Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays!

I made a christmas card. Enjoy your holiday everyone!

John Whitcomb

This is what watching a special on Rudolf Valentino and thinking of John Whitcomb gets me.
I didn't know which I liked better of the 2, so I'm posting both and you can tell me what you think.

According to a number of professors, my work never looks fully completed so if you have an tips as to how to accomplish this, please insert input here.

As always, critiques encouraged.

Christmas Mood

Recently, due to a bout with my vision, I tried to draw everything that came to mind. I really didn't care if it looked good or came out horribly or feared that i would ruin a piece that was going fairly well, I just drew.
This piece I did because I found mystery gold ink in my art supply bin. It was fun actually. the gold would settle which left this flat sewage color but I'd just have to stop and shake it every so often. Gold in my mind is accompanied by silver in my mind (thanks 70s claymation/puppet Christmas movies) so I did shades of gray. Again, I drew anything that came to mind.
My friend told me it looked like a christmas card meant to depress. Maybe an insite into how I was feeling about my then failing vision?

30-45 minutes.
I used gold ink, black ink, microns, different nibs, sable brushes.. anything.

10 minute color experiment

Same as last time. Loud colors. Weird composition. Playing with colors and shapes. Only this time with a man. Care to enjoy.
Critiques always welcome.

20 minute exercise

I've been hanging around a professor of mine and trying to watch how he draws women. He likes to draw nasty women (his words, not mine) So I'm trying to combine my experiments from his class and how he draws...
Just playing with shapes and shading. Also colors. I think I'm getting better at drawing woman finally. yayy

School Projects

There's been two projects that have really been taking up a lot of time and a lot of effort; my portrait painting of one of my great friends Kyle and my illustrator piece which you've all seen the progress on up to this point.
The painting of Kyle that I'm doing is an acrylic black and white. First, we had to find a painting to reference, then take exact photo reference copying that original painting, sketch it, full render it on tracing paper, survive harsh critiques, redraw it all, photocopy it, gesso masonite, transfer our drawing to the board, cover it with layers of mat medium, paint black and white acrylic versions, and then we get to paint over it with oils. The whole thing sounds very tedious and very long but it was actually really interesting. Painting it was the hardest part since I'm not one for painting. Heres the black and white acrylic version.


Now is the possibly finished version of my illustrator piece. I'm not sure if I'll be able to work on it again.. but here's more or less what I'm probably handing in.



I'd love to hear critiques so feel free to comment.

Adobe Illustrator 3

Its that time again. Update on my Illustrator Project. Unfortunetly I realized that I won't be able to add all the details that I had planned so I started to rush today. I'm going to fingure out how I want to render things (I keep thinking of how to do it in Photoshop). Anyway, slightly more shading, fixed the guys ribs, added more to the boy.

Adobe Illustrator Piece II

So I made a little progress on my current Adobe Illustrator piece. I think I hit a few snags. A few.. mental.. snags. "Brain farts" as my friend calls them. Im up to the tedious work of the work and I've lost steam. My enthusiasm has dwindled.. I'm sure it'll come back once I work more into it.
A few changes from my original design. For one, my Professor asked if the scene was a mural on the boys wall. It's not. But the original wallpaper color scheme suggested as much. I'm hopefully solving this by changing the panels to warm colors and later I'll be adding a lit lamp to warm the whole situation a little.
I need to research waves too to make it not look like mountain caps..
Another snag I've hit is the boy. So I just threw him in. Ill define him later. Drawing children.... not my favorite thing to do...
Heres what I have so far:

HIgh Seas

School man. It's a killer. I was able to do ONE personal project admist all the chaos of school. But I like how it came out [its the first one post below].
My brother, a long time ago, asked me to draw him some art of clipper ships. So I tried. It started an obsession with rustic nautical things stemming from my father receiving an old sailboat and fixing it up for 2 or so years.
The second piece is work in progress for my Adobe Illustrator class. We have to illustrate a brochure with 4 panels. I chose to, instead of making 4 individual panels, make one long piece that is (hopefully) visually pleasing even if you look at each frame alone.
The steps will be posted every week! Keep checking! (Im really excited for this one)
Personal Project:


Adobe Illustrator Project:

Groove

Here is a little quickly I whipped up in the excitement of being back into art. This is more of an extermination with colors and inking/warm up than anything really.
A friend of mine was nice enough to let me use a picture of her for reference so yay! Many thanks go out to Anna.
I tried to change the face a little just to get into the groove of not using my reference to a T as it were. Other than that I tried to keep it more or less accurate.

Inking: 15 minutes.
Scanning: Forever.
Photoshop coloring: 20 minutes.

I'm back

So, I have been working. In fact, more than ever I've really been putting an effort into doing more "complete" at home projects. At one point a professor of mine told me that my work never really looks complete so I've been striving to improve this.
Unfortunately my scanner doesn't work with my new computer so I'll have to use the ones at school once I find time in between the homework that I've been throwing my whole efforts into.
To prove that I have, in fact, been doing artsy things, heres a project that I worked on in class for about an hour or two. I scanned an old drawing and colored it [the rendered version is at home and I will be posting that at a later date]. This version, however, is only 10 colors as directed by my professor. The assignment was really just to get us warmed back into Illustrator.

Do expect lots of posts from me, I will be working my tailbone off from now on.

Heres my 10 color vector drawing, rendered version following later:


Heres a little experiment of black and white minimalistic splatter. This'll help me with my ink drawings and such with compostition. In other words, I think it's pretty:

I need a bigger scanner...

So I've been up to a lot this semester, doing a lot of fun pieces. Unfortunetly to show any of them properly I need a scanner bigger than my little 8.5x11 buddy. I'll scan some at school.
In the mean time, I took a picture of a quick portrait I did of a friend of mine! Shes prettier than I drew her, but I liked it overall.
Drew it with an eyedropper dipped in a green ink well on white bond paper.

Calendar

So I'm taking a class on InDesign.
I'd hate to say it, but I really don't mind the damn thing. I really like playing with type and I enjoy graphic design a lot so this program is just fun.. sometimes.
....Sometimes the demon program can burn.

Anyway we were told to make a calendar in 2 weeks.
Here's one of them. August 2010.

Comp - Anger

Nuh! Ive been too lazy to scan what I've been doing!

So I'm taking a class on conceptualization..
...I won't comment about the class itself since this is neither the time nor place, but my first project was simply to create a comp sketch for an emotion.. out of all the emotions I drew, the class liked this one better and, with suggestions from classmates, I fixed somethings; i.e. making him a pretty boy, putting him in a suit.
Amazingly I hadn't done those things from the beginning for once. I was trying to branch out.
Heres the drawn-in-an-hour comp piece: (it isn't final. Suggestions appriciated.)

Old Piece

Heres just an old piece that I like. Used it in my banner. Realized I never posted it.

Experiments

So recently I've been going through a slight art slump. Everything I'd do was less than satisfactory for my tastes and it was really starting to hurt me a bit. Then I forgot what my first semester at my current college, The Fashion Institute of Technology, taught me. Experiment. I needed to go back to basics and just do.
I learned that by just doing whatever I wanted to a piece, was not only fun but teaches a lot. I think a lot in my pieces which is a good thing. Sometimes. I've come to a point where I think too much and my ability to portray my thought process is limited.
Here's something I did quickly just to loosen up a bit and to get over my fear of doing something cliche.

Im back

I'm back.. the lack of updating wasn't from lack of art... well actually sort of... I've been busy.... ANYWAY here's 3 quick practice pieces to show what I've been up to... more later...

[this one based on an ad just for practice]