Sketchbook Drawings 8

This is the last drawing that I did in my sketchbook for last quarter's drawing class. Since my theme for the whole sketchbook was man-made forms vs. organic forms, I decided to do a drawing that showed both working together. I thought the perfect thing to draw for this was the fountain in Forsyth Park here in Savannah. It's a very pretty fountain surrounded by lots of fantastic trees and flowers, a great combination of the man-made and the natural.

Color Theory and Concept Art!

This was probably the project I was most excited for last quarter. My color theory teacher let us choose what medium to use as well as what kind of project we wanted to do. The only requirements were related to color use but other than that it was completely open. It was the perfect opportunity to create some digital concept art, so that's what I did. To fit within the project requirements, I chose a split complementary color scheme, and I had to incorporate atmospheric perspective. I'm happy with the result for the purposes of the assignment and for the amount of time I had to complete it, but I'll probably revisit this concept and try to do it better sometime in the future. 

Sketchbook Drawings 7

These two sketchbook drawings had to be done with an analagous color scheme and I also had to crop the composition. I chose to use colored pencil for both. The first drawing is a zoomed in view of the cockpit on a WWII-era fighter plane. The second drawing is a cropped view of the trees and Spanish moss that can be found in almost every Savannah square. I think the second drawing works much better than the first, both compositionally and color-wise.

Color Theory Using Cut Paper

For this color theory project, I had to pick a photo and recreate certain sections of it in several different ways. One section had to be grayscale, another had to be monochromatic, another had to be a complementary color scheme, and another section had to match the actual colors as close as possible. All of it had to be done with Color-Aid paper, which means that each section is a puzzle of little pieces of cut paper. Like the optical mixing project I posted before, cut paper gives great results, but the process is much too frustrating and tedious for me to enjoy.

Sketchbook Drawings 6

For these, the requirement was to use ink wash. I like doing ink wash, but I'm not so great at it yet. In the first drawing, I experimented with adding line using a bamboo nib. However, I didn't let the wash dry enough before adding the line so it bled quite badly in some areas. In the second drawing, I definitely overdid it a bit, which resulted in really muddy values. These are definitely not my most successful pieces of art, but I learned a lot about using ink wash, which is a medium that I was not very familiar with.

Color Theory - Optical Mixing

In my color theory class last quarter, one of the assignments was an optical mixing project. This means putting very small dots or hatches of different colors very close together so that the eye blends them and you see a completely different color.

Because the focus of this project was on optical mixing, I didn't have to create my own image. Instead, we were allowed to use an existing image that had interesting colors. I chose to recreate a postcard for one of my favorite graphic novels, reMind. It's a fantastic story written and illustrated by Jason Brubaker. You can read the entire story online here: www.remindblog.com and you can buy both volumes of reMind on Amazon.

So here's is the finished product! I have to say that optical mixing looks pretty awesome, but I really don't like the process. It's much too tedious and scientific for me to enjoy.

Here are some process pictures to show how I built up the colors:

Sketchbook Drawings 5

For this set of sketchbook drawings, the requirement was to incorporate an overlay. These two were definitely my favorites out of the whole sketchbook. 

In the first image, I drew line drawings of different leaves on a piece of vellum (similar to tracing paper) and I glued different colored rectangles on the page beneath the vellum. These color swatches are actually leftover pieces from color mixing assignments from my color theory class. I tried to line up the green and yellow rectangles with the position of the leaves as an abstract suggestion of their actual color.

In this drawing, I used a similar approach by putting the line drawing on top but this time I used Prismacolor markers to put color underneath. I felt like an animator while doing this drawing because I had to keep flipping the vellum up and down to make sure I was lining the colors up correctly. I also tried to keep the coloring of this piece very loose.