Schoolism - Foundation Studies Course, Weeks 2 and 3

Below are my assignments for week 2 on 'the Power of Value'. I chose to work traditionally on paper.

For the angel, I first experimented with harder pencils on a 90lb medium-tooth paper and while it is close to the tone of the original photo, I would have liked to have gone a little darker. I felt it was already little overworked and I didn't want to take any chances of wrecking it and having to start over. I'm told that harder pencils tend to work better on art board, so I may try that another time. The assignment was to copy the sample greyscale photos and either get as close to the values we saw or change the lighting entirely. I chose to draw what I saw because I wanted to learn from it.

For the lion I chose to not be so concerned with all the little details and just get the essence down. In the original photo, the lion's mane is a mass of detail. I also decided to experiment with pencil crayons on brown craft paper which was a lot of fun but I still felt that I could have pushed the darks more had I used conté or soft pencils instead.

For week 3 on 'the Power of Perspective', we were asked to draw or paint in greyscale using a couple of provided photos. The greyscale of the White House is from an old black and white photo and the La Gondola photo was originally in colour. For speed I chose to paint both in Photoshop. Below are my efforts.

The balcony portion of the White House picture was a little tricky to draw because the building is almost parallel to the picture plane and so close to the horizon line that it made drawing a test of patience. I originally thought it was a cylinder set halfway inside the building but upon googling it, I discovered that it's not quite a half cylinder so I ended up eyeballing it while keeping it aligned to the perspective I set. I did make the perspective slightly different than the photo where the right vanishing point is further out and I gave the White House a little more breathing space around it and added some more trees. The La Gondola picture was also challenging because of the various elevations of the buildings and the three-point perspective. I resisted the urge to cheat and use Manga Studio. :) All in all, these were great exercises. I think I'm getting more comfortable painting in greyscale so that's a plus.

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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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My Experience with Society6

After some research, I recently decided to start selling some of my art on a print-on-demand site and chose Society6 to start with because I had heard good things. I wanted to be free to create art and keep the logistics of printing, inventory, and shipping to a minimum.

Quality and Service

I've been with them for approximately 3 months now and I have purchased some of my own products to gauge the quality and service. With the exception of a printing error that seemed to always occur with one of my designs on a red T-shirt, the quality has been exceptional. Although Society6 has been have been very quick to respond and replaced the shirt free of charge each time, we couldn't isolate the problem because, as it turns out, they use multiple vendors to print their T-shirts. Below are the items I felt turned out quite well.

Prepping Files for Print

It wasn't immediately apparent to me what the specific dimensions of my files should be for each product. However, once you upload your image, another window opens up with a listing of other products you can add. This is also where dimensions are listed and where you can select fabric colours. Different products require different dimensions of your artwork. When you upload the additional files, the products are automatically added to your store. I was happy to find that it was also easy to remove a product or update their options.

Profit and Sales

I've started to make some sales but the profit on shirts and cell phone skins are quite low and are fixed amounts. Prints and some of the larger products are where you would find the most profit. I understand that the number of views and favourites determine whether you get showcased on Society6's pages so hopefully posting more artwork to their site will help move me up in the ranks. :)

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Mother of Dragons

I've been meaning to try and paint celebrity portraits for a while now and I thought I'd start by painting a character from one of my favourite TV shows, Game of Thrones: Daenerys Targaryen.

This was an exercise to test myself and to learn from and I'm hoping to do more. I used a screen capture from one of the episodes for reference but found it somewhat challenging to paint because the original image was a little soft and the core shadows were much darker due to a sunset in the background. Although I did paint a rough version of the background, I decided to scrap it because I thought it was too scenic for the composition I was going for. In fact, I agonized over several different backgrounds (the paradox of choice) before committing to this final one thanks to several friends whose opinions I sought.

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The Recurring Garden

It's funny where inspiration will hit. While weeding my backyard, two ideas for a gag came to me about dandelions and raccoons so I thought I'd also bring the second one to life.

In my enthusiasm to finish what I had envisioned, I noticed only after I had completed the strip that perhaps I shouldn't have added so much detail and should have considered how the end result would look to readers. When I had to size it down to fit my blog, it was smaller than I expected. Ah well, lesson learned.

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There Goes the Backyard

Every year the hubby and I struggle to keep the proliferating dandelions and other weeds at bay in our backyard or to keep racoons from digging up our front yard and I had this vision pop into my head of Groot and a raccoon encouraging it all. It made me smile and I hope it makes you as well. :)

Cheers!

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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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