More Homework; I Am Weary

Today we turned in our bathroom assignments.

Here's mine:

I showed Will and he was like, "You need to push your value more in there" and I said, "Yeah, I did a value study, here it is"

And he said, "I like this more, work on this one. The angle is less severe and it flows better."

He's right. The black and white one is boring and stiff and slow.

So I worked on it.

But secretly I wept because the only reason I changed the angle from the blue value study is because others asked me to! Ha! In any case, I learned a lot from this.

The next assignment is to put a guy in a boat and do 25 objects. So it's similar to the first assignment. For me, boat means ship and ship means outer space. So here are my thumbs. I want to show a guy floating around in/on/through/over/under/etc his/her spaceship while lotsa stuff floats around in the cockpit and outside. 

My first page:

My second page:

BONUS: Robotce

HEre

BONUS: Here's that bathroom

It's comin' along. I need to do the kid and composite him in before doing a final sketch. I'm gonna start doing value as soon as I get the last sketch mapped in. I just opened it in Photoshop and dumped all the blue, leaving the red, which was supposed to represent my final lines. I don't like the front end of the toilet, the box on top the wall-mounted cabinet and the curve of the sword above the mirror. But I like tons of other stuff, which pleases me. The gun leaning against the tub is supposed to be a PSG1. It almost looks like one! When I was 12, I went to Japan. My host family and I played Metal Gear Solid probably four or five times through while I was there (which, by the way, was the most violent video game I had played at that point in my life. My mother probably would have killed me if she knew. Well, I guess she does now since I'm typing this here, but since I'm stronger than her now she probably couldn't kill me [unless she had a PSG1]). We were playing the Japanese edition  for our first couple playthroughs so all the voice acting was in Japanese. But the name PSG1 stuck with me because they used the English alphabet. So it has always held a special place in my heart. Basically what I'm saying is that there's a PSG1 in the bathroom here because it elicits fond memories of my time in Japan, and how I bonded with people because we all spoke the language of videogames. 

So there ya go. After work, my goal for the day is to draw the kid and redraw the whole thing with him in there in preparation for adding the value, which I'll start today and finish Monday.

Post 328

James C Christensen came to school today and did a lecture. It was good. We talked about lots of artsy things. 

The guy on the far left has potential. He could be cool.

I like both of these characters a lot. And one is a girl, which doesn't seem to happen often around here.

I worked more on one of my homework assignments. I forgot to scan it, though, so I'll have it up tomorrow morn.

Here's what I've done so far today

I have to go work on two homework assignments right now, but I wanted to get in all this garbage first:

I drew this guy's face. It took a while.

Then I tried to mix it up a bit. I still used the same reference, but tried to modify it. It was hard to push it. It's not different enough, I think.

This girl's face

Thumbnails for another assignment. We're supposed to create a fantasy landscape. I went to pinterest and typed in "Tree" and got a cool picture of a tree. Then I tried to duplicate the sweeping movement.

Then this. I already posted it on Twitter, but if you don't follow you wouldn't have seen it and I kinda like it.

Now I have to go work on those two homework assignments. If all goes well I'll update later today.

What I drew today and upcoming stuff I may be proud of

Here it is!

So for my Imagination and Visual Literacy class (Will's class) we're doing a kid in a bathroom brushing his teeth. We have to populate the space with 25 items and make the kid's face the focal point.

Here are my thumbs (and I'm sorry about the brush pen bleeding through, I'm waaayyyy to lazy to fix it):

Here's the next batch. You can see I found one I like, center right:

I blew it up to 8.5 x 11 added value, and brought it in to Will. He told me to make some slight refinements. He's the dark pencil, I'm the blue. My first attempt is on the left, second is on the right. I brought that up to him and he told me my stuff has been getting better this semester. Nice! So I'm gonna blow that one up and noodle it for a while. 

BONUS: Notes from yesterday's critique

Notes I took during the critique on the assignment I turned in yesterday. The pictures on the notes, I guess

ESPN: March 31st, 2014

I used whoever is on the cover of this issue for reference. I did some other stuff today but the photos weren't as good (as in, they were much smaller) so it was harder for me to detect plane changes and as a result the studies weren't as good. It's weird that I'm blaming a professional magazine! I'm just tired. I should have picked reference more specific to what I want to do. This study was 30 mins:

Face. Faeces

Everyone has the same face. I need to do more reference faces. And weird shaped heads. I think that would throw me fer a loop

I'm hungry

Some of these might look better if I did/didn't have brush pen on them.

I'm hungry

Goofin'

Some classmates of mine said that "Large" sized images fit in browsers better than "Extra Large." So there you go

Another attempt.

I try my hand again at Scarlett from February 13th:

And here's the original image:

Bussin

This is the longest I've ever spent on a drawing.

It took me 4 hours.

If anyone cares, here was an earlier attempt I made before Spring Break.

I think I found the reference image on Tumblr, but, as usual, have no idea where I got it. I just have this loose leaf piece of paper in my bag. I don't know where I got it. I don't even remember printing it.

I learned a lot from this. How to effectively see the shapes and values, etc. Now I really want to cut down my time, shorten the amount of time it takes to see these things and implement them. Something else I noticed was how awful everything was until the endgame. Awful might actually be too strong a word. But once I hit a certain point and all the stuff was in the right place, I just waded in there and jammed the place full of nitty gritty details without any fear. It was kind of a weird feeling- And one I want to experience again soon. It was awesome to push through something hard and have a really fun time finishing it up.

One step closer to a finished product?

Okay, now I'm going to class.

Continued brush pen abuse

Off to a St. Patrick's Day thing, had no time to fine-tune this next guy

BACK FROM SPRING BREAK: Tears Fall in Flows Torrential

Okay, party time is over, back to work! Sorry for the lack of posting this last week, I even had art stuff with me but I totally fell apart. I read a lot and played video games and spent time with friends and loved ones but now I'm back, and you can follow me on Twitter using @ZacharyHeckert.

I've been trying to work on the underdrawing. You all know this.

Here I was trying to puzzle out how to get that always-horrible view from beneath the head. Mixed results ensued, naturally.

Then I tried using my new brush pen. Mixed results ensued.

Srrign Break. Spring.

It's Spring Break this week and I haven't drawn anything since the last time I posted. I'm something of a lazy cow. I did some art homework on Monday, though. I don't remember if I uploaded anything. But yeah. My sister is getting her wisdom teeth removed tomorrow so she and her husband came down to visit, too. So here's my sister. There are a couple things I learned from this study. I need to find a way to keep proportion consistent. I don't know how I feel about holding my drawing utensil at arm's length away from my body and measuring. I just want to train my eye. I also should have drawn her shape through the arm of the couch, I feel like that might have helped keep her body normal. I also should have picked a model that wasn't so squirmy, because her mouth is all messed up ;)

When I got home Monday I found that my hardcover copy of A Redtail's Dream finally got here from Finland. For those unaware, creator Minna Sundberg created the comic as a personal project to develop her artistic abilities while she was going to school. Last semester I saw her crowdfunding campaign to bind the completed work into a hardcover book. I was impressed by her work and her discipline, so I backed the project. The reason I'm mentioning this in my post is that I think I have an idea of projects to work on to develop my skills. I have so many ideas in my head but really struggle to develop stories and characters outside of that. I'm considering turning some ideas of mine into short stories and then expanding them into short graphic stories, probably 20-30 pages? That seems really tough, though. But anyway, this book came this week and made me feel extremely guilty for being such a lazy cow and made me want to be better. I need to find time to push myself with personal projects. 

Sunday