Paintings

Here's a couple of paintings I did today.  The cube took about 45 minutes and the landscape an hour and a half.  I think I like where the landscape is going, I think I'll finish it.

Landscape

Here's a 25 minute landscape speed painting.  The reference is a stock photo.

Flyer Design

Here is a flyer to a made up event. The entire thing was made on Adobe Illustrator, including the gift box which I illustrated myself.

Landscape Thumbnails

A couple of speed paintings I did from my imagination just for practice.

What's going on...

I have so many things I want to work on.  I am still working on things for life drawing class (I will post it soon) and I also want to improve my graphic design skills.

I actually did do the presentation with unfinished sketches of my future animation in slide-show form.  As much as I detest not finishing something, I wasn't terribly disappointed because there was no way for me to finish all of that in the time given.  Plus, the instructor wanted us to mainly talk about the process anyway.

As I said up there^^ I need to get my graphic design skills up so I'll be working on a practice flyer for an imaginary event.  The "event" is a gift wrapping contest.  Today, I've been doing spec work for 3 hours.

Animation Sketches

The deadline for this is *drum roll* this.Thursday.  For some reason, I didn't anticipate that it would be quite this much work.  I'll have to be very creative to actually make a presentation out of this.  I have sketches and here's a couple of them:

 

The main character is the girl in the center of the top section with the curly hair.  As I said before, this animation will go along with the song "Change" by Lecrae.  The main character of my animation is on a journey of self discovery and a search for purpose.  She goes through several different trials before finding out what is truly important.

I won't be able to add as much as I want in the time given but I will defiantly work on this after the project is due.

Anatomy Lesson

My life drawing instructor gave us very good pointers when drawing the figure. 

 

- You MUST have a foundation of the structure underneath.This is going to be found in the skeleton.  Form always follows function and if you don't understand this, it will show.Fancy shading and awesome details will not prevent the discerning eye from noticing if the underlying anatomy is incorrect.It is best to learn where each structure is in relation to the others, how each joint moves (if it does) and each point of muscle attachment.

-The body viewed from the profile will have an s shaped curve in back, the neck will arch forward.This is because of the shape of the spine and this will be true even if the person has perfect posture.Use this rhythm to your advantage.

-The legs are not  perfect cylinders and it DOES matter how you draw the knees.  There are certain anatomical landmarks there that you cannot simply fabricate.  I've done that in the past and since I know this information, my previous mistakes are beyond obvious (sigh).

-Pay attention to the pelvic region.  Many of us have a tendency to guess based on "knowledge" of what we think it looks like.  When people simply draw one curved line indicating the hips (sometimes a bump is added) the artist isn't taking into account that the top of the pelvis and the greater trochanter ( top outside of the femur) are separate points.
           >If you have issues drawing crotches to short, too long, or making it visually apparent which leg is bearing weight, you should probably study the pelvis is greater detail.

Overview of what's to come

There's a few things I'll be primarily spending my time on.

-I'm working on a project for an art class.  I'm basically making a music video of a song called "Change" by Lecrae.  I'll be animating it on Adobe After Effects.  This is my first time animating something other than text on after effects (which I enjoyed).  Animating people and scenery in sync to music should provide an interesting challenge.

-Landscapes and environment practice.  I need to improve in this area so I'll be posting quite a bit of 
that.

-Anatomy.  I'm getting into the swing of my second life drawing class so I'll be posting some of my work from class and some studies of my own.

Another Landscape

Anatomy practice

Just more anatomy practice...