Chantry Flats Landscape Drawing

Went to a landscape drawing workshop yesterday at Chantry Flats, in the San Angeles mountains. It was very beautiful, with lots of water flowing, greenery, and flowers. There was a very big waterfall at the end of our hike, and lots of interesting things to look at. We were focusing on composition and while I didn't end up drawing very many things, I felt what I did draw really focused on composition and depth. I was very pleased with the result. These are three of the 4 images I did. The 4th is this cool tree that I would like to work on a bit more before posting.

Illustration Friday: Egg-spire

I'm not quite sure what he is, but because it rhymes, I'm calling him my Rhino-dino. He may be slightly inspired by How To Train Your Dragon, since we went to a show of Dreamworks production art at Art center.

I hope to get to color him this week, since i'm itching to pick up my colored pencils again, but I'm busy with the class assignment for my composition class. The class is really interesting, and I'm learning a lot, but I have a long way to go before I get really good at it. I'll definitely be retaking this class again. Once I finish up the project, I plan on posting the work, but I have more drawing to get back to. That is one of the reasons why I haven't been posting much this month. I've also decided to restart my 15 minute daily drawings, to get back into the habit of sketching regularly. You can look forward to more posts upcoming.

I really like composition class, since that is now one of my weakest elements in my work. I've gotten good at characters, but I've never been happy with not having full cinematic inspired scenes. My teacher is Will Weston and he is really interesting to listen to and an extremely knowledgeable teacher. I've already driven my husband crazy with "and the teacher said this...and the teacher said that..." But it is forcing me out of my comfort zone with my work. My drawings in the class are much stiffer and more exacting than my sketchbook work, but I think they will be like that for a while until I get more comfortable working regularly with perspective.

Update: I forgot to mention my thought process behind this drawing. the only two things I could originally think of for 'expire' were death and spoiled milk. I tried a couple of person with spoiled milk sketches and realized that even the concept was gross to me, so I stopped working on it. Last night I happened to think of egg-spire, and I knew right away what I wanted his head to look like.

Illustration Fri....Thursday: Propagate

Last minute post. Doodled this while watching Olympics

Illustration Friday: Adrift

I drew the initial sketch on Saturday and it was a cat...just an ordinary cat, with a flat head. Then we went to the zoo on Sunday and watched the snow leopards play in the snow. They were so much fun to watch, that when I came home, I redrew the head, and added lots of spots. Finally got it colored.

Illustration Friday: Muddy

I was sick for a good portion of last week, and I'm still trying to get back to my normal operating schedule. Still have a stupid cough. It's been wet and rainy and cold here, but the perk of that is the mountains are starting to look so green and beautiful. I really enjoy my drives to and from work right now.

I think that the guy looks a little weird, but he looks different then the faces I normally draw. I keep trying to expand my range of expressions and features. His face was the result of a drawing session with some friends. We did 2-minute drawings and one set of them were blind/continuous line drawings where we couldn't look at the paper. We really enjoyed the results, which were often funny and Picasso-like. This one was my favorite:

There is a certain quality to the scribble that I lost in the top drawing, but it was still fun working with an image I don't usually draw.

Illustration Friday: Focused

Schubert was so focused on what he saw he forgot to chew his cud.

I was researching sheep at work on Friday, and I really liked how funny their faces looked, thus I drew a sheep. I guess I'm back in the swing of things with Illustration Friday, because This concept came quickly and I drew it straight onto the bristol board with minimal corrections.

I also found my water pen again, instead of the gigantic chinese watercolor brush, so I'm much happier. I can add little details to my heart's content. I thought about breaking out the colored pencils to refine a few areas, but I was happy that I kept this loose (for me) so I left it alone.

Illustration Friday: Clumsy & Marvin the Marvelous duo

Marvin the Marvelous donned his pointy hat, secured his wand, opened the door, stepped out, fell on his nose.

This Marvin piece seemed perfect for this week's IF topic: Clumsy. For those who don't know, this is a project that I'm working on with my husband. He gives me a sentence each week and I have to illustrate it with my wizardly character, Marvin. I'm planning on doing one a week in between working on my first children's book project.

Marvin's character is a work in progress, and I'm using him to explore getting more movement and expression in my work, as well as more detail. I've always loved those wonderfully complex characters with elaborate outfits and gadgets and stuff everywhere.

I'm not quite sure what's up with the perspective on the background...it's wonky, and it is what happens when I freehand a background in ink after developing the character. I also couldn't decide which angle I wanted to draw Marvin at--the anticipation or the fall--so you get both! His arm also got slightly disjointed when I redrew the image on bristol using my light box. The bristol board is thick enough that with a light box I get a general idea where the line is, but it's not extremely precise. I ended up just redrawing the hands rather than tracing them.

Next time: make the color looser, and ink AFTER color.

Marvin the Marvelous colored

Marvin has been colored!

I may end up tweaking the colors throughout the course of this project...I am still putting a bit too much detail in the work. He's supposed to be colored loosely. I colored this one at the same as the Marvin piece for this week. I need to try my third Marvin piece drawn loosely with the pen instead of tracing it off the sketch.

Meet Marvin

Meet Marvin. He's MARVELOUS!

He's also my new bloggy project! I've been wanting something fun that I could post on my blog that will also teach me to dedicate shorter blocks of time to finished work, ie, work quicker and looser. He is also my work-around so I have stuff to post while working on my children's book. Like Illustration Friday, I have to do one a week, from sketch to quick finished color. Each of his adventures will be based upon a sentence or scenario that my husband comes up with. The above post is NOT this weekend's, it is just getting a feel for the character. We'll see how color pans out, and he may change slightly in appearance as my characterization develops.

I'll be adding color later, but I'm off to bed now since I work tomorrow. more to come.

Illustration Friday: Wilderness

And he looked in horror at the 'wilderness' before him...

I don't know why I had such trouble with the IF topic this week. It's pretty open-ended, providing limitless possibilities. Yet I was. I tried something with some tropical plant fronds, but it felt too much like someone else's work I saw earlier in the day. I guess the problem was that all my thoughts are on my personal project. I still need to remember to draw other things too.

Once I went back to the Re-cycler Squirrel post from 2 weeks ago, I decided to delve more into his story. What made him the way he is? Why does he travel around re-purposing trash? I also really wanted to do a more dynamic pose then 'just standing there', so it started with him perched on the edge of the cliff, then I needed to give him something to be staring at. Obviously, since he's a nekkid squirrel, this is before he acquired all his accoutrement.

Invisible work

I've been working hard on what I hope will be my first children's book. As such, I don't feel it is appropriate to show online until I get this published (hopefully!). Nor will I be mentioning anything about the story. What I do want to talk about is my approach and initial thoughts on the project.

First, this project is new and shiny, thus it is in the 'fun' stage. I have a lot of enthusiasm about the project currently and I hope to maintain a degree of enthusiasm through the end of the project. I think it helps that this project is MY project for the first time, and it is exactly what I want it to be.

The storyline I'm currently working on is one of a few concepts that have always been tagging along in the back of my mind throughout school and the past couple of years. I have sketches spattered throughout many of my sketchbooks that explore ideas and possible directions, some of them more concrete then others. I am happy to say that I feel my drawing skills have improved since those initial sketches because even though I slow down and slack off, I've never stopped.

One of the key approaches I'm taking in this book is to tackle my greatest fears and weakest points in drawing. The images will be full of hands and feet, complex expressions, and--the greatest horror of them all--perspective! I want this project to be a challenge that makes me push my skills as much as I can so I can say that the result of my first book was to make me a better artist. So far I've filled up 6 pages with preliminary concept sketches, and I have multiple folders of image references ready for my use. The more I draw, the more I'm eager to come back the next evening and draw instead of watching tv or reading books. I want to see how my own story unfolds.

There is only one negative to note currently with my project: I've gone to bed with so many ideas in my head that I've lost sleep. I even woke up in the middle of the night the other day and ended up drawing for an hour.

Illustration Friday: Confined

Over the years his expression became confined to one of loathing, disdain, & disgust.

I tried something new with this sketch. After I drew it, I taped a piece of tracing paper over the sketch and inked the tracing paper. I think the results are decent, but I could do better. The heavy outlines are too heavy for the size of the sketch. Some of the more delicate linework from the sketch got obliterated. At first I was laying in the hatching very slowly and that made a heavier line, but once I started working quickly, the hatching looked much nicer. I'm not going to go back now, but I should have hatched more on the left side of the face to push it back more. It competes too much with the nose.

Daily Sketch 2: Flickr Quickdraw

I haven't done any quick sketches in a while, and it shows...the really bad ones are the first couple, but I started to get warmed up and got a bit better. In theory, these are minute long sketches, but I think I spent up to 5 minutes on some of them. I think next time I'm going to try this with my favorite ink pens, which I find I really love using when i'm in life drawing. The permanency of it tends to make me loosen up and surprisingly draw more accurately. Go figure. My favorite of the night is the guy's nose.

All these were pulled from Flickr's interesting photos from the last 7 days :) Some of these photos are absolutely gorgeous.

Links to original photos in no specific order:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mandi615/4243364480/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41827227@N03/4259448092/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/itzick/4251519364/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joel_r/4241774044/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexissmith/4246149852/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skr1993/4256605473/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamless-qtr/4256064382/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamlowercasepeople/4249476612/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23934051@N02/4243540553/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomitapio/4246542168/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/krakote/4245270108/

Daily Sketch 1: Monkeys

First of all, my IF: Renewal post (previous post) got 12 posts! WOOHOO! that's already 50% more posts then my best IF post last year. I think that's a perfect way to start the year.

Next, posts were nil the past two days because my evenings became filled: saying farewell to a coworker one evening, and taking my visiting aunt and uncle to Griffith Park Observatory.

Today's sketch is monkeys, because i'm trying to fulfill a promise to my co-worker that I'd do drawings for her child's room.

Illustration Friday: Renewal

Re-cycler Squirrel

I had fun with my little squirrel. The thumbnail at the bottom of the page is the initial sketch. There are elements from the initial that I like better, including working in the recycling symbols. If I ever do this as a finished piece, I think i'll try to work it with those arrows as the framing device. Mostly, I love his ears and the bottle cap.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone!

My first post of 2010 is both good and slightly unfortunate. Good because you get a finished artwork post; slightly unfortunate because this is the fleeting turtles illustration that I entered in the SILA Illustration West competition...it didn't get chosen. Oh well...I plan on doing better next year and hopefully enter multiple pieces. I think that will definitely help me increase my chances of getting a piece of work into the competition. I still may enter it into the Communication Arts illustration competition, but i'm not 100% sure i'm going to submit...the deadline is in just a few days.

I feel that I've improved 10-fold over the first SILA submission I entered in a few years back and I'm hopeful that my future entries will show as much or more improvement from the current piece. It probably also didn't help that I was entering into the unpublished category, which is the category with the most entries and the largest range of styles. I can't help thinking that I really need to get some artwork published, even if it is for a small publication.

I got a really awesome gift from one of my friends this year: Do it Later! A 2010 Planner (or Non-Planner) for the Creative Procrastinator. I'm excited to see if I can fill it up or use it to motivate me and keep me going strong with all my plans for the year...including of course keeping everyone entertained by my sketches/doodles/artwork :) It's going to sit right on my desk and glare at me whenever I'm sitting there, asking me why I'm writing on my blog rather than working on art... hmmm... i should go.

Without further ado, the art:

Happy Holly Days!

The old year is ending and this will be the first year I've actually created a holiday-oriented illustration! yay!

This has been a busy year with work as usual but also with all my new classes. In addition to a half year of taekwondo twice a week, I've taken many classes at The Animation Guild:

Traditional Animation Basics 1 & 2

Life drawing (twice)

Animal Drawing at the LA Zoo

Character design

I started the year strong with my sketchbook, and although it dwindled off as the year progressed, I hope to have renewed drive in the coming months. I'm planning on posting daily sketches again as well as working on my first children's book (which won't be posted)

2009 blog recap:

82 posts

115 comments! woohoo!

40 daily sketch posts

16 Illustration Friday posts

Posts with most comments: Illustration Friday Flying and IF Germs at 8 comments each; IF Germs also generated the most visits in 1 day: 54

Goals for 2010 blog:

1. Post at least 116 posts: one for each comment in 2009 plus one (for effort!)

2. Post more than 41 daily sketches

3. Post more than 16 illustration friday posts.

To everyone who has commented this year: YOU ROCK! thank you for all your feedback and I hope to grow my blog more in 2010.

Have a happy holiday season with family and friends!

Comment Moderation

Unfortunately, I've started getting spam posts on my comments, rather than actual comments about how good or bad my work is. To resolve this issue, I've had to restrict who can post comments to my site. Now only people registered with Blogger/OpenID can post, rather than any random visitor. That may result in a reduction of comments on my site, but it is really frustrating to see that you received a comment, and you get excited then you read a random piece of crap that has absolutely nothing to do with your art.

Sorry to those actual posters who want to give feedback or support but don't feel they should have to sign in/register. I wish I could leave it open to all.

Monster sketch

Found this website that records your sketches as you work: Odosketch!



The limited palette makes it all the more fun because it unifies all the various styles of sketches that appear on the website.

Will have to play around with this more when i'm not on my lunch break.

November is project-finishing month

It's been a busy two weeks, particularly Halloween weekend. I flew out to Tampa to participate in my friends' halloween/masquerade/1920's wedding. Complete with a horror movie cake. :) Fun, but incredibly hectic. The two days after I got back, I slept about 11 hours each day.

My goal for November is the completion of projects:

1. Grandfather's Memoirs - editing is coming along. about 2/3 through editing by hand (made good use of my plane flight last weekend), but I still need to enter all those edits into the digital document...and create the family tree/tables...and finalize the cover...

2. Panda animation - from my animation class last semester. I finished the backgrounds I was working on, but I have yet to make the final tweaks to my line art for the panda.

3. Dog spinning rough animation - from my character design class this semester.

4. Tentative project that I shouldn't be working on, but I couldn't help myself...if anything comes of this project, I will post more about it when I am able.

5. Possible logo design...

6. Illustration friday...since I haven't done one in a while.

As you can see, lots on my plate AND we're heading into the busy season at work.

I also want to scan some of my life drawing from the two semesters I took this year. I went through it and deemed less than a fourth of the pencil scrawls as acceptable and recognizable as a human, but it's a start.

Posting might be scant, since the major project this month is not art related in the least. But I'll try my best to start filling up my sketchbook again and posting images.