That's So Bouguereau!

This week in Nicolas's Figurative Concepts class--and this is only week 4, mind you--the homework was to copy a Master painting with charcoal at 18 x 24".  (!)  Luckily for me (but most unfortunate for all those first semester students I am in the class with), I have had practice doing such things from my other Fine Arts classes.  Of course, those were just drawings, not paintings, and we often had multiple weeks to tackle the more difficult and elaborate ones...but yeah, so one week to copy a Master painting.  I went with Nicolas's favorite painter, William-Adolphe Bouguereau.  This guy could paint a foot that looks more realistic than your own foot.  And he did!  And it hangs in San Francisco's own Legion of Honor.

Anyway, I digress.  I chose Bouguereau's Elegy painting from 1899:

After spending somewhere between 11 and 12 hours on it throughout the week, here's what I ended up with:

Sorry the image looks warped around the edges.  We were to focus on the nude figure, which I did.  I had to render some of the background so that you could see the relative value between it and the figure itself.  Lots of nit-picky things that I'd change if I could do it over again or at least spend more time with it.  Still good enough to impress all those first semester kids in my class, though.  And really, that's what it's all about.

Also, just for fun, I took pictures of my work throughout the 11-12 hours to show my progress!  From a quick sketch to refining the edges to making corrections to redrawing to more corrections to more redrawing to rendering to rerendering, etc. until I have the final piece.  Enjoy!

Figurative Concepts - Week 4

Inspiration: Bruce Timm Edition

As previously mentioned, for my Character Design class, the artist whose style we had to emulate this week was Bruce Timm.  Bruce is best known (from my childhood, at least) for being the driving force behind the look of Batman: The Animated Series and all the shows that followed it.  His style is deceptively simple, incredibly appealing, and has definitely defined the look of all the DC Comics cartoons that have come out throughout the past couple decades (and even the recent Marvel ones, really), even when he wasn't the character designer.

This was another week of my own style getting in the way of the artist, but I also found myself naturally following a lot of what Bruce does.  It was an odd sort of nostalgia drawing Batman for the first time in a good many years.  Since Bruce comes from a comic book background and therefore does a lot of brush work to clean up/ink his work, I thought this would be the perfect week to try my cool new Pentel Arts Pocket Brush Pen!  Let me tell you, it works awesomely!  I can't say I've tried any similar permanent ink brush pens, but I like the results I got with this one.  I definitely have a good deal to learn in terms of controlling it, but I will for sure be using it in my own work in the future.

Anywho, so here are a few pieces I created in Bruce Timm's style (-ish), then cleaned up with my new brush pen, then colored in Photoshop.  Long live the 90's!

Character Design, Weeks 1-3

As I had mentioned previously, this semester I am taking a Character Design class, taught by Michael Buffington.  He's a long-winded fellow, but he does have some good points.  And though I don't particularly care for his drawing style, I do appreciate his mentality when it comes to drawing.  I mean, anyone who sets out to draw 1,001 heads (and accomplishes it, then decides to draw 1,000 more) clearly must love what he does.

Anyway, for this class--at least to start with--we have a weekly artist whose style we must emulate.  Week one was Phil Bourassa:

Week two was Sean "Cheeks" Galloway:

I will admit that, as Michael pointed out to me, I'm letting my own style interfere with replicating the artist's style.  The above three were the drawings he said he liked, even though they aren't exactly in the style of the artist.  Something to work on in the coming weeks.

During class time, there's a live model who puts together cool outfits and does 2-3 minute poses for us to draw from.  That's been fun.  It's been a challenge to figure out drawing from the model in pencil (as opposed to charcoal) on 8.5x14" paper (as opposed to 18x24" newsprint) while altering the model's look and pose to make a better animation drawing.  A new way of thinking, for sure.  Here's a sampling of my progress on that front from this past week:

This week's artist is Bruce Timm, which I believe means that I legally have to watch the 90's Batman cartoons as I draw.  This is clearly a tough career path I have chosen...

More conceptual figures

Week 3 of my "Figurative Concepts" class.  I think I'm finally starting to remember how to draw real people again.  We've been using charcoal pencils (I favor the 4B), but I just had to whip out the vine charcoal this week.  I like using it to quickly block in the figure and line of action, then rough in some tones before switching to the charcoal pencil to really dig into the form and details.  Kind of like sculpting, I am to understand.  I'm still too "heavy-handed" overall, but it's getting better.

Well, go figure(ative concepts)!

New semester.  New classes.  New drawings to post (...and then eventually not have time to post).

This semester, I am enrolled in Developing Story (an MPT class where we--you guessed it--develop stories and talk about story development), Character Design and Drawing for Animators with Michael Buffington, and Figurative Concepts with the Academy's resident superstar, Nicolas Villarreal.  Following in the mammoth footsteps of my fellow student/friend/undoubtedly future coworker Adam Knight (check out his blog if you haven't--you're in for a treat!), I have decided to post some of my figure work from the first two weeks in collage form.  So, without further ado or name-dropping, I present Naked Chicks: Weeks One and Two...

Me? A comic book artist?!?

Back in high school, when all I knew was that I liked to draw, I had no idea where I wanted to go to college.  I was an avid comic book reader from the awesome decade that was the 1990's, so I figured comics were a great place to head.  Somewhere online, I must've found a spec-script for a six-page Spider-Man story and decided to draw out the pages to test my comic book skills.  Now, I had my own comic series going with my old best friend from Missouri when I was in middle school--and it was quite the hit among the relatives we would mail copies to--but I hadn't attempted anything on any professional level.  Sure, I had my über cool Stickman comic strips that I had been drawing since 1997, and all my classmates and teachers enjoyed those, but an actual comic book is way different from cartoony doodles on a piece of loose leaf, ruled paper!

Anywayz, I was cleaning-up some of my digital workspace and came across my scans of these six Spider-Man pages that I had drawn oh so long ago.  Without further ado, I present to you the reason that I am in Animation and not comic books:

To briefly conclude the story, when looking for colleges, I discovered that the fancy term for comic books is "Sequential Art".  Which lead me to SCAD.  Which--after a trip down to Savannah left a far too fishy smell in my nose...literally--lead me to animation and storyboarding at the Art Institute of Atlanta.  And storyboarding is really just cinematic comic book making, when you think about it.  I guess I wasn't totally clueless in high school.