Rib cage studies

A study done by Michelangelo




A detail from the Sistine Chapel done by Michelangelo

Rib cage studies

Adam and Eve done by Albrecht Durer

My home studio.

Since we are creative people, I think it is very important to surround yourself with a suitable enviroment for your creative endeavors. I thought I would share what my home studio space looks like. I have it set up in my bedroom(not the ideal space, but I make it work). I built the desk on the right. The desktop is ajustable, so I can put it down flat if for whatever reason I need more flat working space. It comes in very handy. The desk on the left is set up more for multiple purposes. I keep my computer on there as it is shown, but I'll do other school work on there as well. Above the desks, I have a ton of sketches, caricature studies, and a rough pencil drawing. I like to have the references available when I am working on a final drawing(like the one sitting on the desk). I would like to have a great big bulletin board there, but for now, I'll stick with taping drawings to the wall.

This setup has worked great for me so far. The extra desktop area really helps out when switching between drawings. Also, its nice not to have to clear off my whole desk to work on other school work. I think its a pretty efficient use of my small bedroom space. I would encourage anyone who doesn't have some sort of drawing space at home, to make one. It's so much easier to stay motivated to create art when a space is readily available.

These are the three first 30 min. poses that I drew in life drawing. As one of the main things we have been working on thus far is gesture drawing, I don't find it surprising that my drawings improved in several areas: even if it was only over the course of three longer poses. One of the things that I really enjoy about gesture drawing is that it gets the artist to focus on quick mark making and the "gesture" of the subject. I feel that I tend to work rather quickly, and in a sense the gesture drawings help me block in the critical information that I see quite accurately.

The first drawing is doesn't appear to be laying very naturally. I'd say that I didn't capture the relaxed position of the right arm. Also, the torso isn't defined very well. Its foreshortened, but I made it a little too massive with a too much bulk. The line weight doesn't very as much as I would have liked either, especially in the feet and legs. If I would have thickened those lines up more, or lightened up the other lines, the closer parts would pop more.

The second drawing has a better use of line weight, but the left shoulder is sitting a little unnaturally.

I'm pretty pleased with the results of the third drawing. The legs look just a tad too muscular and short. But for the most part, I captured the pose pretty well and used a good variety of line weight. I added a bit of tones to show some musculature wich I think turned out pretty good. It really helped to start out drawing the curves of the spine. That set up how the rest of the body would be posed.

Paintings, drawings, and other useless scribbles.

Here are three pieces that I feel are pretty representative of my work as of late. All three are pretty recent drawings/paintings, and I have not grown sick of them just yet. Rest assured that will happen soon.

The first one is a painting I did for Painting II. The assignment was to do a still life. While I was going around my house looking for things that I could use as subject matter, I found my hammer and started putting it in different places to see what would work for an interesting composition and also start an interesting dialogue about a plain boring hammer. My solution was to put it in a window sill. I was pretty pleased with how it turned out despite minor set backs here and there.

The second drawing is a caricature of John Mccain. I've been doing caricatures for a few years now, and I can't really get enough of it. Over the course of the last year or so, I have been really trying to push some extreme exaggerations. I've had some success here and there, but I think this one worked out pretty well for me. Some of my biggest influences in the realm of caricature have been Sebastian Kruger, Joe Bluhme, Court Jones, and Jan Op De Beeck. These artist can push their caricatures into grotesque monstrosities while maintaining a great likeness to the subject. In this drawing I was also trying to use cross hatching to describe the forms. It's something I haven't really gotten control of yet, but I'm getting there.

And lastly, I did a little illustration of four charecters from "The Office": Micheal, Dwight, Jim, and Andy. I love the show. I have been fortunate enough to land several freelance illustration jobs over the last year, and I did this drawing to use for promotional postcards and samples to send to potential clients. For this one, I first did several studies of each charecter, then sketched out my composition. After that was all done, I inked it with a ink nib pen similar to a comic book style. Then the final stage was painting the drawing using photoshop. It's a process that I enjoy, but I'm starting to lean away from the digital coloring and moving more toward watercolors. Anyway, this has been the style that I've used with all the illustration jobs I have gotten thus far.

In the future I'll be doing a lot more watercolors and acrylics. They are a bit more time consuming and more costly than using photoshop, but there is something about the hand made look of actual paintings that I enjoy much more than digital. Not to mention at the end of the day I have an actual product of my labors, not just a computer print off.