shading adventures

Brown paper, some kind of pastel? and black marker. And the last one is one black paper... and looks like a mess.

more caricature

And then I accidentally drew Kirsten Stewart. Not looking up if that's the right name.

 

Caricatures

From my drawing for animators class.

Because it's been forever.

I did my midterms. And today, I drew this lady, and I enhanced it in photoshop (I don't actually know what I'm doing in photoshop, though.)

The file is very big, be prepared.

I probably won't animate her, but I think I will keep this drawing around.

my 365

I've passed 300 in my 365, and I just finished scanning up to 220. And while I'm by a scanner...
I forgot my sketchbook for once in my life. This is a collection of World Civ. doodles.
During World Civ. and Art History, I made a small kingdom (set somewhere around the Crusades, before the plague. Or was it after the plague?)

Map of said kingdom. Each X represents the center city of a region (without real borders), each dot represents a main city (they're not very visible). I couldn't decide if the thing in the top right was a crater or plateau. Its scale is modeled after England, mostly, but what was most important about the scale is how long it would take the characters to travel from one fiefdom/region to another.
And, of course, it's a class-m planet.

This is a decent caricature of my gangly teacher.

First drawing on my tablet!

Whooohoo! Road to success!

3D Modeling final

And this is the first drawing for my Maya modeling final. It will contain birth flowers, from each month, coming together in a bouquet. The flowers together in one place is impossible because of different growing seasons, but they come together to make a year. At the same time, they are fragile and delicate and are constantly in a state of decay. The vase sort of represents the world that contains this metaphor for time.

I think of this piece as a painting. I'll design how I create the petals/leaves first- what shapes I'll use and how I'll make a lot then tweak them to make each petal a little different.

HAPPY NOVEMBER

So this is what I did in class today. I R photoshop genius! Not really, but this is my first attempt at coloring. I even used different layers. Why didn't I do this in high school? These are characters for my Animation I final. And there isn't even any purple.

Luck, The Importance of Planning,

I say that I'm lucky, I wish people luck. And I don't really believe in a 'luck', but coincidence, circumstance. And I believe that I know myself well.

To know thyself is to know how far you can go. I'd forgotten to hole-punch my animation paper (we use the  -        .        -  punch), so I planned out as much as I could. I have two hours of lunch before Animation 1, so I punched my papers and did it. 7 seconds on 2's, 100+ drawings, put into iStopmotion, exported for Quicktime. I felt like such a superhero. And I didn't gloat. I just smiled like and idiot in class, filled with personal satisfaction in my own abilities. When a mistake was made, I formed a new plan of action and did not succumb to stress.

But how far can I go? My classmates stay up almost all night, my own roommate gets sleep whenever she can. I don't feel the stress. I see time in blocks of hours, and I usually don't need to stay up later than 2 or I can wake up a few hours early if I need to. And in some ways I find this distancing. Saying 'oh, I am able to structure my time in such a way that I usually don't need to stay up too late' is elitist, arrogant.

folding box

I've completed my first animation!!
and class isn't for over 12 hours. Success.
hopefully it won't be harshly received.

Daily Practice discoveries

I'm up to daily self-portrait 85 or so, and I haven't been posting them because I've been home all summer without a scanner. But I wanted to take some pictures and post some of the drawings that are in a style I'm beginning to see more of. It's made of straight lines and curves, and is very very geometric. I want to see how they translate into more three-dimentional drawings, but I like them so far.
#41 Lizy-Doll, #55 Bthing Suit Try-On, #77 Geometry trying to be more interesting, #79 Sitting on my hands, #80 Happy July 4th! (fireworks are scary)

Emotionally, most of these faces are hiding for one reason or another.


 

mroe summer

Still more summer. But I'm gladly busy with my quaint (at the worst, pathetic) goals. Like watering my garden in the morning, and I'm still trying to make the best pancakes ever. So far, they involve cornmeal.

And I guess that's what I look forward to: food. Not fast food, not out to dinner, I want to make it. It's a fantasy of failure and having to try again. It's an occupation of time. I want to find some creative way to mix flour, butter, sugar, and milk. It's precious.

I painted half the livingroom, rearranged the furniture, and packed a full garbage bag full of stuff from a sideways bookshelf.

I'm still doing my self-portraits. I don't know when they'll ever be online, but they will. I should probably put an adult-content warning. Nothing explicit, but as a project inherently about body-image, and clothes are unnecessary.

A little catch-up

STACnight. Congrats to the kids who put on an amazing preformance. I heard a lot of "I wish I could have done that" from my fellow alum, and overall, it proved to the parents and the visitors what a compassionate group of kids can do.
It was one of the best, if not the best, STACnight I've been to. It's also my fifth.

At the show, I was asked "are you happy at Pratt". I'm not happy at home. I'm happy when I'm busy. I don't miss the smokers and hipsters and film majors (sometimes all at the same time), but I miss the work.
I'm up to... I think today is #55 of my self-portraits. I don't think I've really seen improvement, but I know that I have to do it every day. I finished a small first sketchbook and started on a new one, which I dislike because felt-tipped pens seep through. I don't think anyone else actually cares about that.
The self-portraits give me 10 minutes a day to think about forming a positive and healthy relationship with my body. To believe, when I am alone, that I am beautiful, or quirky, or interesting, or that I just have big eyes. But I rarely feel ugly. I get down if a pair of jeans doesn't fit the way I'd like it to, but I have a lot of jeans, and I have time.
I have time. I don't know what to do with it. But I have it.
If that was the description of an object, I would throw it out.

I keep going back and forth on my personal religious beliefs. It is very hard to develop a religious opinion without the help of media, ministers, and parents. I don't like religious politics. I like moral lessons through ancient example. I like looking past and understanding context of texts. I hate when religion and politics cross in America.

A Deep Breath and a Cup of Tea

Summer, and I always feel like I'm going to do something great and then something blocks the way. okay. I'm not that sick. I just feel lousy. A snot-nosed kid. Doesn't that make me an artist? Being scared by dreams, worrying over nothing, flying from one obsession to another? Does that even matter?

I was recently asked how well I know FinalCut. Is there a way to respond to that? I don't know how to measure how well I know a program, except with a quantity of time/experience and a example of quality. I wish I'd learned by a universal guide.

I've been playing Advanced Wars, Days of Ruin on DS. It's become a personal obsession that reminds me of how much I loved Fire Emblem until all my characters died.

When I was cleaning out my desk, I found a ton of drawings that reminded me of how raw my artwork was in high school. Raw, but so interesting. If I ever get my computer back together, if I ever get a desk to put it on, I'll scan those in. They'll be reprints, but they're still interesting. And I found a poem, too.

So after about 9 months of intensive training, what do we do now?

I don't know. I'm going to finish my tea.

The third: What I learned in college. Year 1.

Time is fluid. I often had many projects to work on for a week, and I had to figure out when I would do them, and fit this around constants. I have a painting due in a week and I'm not doing anything Monday night so I can get it done then but the homework for Wednesday needs to get done Tuesday morning so that I have time Tuesday evening to do Friday's homework. After weeks and weeks of thinking like this, I don't think in any other way.

High school did not prepare me for this time scheduling because if we had homework, it was probably due the next day. I think this forces procrastination. I think this evolution of thinking about time happened when I realized that if I get something done sooner, I don't worry about it.

I realized that as much as I dreaded my drawing class, Professor taught us how to think about the process of the drawing. It wasn't about pencil control or shapes, but about how to see the human figure from the inside out. We break down the human figure into the gesture and then simple shapes.

I learned:
How different kinds of light create color,
how to mix acrylic and oil paint,
how to create any color with the primary colors and white,
how to see color and shadow,
how to make a design interesting,
how to paint from a still life,
how to arrange a still life,
how to use InDesign, Illustrator, FinalCutPro,
how to generally use a Mac
how to mount anything on nice paper,
how to conceptualize a plan into a 3-dimentional shape,
how to cut and rip paper in a straight line,
how to quickly pack,
a decent amount of pre-1800s art history

and I don't know what else. There's a lot that's not in there.

sketches

I don't keep a regular sketchbook, these exist in what's supposed to be my drawing notebook. The first half are ones drawn last night before I went to bed, around, say, 2am? drowsiness should be apparent. The others were drawn this morning while having breakfast in the cafeteria. Oh, and the sandals were drawn when I realized, during drawing, that I didn't have non-flipflop sandals to drive in this summer (I don't like driving with flipflops).

And sandals guy walked past me after I had his drawing on the page. The last drawing, of me drawing me with hotchocolate, was finished about 40 minutes ago from this post. Overall, a productive morning. I guess.

these are some drawings

I believe some of the colors have been changed a little from the original scan, because photoshop tends to screw with jpegs.

The first is a combination of the words 'science' and 'art', in friendly bubble letters, colored with crayons. It's also a practice in translucency, which I think worked out decently well considering I used yellow and blue (which have drastic intensity/value differences).

The second is.... it's like when someone is talking, and you're not really listening, but you just nod? This is what I thought the writing version of that is. I figured that out while I was doing it, because I realized it was like writing without paying attention to anything. It's like someone in a movie pretending they know sign language, and flailing/gesturing so that it looks like sign language, but it's still ishkabibble.

As a note for the future, this is my first time using a scanner at Pratt (my scanner/printer/fax/copier was too bulky for my room), and it's rather lovely. It also makes R2D2 sounds.

Left Foot.

This was 2 hours last week. Figure drawing and spacial analysis.
This is, literally, the hardest angle to draw your foot as.
Because:
My toes actually face the outside, since the toes are smaller as they come towards you, it is harder to understand the angle by what's in front of other things. The ankle is also not at a totally correct angle in relation to the heel, which basically looks the same from a number of angles. This piece did drive me a little crazy.

listening to Neutral Milk Hotel

This is on the whiteboard outside Stabile524, my secret HQ. Striped hat, coat collar, earphones, complete. Not the best photo, but the idea is there.