Life Drawing 2016

It's probably been a full year now since I last went life drawing - moving around for freelance jobs has stopped me from finding a regular place. This evening was incredible, though I felt very rusty! I also had Simon and Garfunkel stuck in my head the whole time because all I could think was 'Hello Charcoal My Old Friend'! Cheesy but true!

(Apologies for image quality - I don't have my scanner with me at the moment. Images will be re-uploaded at a later date. All images are A3 in real life.)

One 5-minute sketch, one 15-minute rendered drawing

20-minute drawing.

Final 30-minute drawing.

Master Studies

Last week I visited the John Singer Sargent exhibition that's currently on at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It's an incredible exhibition that runs until late May, so if you have the time, I'd really recommend it! This is a study of Sargent's  'Madame X'. One hour, Photoshop.

Master Studies

Another master study, this time of a painting called 'Valley Thunderhead' by Renato Muccillo. Animation on the film is almost finished, so soon I will be painting backgrounds and I figured with Muccilo's dramatic skies and use of lighting his paintings were appropriate to study in preparation. Photoshop 30 mins.

(Original)

Master Studies

I don't know how many of you are aware of the recent (hashtag)21days by Noah Bradley on twitter, but the idea is to spend an hour a day for 21 days working to improve your art. It's been a busy week so I've yet to be able to make it a daily habit, but here is one of my master studies from the project. The original on the left is 'Anna Obolenskaya' by Carolus Duran  and on the right is my study of it. One hour in Photoshop.

Sketches

Today was the long-awaited deadline of my dissertation. It is now over and I'm free to get excited about new things! After handing in, I went into Cardiff and sketched for the first time in such a long while I don't remember when the last time was! I felt really quite rusty, but now that a whole module is over, I think I'm going to find time every day to just sketch. It's one of my favourite things to do!

Also now that the dissertation is over, I can start to dedicate some more of my energy into getting a portfolio site up and running. You may have noticed my new little icon on the side there, and if you follow my twitter you will see it there too. These are merely the beginnings of something big to come! A couple of doodles made a couple of weeks ago:

I hope you're all well!

Studying Colour

Recently I bought myself the book 'Colour and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter' by James Gurney. It's a fantastic book and makes me realise just how little I know about colour theory! With that in mind, I've been doing really quick (15 min) colour studies recently just to try to get a little better. Below is one of those studies, done on the iPad app ProCreate, and beneath that is the reference photo I used. Mine is a little more blue-tinged than the original image because of the screen inaccuracies between the iPad and my laptop!

Photo found on DeviantART

Before I go, you may notice that it's a Monday today. I'm posting on a Monday because the next few Fridays are going to be fairly nightmare-ish in terms of finding time to post (I'm moving out of my student house and deadlines are approaching!). Instead of going on hiatus though, I'm just temporarily moving the posting day. It will be back to normal soon!

Until next week!

Breaktime Studies

Hello all! Animation of the film is coming along very well; I hope to finish it by the end of Sunday. I'll then have three weeks for clean up, colouring and compositing; we're almost there! To do all of this though, I've been going in for early mornings and staying in for late evenings and so break-times are entirely necessary. Here are some studies from this week, done for stress relief.

Off I get back to work! Have a good week everyone!

Digital Painting

When I was 16, my brilliant parents bought me a Wacom Bamboo Tablet for my Birthday. That was the beginning of digital painting for me. At the beginning of this summer, I made another technological leap in the medium; I bought myself an iPad Mini. Together with the incredible app Procreate and my Wacom Bamboo iPad Stylus, in 2013 I enjoyed a summer of digital sketching on the go.

The above image was the first finished painting that I created on the iPad. A quick disclaimer before I go on though; I painted this image using a Rapunzel picture book as reference. The staging, colours, idea etc purely belong to Disney. I used it to dive in at the deep end and see if I could create the same effects as in the book using these new and strange brushes and I'm pretty pleased with the result!

My next experiment was in textures and tones. I used reference images of ferrets off google for these. Ferrets are brilliant fun to draw I found - they make some great shapes with their bodies and they're cute too!

My last experiment I'm showing you today was made after I got the song 'Morning has Broken' stuck in my head. It was an experiment with the texture brush and lots of different modes of layers. Thanks to Photoshop, I'm very familiar with the multiply layer, but this piece was a masterclass in all of the other ones!

My next project after I hand in (and post!) my animation on Monday next week will be an Adobe project; playing with Photoshop and Illustrator, so there will certainly be some more digital art coming your way if you want to stay tuned!

Until next time!





Experimenting

Every so often I feel that I need to branch out into different media. Doing every drawing in pen, pencil or digitally can become very repetitive. Sometimes I like to experiment on projects but sometimes I prefer the safety of doing something for myself and being allowed to fail!

This was done for a friend with silver pen on white paper and then taken into photoshop. She has that original on the front of her Birthday card (I'm quite proud; it looks very delicate) and then I did this afterward.

These were done with black pen and watercolours. Having not used watercolours since 2011/early 2012, it was odd using them again! Each is about the size of a postcard.

These are also done in watercolours with black pen and are postcard-sized. The aim was to get some texture into the pieces and I'm pretty pleased with the result. 

These last drawings were done in coloured pencil. I love the cold Christmas penguin!

Have a good weekend everyone!

Faces

Happy Friday everyone! I hope you're all enjoying advent (we bought our Christmas trees today!) and I promise you'll see those advent paintings that I mentioned soon.

This week has been a crazy week and so instead of showing you some new work, I'm going to show you some old things.

Back in April, one of our university briefs involved making studies of faces. Having never studied the human face from a drawing perspective before, it was one scary brief! Using reference photos of actors pulling funny faces and from modelling agencies, I got to work. Certainly, if you can spot the three drawings of Ricky Gervais above, I'll consider this coursework to have been a success!

 Each of these drawings was done using pen and copic markers. I started using shades of grey but I did so many drawings with them that they ran out and I had to start using different colours! I adore copic markers!

Whoopie Goldberg anyone? This was more than just an exercise in drawing faces, it was an exercise in finding all the shapes, surfaces and forms that a face is made up of. As such, I found that I love doing drawings with lots of contrast in light and shade - all the better for seeing the forms with!

I need to get back into practicing drawing faces; because we see them all the time, they're arguably the hardest things to draw as all mistakes are instantly noticeable. They're so important though as so much expression can be found in them. Maybe soon I'll do a post with some newer face drawings so we can see an immediate comparison and see the improvement.

Happy Friday and I hope you all enjoy your weekend!

Observational Drawings



 Observational drawings are incredibly important in lots of different ways. They help in the growth of an artist, they can help an artist understand the object(s) better and they can inform an artist for a piece of work that they're undertaking. In my case, I'm planning to do a piece of animation either in my reading week or over the christmas holidays. As you can probably guess from the sketches below, the stars of the piece are going to be hands and feet (I know, it sounds strange!). I'm using the exercise to teach myself how to use Adobe After Effects and hopefully, I should also be able to have some fun too!

Over the summer holidays, I went to Spain and was in a very rural area for the Fiestas in August; Villadiego. There I saw some traditional spanish dancing and that is what has inspired me. I took lots of videos of the intricate hand and feet movements and hopefully I'll be able to recreate the beauty of them.

Most of the time, I can use my own hands and feet for reference but for those occasions when my hands are crampt and I can't physically rotate my feet to the correct angles, I use these references for anyone who is interested:

Hands: Hand References by SenshiStock on Deviantart

Feet: Feet References by mostlyguystock on Deviantart

Until next time!

And It Begins Again!

Hi everyone! Today was the start of my 3rd year induction week and so the madness of term begins again! Here is my first post of the new year! To explain, over the summer I downloaded a trial of a piece of animation software called 'TV Paint'. I may be buying and using it for my film this year, so I thought I should have a go first!

Patito from Julia Young on Vimeo.

Throwback Monday

I've posted a few nostalgic posts over the summer and I promise that this one is the last! Finding these old drawings from first year is lovely on a few counts; it is good to see improvement, good to reconnect with old ideas I've had about creativity and good to reaffirm where I am now. It's made me excited for third year!

Drawn at Cardiff Museum, October 2012:

 

Drawn at home, the Cotswolds, Spring 2013

Drawn from photographs, Easter 2013:

 

Studies

It's almost time to go back to university for my third year! So, in the interest of bringing my observational skills from where I've let them slack over the holidays, as well as life drawing, I've been doing more observational drawing. This week it's been hands and feet.

 

 

Concepting

The other day I felt the need to both be productive and blow off a little creative steam by working on something different for a couple of hours. The result was that I put together a couple of concepts for my housemate's game project. His brief was to do an old abbey in the style of the 1992 'Dracula' film, on top of a cliff with waves crashing below. He also wanted a couple of interior shots. Here is what I came up with: