STILL LIFE - TARP AND LAMP

This was a still life we set up in the corner of the room because Slava, Emily and I are cheaters, and we didn't want to draw the incredibly daring and complex still life our professor set up on the other side of the room. I mean, it was crazy, there was a massive slinky and all these boxes and a DIRT DEVIL. A DIRT DEVIL. Anyway, we drew this. I tried to avoid drawing the massive tarp in the bottom left corner of the page for as long as I could (I hate drawing cloth) but, I couldn't stave it off forever. I mean come on, the thing takes up most of the page. There are some proportion errors here, too - they aren't that obvious now, but if you were looking at the still life you would see areas where I cut corners to make things fit in with the altered geometry I created for my shapes. Actually, I like how the tarp came out. It's probably one of the better drawings I've done of a piece of cloth.

"Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. (Paul Cezanne)"

I thought about this quote as I did this drawing. I'm not sure if I achieved my goal, but a few of the shapes Cezanne mentioned were actually a part of the still life. The metal portion of the lamp is a cone that does not extend to a point. The cardboard tubes to the right of the page are cylinders. And as I was drawing this, I began to understand how crucial it was to give these shapes direction.

"To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships."

I struggled with this concept as I drew the objects in the corner of the room. Their relationships were what interested me, but I realized that since some of my proportions were off, everything in the drawing became skewed. The relationships between the objects seemed to clash with reality at every turn, because one mistake led to having to cover for that mistake, which caused another error - and so on. However, once I erased over and over again and finally got the drawing right, I was able to correct some of the relationships I had tarnished - in particular, the one between the chair, the rubber tube in the background, and the windowsill it is resting on.

"The contour eludes me."

Indeed it does. And not just with the part with the tarp, as I mentioned. I tried to show the fact that the cardboard tubes were cylindrical (and thus, rounded) and that kind of bombed. It looks worse in person than it does online, so you'll have to take my word for that. But there were a lot of rounded objects in this still life - all the tubes, the lamp shade, and of course the metal parts comprising the chair - and they come across as flat to me even after all the time I spent trying to hatch some kind of texture onto them.

CLASSMATE PORTRAIT - EMILY

This is my friend Emily, who I drew on the first day of drawing class. No, she is not asleep - she was actually drawing someone else and was looking down at her paper. Looking at this drawing a few weeks after the fact, I can see where my facial proportions went awry. Well, a lot of proportions are off, but the hand stands out as oddly small and the nose stands out as oddly large. Sorry about that, Emily! Still, I like this drawing. I'll just have to remember in the future to box everything out before even thinking about details. I like how her hair came out, though - she had it in this bun thing and I was like "well, that's going to be impossible to draw" -  but it came out nicely.

PROFESSOR - INTERIOR

Dear God, where to begin. This is my professor, Judy Rifka, who posed for the us during the second week of drawing class. I like to refer to this drawing as "Rifka Crying Tears of Blood," due to the unnecessarily dark spots I put under her eyes to simulate the shadow emanating from her glasses. The rest of the drawing gets worse from the neck down - her shoulders are too beefy, her arms are enormous, and her legs just came out terribly. Again, I rushed into details before boxing out the proportions of her body. You can't expect to get anything better than this if you don't follow the proper steps. The ONE thing I like about this drawing is her left collar - somehow, even though I suck at crosshatching, that one 3 square inch of page came out very nicely. And it was totally by accident <_<.

BAM

YEAH, that's what's up! This drawing didn't come out half bad. We were supposed to draw our own hands, holding something. I grabbed a paintbrush. Looking at it now a few weeks later, some things become glaringly obvious that were not that way when I was looking at my completed drawing. First of all, the paintbrush is a little on the small side - it was bigger than that. I mean, it's not TINY, but it's off somehow and I can tell the difference. Again, I rushed into detailing the brush itself before making sure it matched up with the hand. Also, my middle and ring finger are wonky. Especially my middle finger - it sucks that I can only see this now, but it's true. Although I do like what I did with the inside joints of my fingers, I wish those two came out better. What can I say? My hand was in a pretty weird position, it looked unnatural to begin with. All in all, this one of my best drawings, though.

HIDEOUT

This was a hideout a designed for a modeling project in my Animation class. The assignment was to make a room. Although I was not proficient enough in Maya to model the room at the time, I think the planning sketch came out nicely. I may model this room for real sometime soon. The theme is some kind of hideout in an urban environment with medieval undertones.

3 POINT PERSPECTIVE

I wanted to try a drawing using three point perspective. You can see the horizontal points on either side of the page (where the glass recedes to) and the other point is higher up, near the top of the page. I added the guy in the motorcycle helmet to give this some kind of movie poster feeling. Will add colors + logo in Photoshop soon.

A BUNCH OF HANDS

I wanted to draw a bunch of hands using this program I found online that will show you a hand in various positions and allow you to move it around in 3D. I spent a lot of time drawing whatever I was looking at in my browser. It felt a little weird drawing an object that I was looking at on the computer, but I have done that a few times since then and I'm getting used to the feeling. The hands came out okay. Also, yeah, that's a nail going through the palm of that bottom hand. I felt like adding some life to each hand individually.

MORE HANDS

So then I drew a hand that I made a claw, a bracer, a hand with some kind of prototype "gun-glove" on it, and a hand with a leather glove on it. Then I tried drawing some more Proximity Cowboy character designs, including one showing his jacket and one showing what he would look like wearing a cowboy hat AND a motorcycle helmet. The answer? He looks like a boss.

MINOTAUR - THINKING

This picture is my vision of a minotaur. Thinking. I'm still exploring the minotaur as a fantasy character, and I'm trying to find my own personal spin on this beast race to make it my own. I need to get used to drawing the form of the minotaur before that comes, however.

MINOTAUR - FULL BODY

I wanted to design the full body of this humanoid after drawing the minotaur thinking. I like how it came out, although I'm really bad at coloring things in on the computer. I will develop this one even further, possibly adding another character in who is seen from the side.