Sketches and Shapes

Did some sketching at Kahala mall the other night:



Also started doing some exercises suggested in Design Basics Index, by Jim Krause. The page below is an exercise involving creating small compositions using geometric shapes.


I later tried to take this exercise further and "abstract" magazine ads and layouts into shapes as well:

Shapes are your friends.

Purchase Drawing

About a week or so ago I bought Kate Bingaman-Burt's book Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today, in which she includes daily drawings of purchases. I had been meaning to both get the book and start drawing regular, if not daily, purchases since I read about her a year or two ago in ReadyMade magazine. It seemed a good way to get drawings out, especially if I was stuck in the "I don't know what to draw" doldrums. So here's the first of (hopefully) many of these drawings. Still trying to simplify lines, couldn't resist the temptation to retrace lines in the name of "line weight," though.

This month's issue of Juztapoz magazine was curated by Pushead, he of countless Metallica skull graphics, featuring, among others, Aaron Horkey (amazingly intricate ink) and Dan Seagrave (practically every classic death metal album cover). Horns, pentagram, etc. were induced by the giddy metalness of it all.

Hello again. Here are some sketches

Spent a good amount of time on the north shore over the weekend and did some sketches at the beach.


Two above done on October 15. I bought the Bill Sienkiewicz Sketchbook that night and was really impressed by the economy of linework in his ink sketches. He is able to express a lot of his forms using lots of negative space and each of his pen strokes defines a shape, nothing is wasted. Sienkiewicz has a great feel for contour and gesture. He says of sketching: "I often sketch in pen. It forces me to be exact, and if I fuck the sketch up, it screams at me. Not the pen, the sketch. The pen just laughs."


Rocks and island sketched on October 16, trying to be conscious of the use of pen strokes, and making better decisions of separating light from dark.

Working on Anatomy/People

Lately I've been trying to work on gestures, anatomy, and general figure drawing. When I've tried this in the past, I always get stuck in the middle of a Loomis book (free downloads of these at Escape From Illustration Island in the link) or some anatomy text and just draw one or two static pictures and call it a day. Not terribly effective.

My current strategy is to play to my ADD and go to multiple sources. I've been reading digested/simplified anatomy at two blogs geared towards animation: Rad Sechrist's Rad How-To and Kris Anka's Design Lessons. Both of these break down more traditional anatomy and figure drawing basics into practical chunks.

I go back and forth between these blogs and Loomis's Figure Drawing For All It's Worth to get proportions, forms, and muscle relation studies, and then jump over to Pixelovely's Gesture Drawing Tool for practice with timed pictures (warning: nekkid people). Rinse and repeat. There are also some neat references at Posemaniacs, though all the models are generated by computer and can seem awkward.

In any case, I hope to get a better grip on drawing fluid, lifelike poses out of this.

Inktober 6, 7

Sketches:

What a reality TV show about me doing freelance design/art would be like, according to my girlfriend:

Inktober 5

I really like the look of twisted trees, and take lots of pictures them when I'm out hiking or relaxing at the beach. Here's a sketch of one such picture taken a little while back of a fallen tree branch on the North Shore of Oahu.

Mainly done with my current favorite pen, a Japanese Uni-ball Signo 0.28, with some help from the Pentel brush pen and 0.5 Signo.

Inktober 3,4

Some more ink sketches done with the Pentel ink brush:

Hands

Hello Kitty clock, with friend.

Also, here's a cool video on how ink is made, via gurneyjourney.

Happy Inktober!

In celebration of Inktober, here are a couple of inky sketches from the past couple of days.

Toby sleeping, Pentel brush pen

Vampire squid, Pentel brush pen on tracing paper, done while working on lettering for a client project.

Illustration Friday - Proverb

Hi.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Here's my entry for this week's Illustration Friday. The topic was "proverb," and after some thought, I decided to illustrate "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime."

Analog ink + digital color

So now you know how to fish.

Sketch:

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.

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

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.

Car

The other week in class we worked with cylinders and converging lines to construct cars. I'd be lying if I said this was the first car I've drawn, but it's definitely among the first that actually came out kind of looking like a car. We traced ellipses and converging lines off of a photo, then used them as construction lines for our own car. Some people drew BMWs and Corvettes, I drew a beater. First one in pencil, second one in ballpoint.

I pose a question to the photoshop-literate: I am scanning 11"x17" paper on a letter size scanner, so I do it in two parts. From there, I bring them into photoshop, align them as two layers in a single file, and mess with the levels and contrast/brightness. Is there a trick to this, so I don't get that dark line where you can see the division between the two scans?

I'm thinking I'll play around with these in the digital realm later. And upload more scans, but now I am le tired. Criticism and commenting is encouraged. g'night.