Design 1 oh boi!

Bruce Claypool is such a way cool guy. But he is such a bitch when it comes to grading and precision. We had our first real assignment turned in yesterday and the grading curve was quite high. My twelve compositions of "problem solving" got a 10 out of 10 for their effective solutions to the concepts, but I got a 7 out of 10 for craftsmanship. Why? Well, he really didn't like the small portfolio I put them in. That's it. They were fairly perfect for being hand cut (except I used a hole puncher for the circles), but the first few slip pages of my portfolio got wrinkled mysteriously, and Bruce just generally didn't like the unoriginal idea of a portfolio as a presentation device. Whatev.

Here were my solutions for the following concepts

Figure Ground Ambiguity, Figure on Ground, Random, Order, Asymmetrical Balance, Symmetrical Balance, Diagonal, Horizontal, Vertical, Emphasis, Kinetic Energy/Movement, Black Eye Freud.

They're not in order so try and figure out which piece represents which concept.

We now have to find some uniting theme for photographs we'll take to represent these eleven compositional concepts. Uh....sounds fun, right. I thought of setting up all the fast food I eat into weird settings to do it. I do eat a lot of fast food.

Oh then the grayscale. Five hours of painting swatches to get just the right shades of gray for a perfect transition. And when I say perfect, I mean it. Nothing less will suffice. After cutting out 60 shades of gray, I picked out the 11 to make a good gradation. Bruce said it was good enough to leave alone till next week. I spent 2 hours picking them. This is what I left it at:

Le Fin

K So Now K

Imaginatomy. I can't love this class more. Rey talks a lot and could surely go on for hours about his immense knowledge of the anatomy of EVERYTHING. But its great to learn about every facet. Form certainly follows function. We're continuing to work on our human skeletons which are starting to take shape nicely. Some progress shots:

after week 2 -

after week 3 -

after week 4 -

So while we were constructing the human skeleton bone by bone, we started to think about our creature and had to present six different silhouettes of ideas. They could be similar or along a similar theme, but I chose to do a variety. I looked at a lot of skeletons and weird animals, but I think my ideas still came out somewhat tame:

He liked the top one and the little one. I remember him telling everyone that most people like to do the typical giant-could-eat your-house-evil-looking creature. Thats the top one. But he also said very few go down the small or mundane road. The cows and rats of the universe. So thats why I threw in the little cute creature. He thought it would be cool to do something non-monsterish and stand out that way. I thought "Hell yeah." So I'm doing the lil guy. I thought it would be a mix between a frog, kangaroo, kangaroo rat, and rabbit. Jackie dubbed it the "Rangaroo." That fits.

Some new stuff y'all

Ok, so to take abreak from painting, I decided to go back to my love of drawin'. Mmmm-mm I can taste the graphite. Anyway, I've done these studies over the past few weeks. All of them are about 8' x 12" with black and white charcoal on toned paper. Enjoy!



So, this is a study of good 'ol Leonardo...das right homies, da Vinci. Anyhoo, it was from a cartoon (no not the spongebob kind) he did back in his prime. I think this is his best rendition and amiable expression for the Virgin Mary.




This is one of two studies I did of one of my favorite widely-underrated artists - William Bouguereau. He was a French dude living in the 19th century and his work, although popular at the time, was eventually overshadowed by the up-and-coming Impressionists and the modern era of art that followed (amateurs, all of 'em). This particular study is part of a painting right here in sunny (bleh) San Diego titled "Young Sheperdess." I focused on the head portrait of the girl rather than tho whole composition.



Another Bouguereau study, but this time its of a whole painting called "Evening Mood" or whatever that is in french. I always like his balanced images - very calm, soft, wonderful combo of both hard and soft edges (uh mostly soft...), glowing paint, extremely subtle value changes...just perfection of composition, luminosity, color harmony, and figure drawing. Ok, I'm done worshiping him



And this is a product of the other studies but using a stock photo as reference. I tried to use what I learned from the other studies and make it my own with a photograph. Ken Joudrey, my instructor, likes it so I guess its good nuff.

Next post: World of Warcraft painting sketches and progress shots!

Same ol Biznis

So I got some updates on paintings. I haven't blogged for a month, so this should be packed, right? Not quite...but I got some progress shots of that pandora painting thats taken fo-eva:





This is where the painting stands today (colors may be a little off) and i think its come a long way since I first began. A lot of little details were added that hopefully gave it a second read.

And the following paintings are tiny in real life - 5" x 5". They were done for my brother in a just a few hours in acrylic. Its a good sign of me getting just a little faster...hopefully.




le fin

Beginnings and Ends

So, heres my progress on Pandora. I'm relieved to see I'm almost done. Color has always been an issue with me so I'm going to have to work that out a bit, hopefully with just some simple glazing. Theres a lot of little touches and things I have to do, but for the most part its the beginning of the end.



The Mod, on the other hand, is far from finished....
After some direction for more "bulky" armor, I sketched this:

I think I could still go bulkier, but I just don't want to go rediculous crazy immobile bulky.
And heres some more creature sketches. I was told to be less "Cloverfield" and more "alien." The body should be pretty humanoid and muscular - a perfect human body. Fast, strong, and menacing. Well, two outta three ain't bad? So since the body was more set, I focused on the head and tried for something more "not from this world" (not related to the commercialized Jesus store). Still I think I have a long way to go as far as these concepts...they're just too predictable (some still look too "earthy") and shotty (not enough thought or time spent on em).

Anyway, in other news, I got a letter for Valentine's Day a day late. It was my new lover Art Center. If you don't know already, I got accepted! I'll have to say goodbye to Palomar very soon. I'm going to start in the summer and hire David Blaine to figure out how to make 15 grand to appear outta thin air.

I love you too, Art Center

Fish!

So here's my latest progress on Pandora. It's getting increasingly frustrating for some reason. I'm worrying over the color harmony all of a sudden even though I still have some playing and glazing to do. My instructor did a little demo on it (the top right part of her clothing) after I asked him how he paints. So hopefully he can quell my concerns over color. But I just had to put it aside and sketched out some ideas for the MOD....





Ok, so these look more like some poor creature you'd see in a bad Godzilla film (are there any good Godzilla films?). But we need them to be somewhat human in structure (bipedal, posable thumb, lack of twenty slug legs, etc.) to make the animations easier and gamplay more cohesive between factions. It was nice just to play around though. I obviously looked at some undersea creatures. They all look like they're from another world (and they practically are: most of the ocean is completely unexplored). So I figured some inspiration from "unda da sea" might create something more alien-monstery. But I should try to be less obvious about where I draw inspiration.

In other news (or lack of it), I haven't heard anything from Spectrum or Art Center yet. I sent in three prints of paintings to Spectrum for the annual contest more than two weeks ago but they havent even taken out the admission fee yet. I'm wondering if they even got it. Oh well.

boo-yakasha

meh

looks like sasquatch with armor