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.

Canada Comic

Hi everybody, I hope you're all well and have had/are having a lovely summer! Since you last heard from me I've been to Canada, staying with my family and dear friends at a lake house in Quebec. It was totally wonderful and very needed after a hectic third year! Whilst there I produced a mini-comic in watercolours based at the lake. I thought I'd share a couple of panels with you today.

For the comic I used A4 pieces of paper which I divided into double-page spreads. Having thumbnailed the story I knew that by working on such a small scale the project would take very little time and I could enjoy painting without worrying about finishing. It's been a while since I last worked with watercolours and I loved using them again!

Since you last heard from me I have also graduated from university and started my new job at Fettle Animation! I started today and I love it already. Hopefully now that I'm back on a regular schedule and in the UK again, Monday posting can resume!

Building a Lighthouse

It goes without saying that when you're designing a film about a lighthouse keeper you have to draw lots and lots of lighthouses. We've gone from ordinary to fantastical, but the exploration had to end at some point with a final design! We have spent several days drawing every prop and every angle imaginable so that our CG buddies can model everything, and here is a very small taste for you.

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!

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!

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!

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.

 

 

Time, Time, Time

I don't know if I wish there were more hours in a day or if I just wish to be more productive with the hours that we do have. One way or the other, I simply don't have the time to create all of the animations I want to! I've had an idea for an animated short about a deer, based on a piece of music that I had heard. Well, I'll file it away in my future-personal-projects folder until such a time as I have time!

Improvement and Nostalgia

This week I returned for the first time in a while to my old Deviantart page. Having created it at the age of 15 and not having posted to it in two years, it was filled with work that I was once really proud of. Going back over the 100+ images that were on there though, I marvelled at how much I've improved since then! I've now deactivated that account, but for nostalgia's sake I'd like to put here the few images from that account that I am still proud of. 

Age 15 - I did a project on Rodin and made 3 sculptures of hands; a

child's hand, an adult's hand and an older person's hand. I then did a series

of etchings of piano keys so that the final piece was both 2D and 3D.

Age 17 - In 2011 I kept a series of sketchbooks and resolved to draw one image every day.

Unlike my current illustrated journal, these images were mostly from my imagination.

Age 17 - Another page from my 2011 sketchbook series. This one was drawn at Halloween

and eventually I used it as inspiration for my first year character design university project!

Age 17 - This was the year I really started experimenting in Photoshop.

I titled it 'cozy' and used a 'knitted-jumper' type texture on the image (my first

time using textures!) and I feel very nostalgic looking at it now. 

Age 18 - This I think is my favourite of all of my old drawings. My teacher

at the time was doing a Masters degree in Psychology and she gave each of

us a questionnaire to fill out to help her. I loved the concept 'draw your mind';

it has so many possibilities!

Until next time!