Friends Forever

I've been getting back into colored pencil a little bit. I forgot how much I love those things.

Anyway this is what I imagine it would be like if the Loch Ness Monster and a dodo met and could be best friends and talk about being genetically inept and cumbersome.

Dogleslugs

"Wow, Katie, I wish I knew what it looked like inside your imagination," Says nobody ever. But if they did, this would more or less be the image I'd direct them to in response.

In addition to being the most brainless thing I've painted in recent memory, this is also kind of a color study inspired by a piece by Sam Nielson, who is amazingly talented and you should check out his work.

Here's a little test animation of this blob eating an apple. It's kind of cute. I think the stupid built in Flash codec I used on export made everything kind of short and fat (like, shorter and fatter than I already draw things) so I'll fix that later probably.

Casting MaGiC!!11

I've got this bust of Socrates on my desk that I draw sometimes when I can't think of anything else art-related to do. The drawings were all pretty grim at first but I found something that really helped:

 I got this book called "Classical Drawing Atelier" for my birthday which, in the few pages in the very back of the book that have any sort of actionable instructions for improving your artwork, outlines this method of cast drawing (but I think it can kind of be applied to any kind of observational drawing) in which the main forms are blocked in with a bunch of intersecting lines. Like, the line that defines the back of this sculpture's neck, if followed through, can define his browline as well. It's a lot easier to keep features positioned correctly in relation to each other this way than my own homemade method, which involves drawing a bunch of circles and stuff ontop of each other until they sort of resemble a face and then hatching out details from there.

 Y'all should give it a try!

Tommy Lee Jones-- Progress!

I feel like I never post anything finished on this blog, but here you go. I've got about a zillion personal projects going on at once and it helps me to stay motivated if I get to post something on here every once in a while even if it's not in any real state of completion.

So I was SUPER PROUD of myself working on this and then I flipped it to a mirror image in Photoshop and realized that it's pretty lopsided and wonky and doesn't look as much like him as I thought it did.

It's funny how your brain plays tricks on you-- the longer you stare at a piece of art the more your thoughts and preconceptions start constructing a pair of proverbial artistic beer goggles that sort of blind you to what's actually going on. Sometimes it takes looking at a piece in a mirror to shake it off and see things for what they are.

Which, actually, sounds like some convoluted metaphor for life. I didn't mean it that way, but if you got a sudden philosophical urge back there I think you should just run with it.

Ron Swanson

5 min sketch from tonight.

Life Drawing

Norman Rockwell master study progress. 1 hr total so far.

Caricatures!

So I've been playing around a lot more with caricature. It's proven to be really, really challenging. It's all about hierarchy-- finding the primary, secondary, and tertiary features and keeping the exaggerations within that same structure. But sometimes the hierarchy isn't just in the person's face, but the person's face as compared to other people's faces. I've found that it's really helpful to work from a photo reference that includes multiple people, so you can see that a jawline that doesn't really seem like anything special in isolation is actually comically huge compared to other people's. I started out pretty tragically horrible (And I'll post progress lineups so you can see JUST HOW BAD they were) but now they're sort of getting to the point where you can just about tell who the person is. Not groundbreaking by any means, but I'm kind of proud of how much better they've gotten. (These are Steve Buscemi and Tommy Lee Jones, by the way.)

Cheeks!

So sometimes when I get artist's block I go back to drawing these characters I created when I was twelve. I know their personalities and they're just kind of cute and easy so things flow pretty easily. I wanted to experiment with some color and light with these guys. Pretty pleased about how it turned out considering it started as just a bunch of goofy sketches.

Jackrabbits

Bertram

A mood piece for the short film I've been working on sporadically for a couple months!