Finally!

So FINALLY I get around to posting a blog. The problem was I have tons of sketches I want to post from my character design class. BUT! I wanted to clean them all up digitally before I posted them. Due to the fact that I have what my neurologist has so kindly told me is called an intentional tremor (meaning my hand shakes when I try to focus on doing something with it... i.e draw clean lines or detail), a lot of my pencil work is not where I would like it to be. Fortunately I am going to be testing some medicine very soon to try and fix my hands. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to digitally go back over my lines and make them as clean as I would like. Now I have started summer school, soon I will soon be off on a trip to Europe, and shortly there after returning to San Francisco to move into my new apartment. So I just have to face the fact that my lines being cleaned up won't happen. Which is super hard for my OCD self to accept, but I can't let my blog go unattended. I especially can't let it go with no character design assignments on it, since that is after all my passion!

Anywhoozle! These are some in class sketches done in usually spans of either 3 to 5 minutes. We would have a model with some sort of costume on. Our teacher encouraged us to often draw something inspired by the model rather than what we were actually seeing. So we were to get ideas from their poses but not necessarily draw a man in a homemade looking superhero outfit (which was often the case). I followed this very often since I'm not too much of a fan of the action macho guy sort of stuff (which was a lot of what we got in the beginning). Then later on as we got more and more sassy girl models I began drawing more directly from the model. These particular poses are from our final assignment. For this we put together a final portfolio of our semesters work, in which we had 4 pages of in class drawings. So these are my favorite drawings that I picked for my final. I hope you enjoy and I'll be posting more from this class soon!

Summer Siesta

SORRY FOR MY LACK OF UPDATES!

Come Friday I'll be done with my first year of grad school. This semester was exhausting but Im excited to post some updates from the past few months soon. In the mean time an interesting thing happened today. Shay Carl put up a video where he talked about a guy who got a tattoo of him on his arm and vlogged it. When I saw the picture of the tattoo I instantly thought the image looked familiar. Sure enough after checking out the newly tattooed guy's vlog it turns out it was my drawing I had done last summer of the family that they based it off of. That's a first for me! It's a weird feeling to know someone out there is carrying my drawing on them for life. I hope the enjoy it! Here is a link to the tattooing if you'd like to see it.

Greg's Vlog

SHAYTARDS

Heads Will Roll

These are a couple of snapshots (unfortunately taken on my cell phone due to lack of a proper camera) of the work I have been doing in my head drawing class for the past couple weeks. The male head is from my second week and the female (which I am much less proud of due to being made to use vine charcoal rather than pencil) from my third week. We've been focusing on building up values to create the face rather that just sketching it out and shading it. It really freaks me out to shade so dark so fast but I have been really liking the end results.

Validation

So I have to return to my school in about two weeks. While I am super excited to start my new classes all I can think about is how much I've come to love this sleep-whenever-I-want schedule, how much I despise airports and what a pain in the ass it is going to be to unpack my dorm again (for winter break our dorms make us pack up everything, put it on our bed and then clean. GIANT PAIN). Here are some pictures of what my dorm looked like before I had to take it all down.

On the good side maybe this will give me a chance to organize a little more and get rid of some of the clutter that was starting to happen. PS- I LOVE MY CLAW FOOT TUB! And I will be super sad when the time comes that we are separated. Otherwise I won't miss my dorm or my insanely loud neighbor with the barking laugh.

I am ridiculously excited to start my digital painting class. I've always fumbled my way through trying to figure out how to do it on my own, but I've never found a solid routine way that works for me. So every time I pretty much have to relearn a way to paint which really slows things down. I've already taken some workshops with the teacher and he is unbelievably awesome so I can't wait to learn from him. As for character design I am of course excited since it is what I am at this school to learn. I'm currently doing it for a group animation project which is fun but it would be nice to know all of the terms and techniques that I currently just kind of float my way through doing. Head drawing I know will be my most difficult class (mostly because I don't really enjoy drawing realistically and I already know the teacher doesn't give above a B) but I need to learn a lot about portraiture.

It's semesters like this that make me truly realize I just picked the wrong school for my undergrad. I graduated feeling like I wasted all this time and money for a degree that meant nothing for me and not having learned anything that would help me in my desired career. I knew I wanted to be able to draw for a living but I didn't know how that was possible. I spent all 4 years figuring it out and once I realized in my last semester that it was character design I wanted to do there weren't really any courses for me to take that I could learn from. I made places for myself in classes such as the animation classes and on my school magazine as their first illustrator but no one was really able to teach me about illustration there. Now in grad school I really feel challenged artistically and can already in the first semester see my growth. I feel comforted that even though I'm not starting my career as fast as my peers I know I made the right decision.

And now a little taste of my holiday.

We didn't really get any family pictures unfortunately, but the animals are always happy to pose and be cute.

Hope everyone had an amazing holiday!

Break

Hello! Sorry I haven't updated in a while. Finals and dorm related stuff got crazy and now I'm home for my 6 week winter break, which I'm now about half way through. Since my art supplies are heavy, bulky and messy and so most are still packed up in my dorm, not much more than pencil sketches for my animation project I'm working on and random doodles have been done. While I'm loving being at home and not particularly wanting to return to my dorm, I'm super excited about my classes I have this semester; character design, digital painting and head drawing! So hopefully I will produce some fun stuff to post here soon. But for now, happy holidays and enjoy any time you have off!

Progress

Im on Thanksgiving break now and trying to get work done at home when all my stuff is back in San Francisco. I'm trying to do as much as I can but it's a little worrisome to not be able to make much progress on my finals so I'll have to buckle down when I get back.

bristol, pencil

Last week in Chiaroscuro we did another life drawing of the head. This time I was determined to learn how to do the kind of cross hatching technique my teacher does. Since I've been trying to learn it on my own since the beginning of the semester and have so far been unsuccessful I pestered him every break we had during class to teach me. After a few attempts he finally did and I must say I am in love with the way this turned out. It is nowhere near perfect but it looks a million times better (to me at least) than what I had been doing before. Hopefully it will translate well into my still life final!

Sketches

One of the things that can always be found in my book is my sketchbook. Here are some of the more recent doodles I have put in there (most of them are done since I moved to San Francisco). Enjoy!