Schoolism

I signed up for Schoolism art classes that I hope will help me improve and grow as an artist. I'm going to post some of my completed assignments but because these are paid courses I can't go into great detail about them but I hope you get some sense out of my description.

I decided to start with Art Fundamentals with Thomas Fluharty because he's an amazing artist and I felt that it would be a good refresher course. I am also planning on taking his oil painting class later on.

Below are my completed assignments from last week, Week 1, on the subject of Seeing. The original images were in colour and I drew and painted greyscale versions. I tried to get as close to the originals as I could. It was certainly tough with all those details! For the giraffe, we were also encouraged to add in a painted background. I kept mine loose so that I would have enough time to start Week 2 lessons.

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TV Sketching

It was an eventful and productive long weekend. The hubby and I kicked off the weekend watching a late night viewing of Mad Max with some good friends. It was a pretty fun ride with all the non-stop action and stellar visuals. I felt very inspired when I got home but sleep prevailed and drawing would have to wait.

We did a ton of yard work with our neighbours. The pesky weeds in our lawn never seem to abate and I often think the war over the weeds is a losing battle as I picture evil fairies or raccoons replanting the dandelions we diligently remove. To celebrate our small victories we decided to have an impromptu bbq with our neighbours. Yum, yum!

After all the work, I did finally manage to squeeze in some drawing time while relaxing in front of the tube watching Outlander, Reign, Lip Sync Battle and Penny Dreadful. For the first two shows I would hit pause and set a time limit between 1 to 5 minutes per sketch with the goal of increasing my drawing speed. For the latter shows, I didn't bother pausing, trying instead to capture the likeness based on my observations and memory. Lately I've been spending a lot of time pouring over Loomis's Drawing the Heads and Hands and Gnomon workshops but I need variety in my study or it gets a little dry. Attached are my sketches, warts and all. :)

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Life Drawing - April 13, 2015

Below is my best work from life drawing at Kagan's yesterday. It took me quite some time to get into the groove but that tends to happen when I've stayed away from life drawing for a while. For me, life drawing requires a different mind set than when drawing from a photo reference or my imagination so after a long comic project I need to build up those muscles up again! Speaking of...I should probably get back to the gym as well. :)

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A collection of life drawing

After a long stint on projects it's nice to get back to life drawing where I don't have to plan things out and can just enjoy the act of drawing. The short poses really force me to get down to the bare essentials (no pun intended ). Below is a collection of both recent and past drawings. Thanks for looking. :)

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A character design for a graphic novel

The story part of my friend's graphic novel is complete so I thought I'd post up a character design I did last week of the protagonist. At her request, I did a rough front pose in colour. Alas, the project has taken another direction and I am no longer a part of the process. C'est la vie.

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Tonkinese study

As I have some upcoming pet portraits to work on, I decided to do a little practice drawing of a Tonkinese cat from photo reference. My cat happens to be a Tonkinese - wonderful little guy but doesn't seem to like having his picture taken. Thank God for the internet and Google! ;-)

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What I've been up to

Since it's been quite some time since my last update, I wanted to write about what I've been up to. I have to admit that the long-overdue fair summer weather and a lot of changes at my day job contributed to lulling me into slacker mode on the drawing front. I just wanted to get out, enjoy the weather, see friends, shop and enjoy the city! Then came fall which always means three things for me: the Toronto International Film Festival (yay!), an increase in work at the office (boo!) and a renewed determination to become a better artist. The last usually means becoming a hermit and devoting whatever spare time is left at the end of the day to draw.

An aspiring writer friend (I'm sure she'll become famous one day) recently asked me if I'd be interested in helping her take a script she is working on into graphic novel form. After reading only a few chapters, I was hooked but where to begin? I was extremely flattered but mostly concerned about all the work involved. Victor and I decided to get some industry knowledge by taking separate classes at the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop where they have veterans of the comic book and animation industry like Ty Templeton, Geordie Miller and Scott Caple to name a few.

I chose two classes focussing on perspective and anatomy respectively as refreshers while Victor is taking Ty's Comic Bootcamp that covers scripting, layouts and rudimentary figure drawing. The classes are already helping us to see things in a new light. I'm not sure how this project is going to turn out but I'll do my best and we'll see what happens. :o To make up for my absence here are some of my doodles, studio life drawings and character sketches from the last few months:

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This Little Piggy Went To Market...

Feet are one of the top problem areas for me, so I decided to tackle them head-on by drawing a lot of well...feet. I decided to start from the inside out but aside from the model skull I own, I don't yet have an actual skeleton on hand to help me gain a better understanding of what I'm drawing. In the meanwhile, I've used the following references to aid me: Artistic Anatomy by Dr. Paul Richer, Figure Drawing - Design and Invention by Michael Hampton and Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblet - all excellent books. Some of the studies are copies from these sources while the rest use my feet or photographs of feet as reference. There's something about copying something over and over again that commits it to memory - I now know the names of all the bones in the feet!

I have also included some more of my life drawings (5-10 minute poses).

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