Saturday, April 5, 2008

Digital Sketching

Didn't think I'd be back here so fast. I think the break helped me a bit, as I've been spending a couple hours a day doodling. And since I haven't had art classes, I think I've been trying to keep myself busy...
These sketches were all done purely in photoshop CS3. Make sure to click on it to blow it up full size. And click again to make it bigger... It's quite a large file.



Obviously I got sucked into a few of the drawings, and had to render them. It was fun, but my hand is cramping and my back is aching, so I'm glad I filled up the whole page.
I have several sketchbook pages to scan and upload, but I think I want to practice drawing/painting environments next, so I'll wait till the next batch to upload them.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Winter Quarter

This winter I was lucky enough to take two art classes at the same time. I took 2D Design and a form and content class that involved both drawing and painting (which gave me a nice head start in painting because otherwise I would have to wait until 200 level courses to paint). For this Spring quarter, I couldn't register early enough for any more art, so perhaps all you'll be seeing here for a while will be sketches and doodles :/

Enough chit-chat--

This design assignment was tricky, as we were restricted to using certain shapes. But I'm just glad it didn't have to be in color.



Details:




This is a stonehenge stamp design for another assignment. I probably spend more time coming up with the idea than painting it. The original is 11" x 11" and the fully reduced version is 1" x 1".



This was one of a couple of assignments given to my class by architect Larry Woodin. It is a 47.5" x 15.5" piece of foam core cut out as a window design. I first made the design in Adobe Illustrator scaled it to a pencil grid on the foam core, and the rest just took hours of exacto-knife carving. Inspiration came from Japanese Kabuto beetles.



Early process shot:


This painting was for a collaboration assignment, where we adopt the style and composition of a well-known portrait artist's work. I basically inserted an androgynous version of myself into Peyton's "Tony" piece.


Detail:


These next few were painted from a live model, but the last was painted only from references and memory. They were exercises in figurative abstraction, which was (and still is) quite new to me. The second turned out much better than the rest, but all of these were more fun to do than I thought they would be. The first two are oils on gessoed paper and the last is oil on 18" x 24" stretched canvas.







This is the last painting of my class. We were pretty free to paint whatever we wanted for this final assignment, so I wanted to do something in my own style. Painted mostly from memory and imagination, I don't think this piece is as strong as it could have been, but I struggled a lot with it and I think I learned a lot from it.



This is about 3/5 of the work I did last quarter, so I might post a few things I missed later. Otherwise, for the next several weeks I'll try to crank some sketches and a few digital paintings. Thanks for looking!