Charcoal

I haven't updated in forever, so I'm taking advantage of being sick to upload some recent drawings. We've started working with charcoal, which is one of my favorite tools for drawing. These were done on large paper, so please excuse the digital photos; I did not want to deal with charcoal dust all over the scanner, nor did I want to deal with stitching the pictures together from multiple scans.


The first one is more of a "finished" drawing. I'm pretty pleased with it, I just need to work on firming up the geometry here and there, which I'll do when I'm over this cold/flu whatever it is.


The second drawing is a quick study of a still life arrangement. I like the way charcoal allows you to spread value over larger areas quickly, giving it a more painterly feel.

Other than that, I'm pretty sick. Don't play ookie mouth with me.

Blind Contours

Here are a bunch of blind contours I did for class this past week, in all their gimpy glory. I've always found these an enjoyable exercise, but this is the first time I'm trying to make them better somehow, paying closer attention to the details and link between sight and hand movement.

Sketch dump

Hey, haven't been here in a while. Here are some sketches from the last couple of months. The fall semester just started, so I hope to be more productive and post more sketches and whatnot. Just need to set aside the time to work. Drop some criticism in the comments, if you please.

3d sketching application

Check out Rhonda, a 3D sketching program developed in 2003. The Neil Young music adds to the video, kind of wistful and nostalgic. Anyway, good stuff. I want it.

Also, sometimes I take pictures of signs.






Carving words into trees makes Woodsy Owl sad.

More Sketches and Vacation

Here are some sketches. Some are from our trip to the bay area, pictures of which are also slideshowing below. If I didn't mess up the slideshowing.

















































The trip went well, we stayed a few days in Monterey and one in San Francisco. Lots of driving.

Sketch Class Final Project

The final project for my design sketching class was to produce a product idea and present it with several sheets in ink and grey marker.

My product is a massage chair inspired by the form of a lava lamp. The chair has a bulbous, organic form, sitting on a conical metal base. This would mainly be targeted at an older nostalgic audience, as well as a 20-ish stoner audience. Bam. Stoned phone orders. "Dude . . . the chair is like . . . moving."

The idea is to have the motion of the swiveling chair charge a battery for the massaging action. Whether or not that would work in real life is another issue, reserved for "engineering." Heh. In any case, please take a look, and leave me some crits/comments.

Ideation












3 Views












Parts












Perspective












Use












Logo













Magazine Ad


















Commercial Storyboard

And Iran (or I don't know a lot of things)

Today was the last day of sketching class, so we presented our design projects. I think it went pretty well, I'll post the drawings soon. My instructor apparently liked my work, because she's holding onto my sheets for a bit to make copies as examples for future classes. Woot.

Watched Who Killed the Electric Car? this afternoon, and I encourage you to see it, if you haven't already. While people can argue about causes of global warming, whether global warming is real, etc., I think we can agree that breathing car exhaust is undesirable. It's pretty much impossible to spin smog as a plus. I haven't done extensive fact-checking on claims made in the movie, but this much is apparent:

1. General Motors and other major car manufacturers produced all-electric vehicles
2. Said vehicles were leased to a limited amount of drivers, at least some of whom had pleasant driving experiences
   
3. The leases on the cars were not renewed and the manufacturers took the cars back to be destroyed
4. Bearded Mel Gibson looks like a crazy homeless man

Regardless of the possible reasons for their actions, that the car manufacturers destroyed the cars is sad and wasteful. It's not even that they decided not to make the cars anymore. It's that they destroyed the fucking cars. Seriously. At least from what was presented by the filmmakers, the cars were fine, good, great, even. They could have at least let people buy up that limited run of cars. Couldn't they? Crushing them up and leaving them in a landfill seems so unbelievably pointless and wasteful.

And now the automakers are getting food stamps. Fuck. That. It's things like this that tell me most politicians who tout a free market don't really believe in free market policies.* Companies do business, some succeed, some fail. When a company fails, another company can fill the void it leaves, hopefully with a better business model or better luck. If a company constantly needs money transfusions to keep it hobbling along, it is failing. Pull the plug. Yes, people will lose their jobs, but other jobs and companies will take their place. It's not as if nobody's trying to build better cars in America, is there?

That domestic innovation is so discouraged when the United States is falling behind the rest of the world in technology and production is sickening.

/rant

Iran's so far away.

Yeah, I had to do that. Not certain that the reform candidate is necessarily the winner of the election, but then again, blanketing censorship of the internet and shooting demonstrators is a pretty dick move. That's what I have to say about that.

*This is my problem with fighting wars to promote "democracy." If we say that our ideas are better but need to be shoved down people's throats with a bayonet, it doesn't matter if the ideas are good or not. Use of force to promote the issue shows me a lack of confidence in the argument.

Escondido Falls Hike

We went hiking this past sunday at Escondido Falls, in Malibu. Pretty easy hike, with some nice scenery. The drive out to Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway is nice, too. It made me like southern california for a bit.

We took a wrong turn early on and ended up walking around rich people's houses. Seriously huge yards:


We turned around and found the right trail




























Scary spider


Small waterfall at the top. There was apparently another waterfall at the top that was more impressive and had swinging ropes, but Toby, Nicole, and I stayed behind while the others went to check it out. I wasn't too sure Toby could pull off the steeper climbing. She seemed to enjoy the hike, though.




























The water smelled kind of sulfurous, but it was pretty. This is now my desktop image at work:






















































































link to Picasa album

Lego Architecture Kit (or !!!!!!!!!!!!)

Guggenheim


Fallingwater

Holy jesus monkey this is awesome.

Huntington Gardens

For class on Saturday we went to the Huntington Gardens to sketch outdoor scenery. I'd never been, and despite the heat, I enjoyed walking around and looking at the different gardens and buildings there. Definitely need another shot at that place, and if you get the chance to check it out, I recommend it highly.
I'm not terribly pleased with my sketches from that day, but it was instructional and helpful if only because of the effort and action put into drawing; like so many things in life, the point is the process, and not necessarily the end result. At least that's what I tell myself when I look at these.
Trees outside the main house

Trellis covered path in the rose garden. Perspective's off. Bah.

Lion chair

Tree covered with other tree stuff in the Jungle Garden. This is my favorite of the bunch. It looked like the tree was being taken over by parasitic growths, but still standing. I've forgotten too much of high school biology to know if that's actually the case, but it sounds dramatic enough.

Poorly done Chinese Garden drawing. Those goddamn roofs are deceptively hard to draw.


After completing some drawings, I had about an hour to walk around before closing, so I went into some exhibits. The main house holds European art, which I found out later after looking it up. They had lots of furniture, sculptures, and a lot lot lot of portraiture. Gainsborough stands out in my memory, as they have the Blue Boy there.
And there was this middle aged woman there explaining the pictures to her companion: "It seems there's a distance between the couple, but he's trying to bridge it." When I passed by them I swear I could smell liquor. Some say that's how you do it, but I just can't fathom drinking in that heat at 4 in the afternoon, but to each their own.
Strangely enough, I found myself drawn to a small collection of watercolors they had up. And the furniture and sculptures. It's strange because I have a difficult time with watercolors and I've been averse to 3-dimensional art in the past. Not that I didn't like those media, but I found them frustrating to work with. Perhaps that's the root of my interest in them in galleries. Envy of some sort.

I took a picture of this cool end table in the art gallery in what was the Huntington house. I guess it still is the Huntington house. In any case, I like it.

The placard said something about incorporating Japanese design in the shelving, but what would I know.
There were also some chairs

This is a sussex chair by Morris & Company from ~1870

And another from 1880. Looks comfy. I took pictures of the placards for the last two. That's how I know what they are, teehee.

Right now I'm recording to my laptop from vinyl, and am getting a lot of noise, like an electric hum. It's pretty annoying. Recording from the audio out on my amplifier to the line in on my computer and recording to Cakewalk. Fucking technology.