More Portraits

You know? I have a really good-looking bunch of friends...

Rocking the boat

I've been taking my tablet to my weekly figure-drawing sessions. Started out a bit rough but it's totally freeing being able to move a bit of color around and keep myself moving fast on the tablet.

















Hopefully after doing these for a while I'll finally and get bored and convince myself to take watercolors with me. But, for now, I'm pretty happy with the results.

Been a year huh?

A year ago I went home for winter break and immediately found myself bored out of my mind, and decided to ask all of my friends on facebook to send me photos of themselves for me to practice speed painting. I cranked about a good 16 or 17 of them in a month, and learned a lot...
I feel like doing that again this year, but I'll probably move a bit slower and not do so many... I'm taking my tablet to figure drawing to get faster. Pics of those studies will be up shortly.

The first of my 2010 batch: Spencer and Brad

First post of my last year in school

... 7 or so weeks into the quarter, I finally take a breather and post here.
For a while now I've been lucky to get 7 hours of sleep in a 4-day school week. Definitely been working harder than last year... but I'm not as stressed out, somehow. If I had to guess as to why, I'd say it's because I'm really happy with my professor, and though he's an extremely intimidating individual, I think we finally have a clear and mutual respect for each other. Also, now that I'm 21 I can go out for a drink or two with my friends and colleagues, shoot the shit, and yap for hours and hours about school because that's just about all we can do.

Anyways, for those of you I am ever-neglecting to update, my lamp project has evolved since the summer. We now have a "pedestal" to go with the lamp, which sounds like a strange accompaniment to a desk lamp, but has become quite an interesting problem. We have fairly free-reign over what the purpose of the pedestal is (as long as their IS a purpose).
So this is what it looks like after working all night in the CAD lab. These were rendered in a pretty sub-par program but they pop out fast so I can render changing concepts as I go.





The top of the lamp rotates, and the lamp is only lit when the edges are aligned. Tiny magnets offer a little feedback as well. When the lamp is sitting in its tiny index in the pedestal's table, the form is continued down to the base. This way, the user is encouraged to turn on the lamp by "normalizing" its shape, and hence its purpose: to be a light.

So now is the scary part-- where we have to build it. I'm looking for an aluminum sculptor/welder, or a commercial/industrial specialist who isn't afraid to tackle something of such small scale. The top diffuser will be SLA'd or FDM'd, depending on the properties of samples I have yet to acquire.

And for those of you that could care less about ID and weren't impressed by the pictures, this is a teaser to a painting I've been working on in my little spare time for the sketchgroup:

Girlies

More figure drawing. Been going almost every week for a few months now... All of these are done with Prismacolor Pencils with Prisma Markers (for the longer poses).















There's one set I need to photograph and stick in here.
Be sure to check out the sketchgroup! It finally got somewhere (it only took all summer...).

Bunch of naked dudes

Something (Starcraft 2) has gotten in the way of finishing my last painting. Change of plans:

Now that I'm teaching I have some cash to spend on weekly figure drawing sessions!
Having a blast with these. I'll try to branch out into more other media when I get more comfortable. I'd say I'm at an 80% success rate now. Sorry for the stupid pixel-junk. I my some reasons to keep this PG. You'll just have to assume I'm really good at drawing genitalia.

















Wow. They're always looking to the right. I'll make sure to let the model know next time.
And yeah, this censoring square looks really really stupid, but I gotta keep this blog PG-13 at least.

R & R

I'm feeling quite rejuvenated this summer. The sun is out all through the week and I've worked myself into an art-craze. I haven't managed to get many of my other friends to contribute to the Summer Sketch Group with the same vigor, but oh well. I'm making my own fun.

I started teaching art privately several weeks ago. I'm liking it a lot, and I'm hoping to pick up more students in the future. I'm pretty sure I'd be able to handle teaching classes even after school starts up again.


Just a quick loose doodle.


This was my submission to the Summer Sketch Group's Draw My Character Activity... I wanted to let the next artist choose to show what might be in the bag she's hauling around through the desert.


Started as a doodle and eventually turned into a late-nighter. I worked up some nostalgic feelings watching Castle in the Sky and Naussica, so the theme of flying and adventure has been on my mind lately.


This one I started out a LOOONG time ago. It went a lot of different directions over the many months I tweaked it off and on... I don't usually do this kind of linework.. Not sure I'll do this kind of style very much, but it was fun to paint a quick cityscape and take a crack at rendering with multiple light sources.

So I've definitely got to do more observational drawing... All of my people look the same. Bugs the hell out of me...

... That shouldn't be a problem in my next post, coming up soon!

So this is awkward...

This has probably been the longest blog post-drought ever. For a laundry lists of excuses and legitimate reasons.
A lot's happened since my last post, both good and bad. It's been almost two full quarters of school, and within those a relationship, spring break, a breakup, a trip to Denver, my 21st birthday, a breakdown, random adventures, and a general reevaluation of myself and where I am and where I want to go.

I'm not really sure what I think of these. My work hasn't been getting better or going anywhere. Probably due to the fact that I haven't been doing much art at all. It's been a very discouraging cycle. But, I'm planning on spending this summer doing a lot of art and getting back on track...

















I got a new tiny Moleskine, for stealthy life drawing. It's small enough to fit in my back pocket, which helps counter the offset my gigantic wallet creates in the other pocket ((mostly full of punch cards, not cash.)
Something tells me I need a subject change. Maybe I'll spend some time getting back into real paints and watercolors, and try out a landscape. Or several. My life needs some color now. Bellingham's back to it's dreary old gray self again...

Scaling it up

This is my project from my first quarter as a junior. The assignment was to design and construct a privacy screen or room divider. Easy enough right?
Actually, it was really, really hard. As an exercise is simplistic design, we were urged not to make up an excuse for our design by giving it multifunctionality; shouldn't have to justify its existence by serving another purpose. The challenge was to display this minimalist philosophy in an elegant way.
My design ended up being heavily inspired by my graphic design courses, as I became interested in the simple mathematical aesthetic about typographic compositions. In essence, letters, the basic visual and structural building blocks of verbal and written language served the same purposes, physically, for my screen. I used .125 anodized aluminum, laser-cut from 3 patterns designed in Rhino.
Though some may find the 3-panel screen design safe and conventional, I think it is simple and appropriate, and at the same time flat panels speak to the 2D geometry of typography. As well, a screen need not be an obstruction, but it should enhance the environment, or create a new one altogether.
This brings me to the biggest challenge-- the joinery. I needed twist, an example of engineering that was neatly integrated into the overall design. I ended up building magnetic hinges from 3" cow magnets, folded my own aluminum brackets over them, and used aluminum binder posts to fasten them. These magnets allow a user to rearrange and construct a screen of whatever length or composition they desire. The polarity of the magnets permit a vertical flip of any module (similar to certain letters: b/d, a/g, etc). The polarity denies the user a horizontal flip, and to avoid confusion in this case the user only needs to match up the joinery on both sides of the screen to ensure a magnetic bond.

This has been a very long description for what happens to be my most intuitive design yet. Funny how that works...

Boredom can be a beautiful thing.

Within just a few days of returning home for the holidays, I found myself extremely bored. No more early wake-ups or firing on all cylinders through the night... Although I loved sleeping in every day and gorging myself on delicious home cooking (as well as plenty of holiday sweets). Many of my friends had not yet come back, or even finished school, so I decided I had to give myself some work to do. So, I asked all of my friends to send me good photographs of themselves for me to do a digital portrait for them. I flew out of the gates by cranking out 5 on the first day. Production quickly trailed off, and I still have a few more to do before I retire this project, but I'm happy with my progression. I learned a lot about discerning colors among tricky context differences, and rendering reflected light. I've done 16 of these since I started a few weeks back, and these are some of my favorites:



















All of these portraits were first sketched free-handed and then painted from reference (no tracing, paintovers, or eyedropping). I used only 1 layer for the sketch and a second one for the paint. Took 40 to 90 minutes (if I got caught up tweaking brush options for the hair) each.

Thanks to all of my friends for helping me out and encouraging me!