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.

Tightly Rendered Graphite Botanical Drawing

Since drawing class last quarter was all about trying out different techniques and materials, one of the assignments was to do a very tightly rendered graphite drawing of some sort of plant. It took a long time to build up the value in this drawing, because it had to be so tightly rendered that there wouldn't be any visible pencil strokes. The process is a little too slow and tedious for me, but I had never tried it before so I still learned a lot from it.

The first image is the structural line drawing and the second is the finished product.

Sketchbook Drawings 4

Here's some more drawings from my sketchbook for last quarter! That week we had to do analytical drawings. I decided to experiment a little bit by layering different colors for the different stages of developing a structural drawing. Then I drew with black for the final lines. I kind of count this as a turning point in my sketchbook as well. With the first six drawings, I tried to do one drawing of a man-made object and one drawing of a natural object to show the contrast in mechanical forms vs. organic forms. Here, I started to look for organic forms in man-made objects as well. I still tried to focus on the difference between organic and non-organic forms, but I didn't limit myself to one man-made thing and one natural thing.

First Pastel Still Life!

The last project for my drawing class last quarter was this color still life. I have to say, it was quite a challenge. I had only used pastel once before, but not in the way that I used it in this piece. One of the restrictions was that we had to stick to the primary colors and mix the rest. We could only use other colors at the very end if we couldn't manage to mix a certain color with the primaries. If you've used paint before, you may think no problem! However, mixing pastels is nothing like mixing paint. Rather than pre-mixing colors on palette and then applying them, with pastels, you are mixing the colors right on the paper. You also have to pay attention to the order that you layer the colors. If you don't get it right and add too many layers, then the colors get all muddy. I feel like I managed to pull it off pretty well, but it took a lot of work to figure out what I was doing. The only thing I am not as happy with in this piece is the cloth. I definitely didn't capture the folds quite right, and in my opinion it looks a bit flat. Something to improve on for next time :)