been working on a larger project but haven't had time to get very far with it yet, I have at least had time to work on my sketchbook though.  This one is of some touristy knives that I got while visiting Palenque in Mexico.

Old Parts and Stuff (sketchbook)

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So this is a piece from my sketchbook.  It's a bunch of doohikies on an old machine I found in Fairview, Utah.  It was an old thresher I guess called "The Ruth Self-Feeder".  How it works I have no idea but it did have some cool parts on it.  This is also a piece that made me realize I need a good scanner.  It's hard to make these pieces look like they do on the paper using my little digital camera.  Something to add to the wishlist I guess.