Pictures from LA

I've been sick for the past couple of days, and at first I thought, "hey, what a great time to do some sketching!" and I would have, had I not been in bed feeling like crap. So here are some sketches and pictures from the LA trip. I misplaced my camera at the bottom of my backpack during the Ragnar relay, so I have no race pictures :(.

Sketch of hallway at some church in Temecula, done early as hell in the morning. I was really hyper after running my leg at night, so I spent some time hopping around and stretching before sitting down to draw.

Saw Jordan at Capitol Records

Rhodes

Beatles! blurry like a bigfoot sighting, sadly. We also saw Steve Perry there.

On the plane ride home.

One Rag to Rule Them All

I recently participated in the Southern California Ragnar relay, which is a 200-ish mile relay from Huntington Beach to San Diego. It was a lot of fun meeting up with new and old friends to engage in physical exertion and loss of sleep, with the glimmering hope of a free beer at the finish line to spur us on.

In any case, I collaborated with another teammate on designing the t-shirt for out team, the Fellowship of the Rag. Yes, the name is as juvenile and disgusting as you might think. Our concept was to incorporate joining hands/arms around a red dot, with all the pertinent event information, as well as the names of our runners and volunteers.

I started out sketching some hands and circles, to envision how to set them up:

After determining the sizing and position I wanted for the hands, I put some sketches on the lightbox to get a cleaned up forearm to use as a template in Illustrator. I wanted to get the pencil work pretty clean before getting to the computer, to reduce guess-work:

I traced the forearm and hand as separate shapes to be able to change the angle at the wrist:

Since we were going for a 2-color print, I wanted to make the elements simple and readable. To this end, I made sure to leave gaps between the fingers, so they would read better:

Once I had the hand and arm positioned relative to eachother, I joined them into a single shape with the pathfinder tool in Illustrator.

Then it was a matter of pasting copies of the forearm, each rotated 30 degrees, to make a circle of 12 arms.

Then text was added for the runner and volunteer names, as well as the team name.

Pretty quick from start to finish and I'm already getting ideas to work in next year.

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.

Recent Work

Here are some models and renderings I did recently for Honolulu-based interior design company Retail Therapy. These models are of a proposed cell phone store somewhere in town. I'll update when the store is done.

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.