Midddddtermaganza

Oh my crap! So many projects! Bwaghfh! Between Heads and Hands and Figure Painting I'm gonna die for sure. Oh wellll...at least I'm learnin' things! I think the combination of classes is really forcing me to get used to using planes in my work and to also be more consistent with my proportions. For your viewing pleasure, I have here most of my Heads and Hands drawings from this semester. The upper-left is the beginning of the semester, going to the lower-right, which is my most recent portrait. They go newsprint, drawing paper, 2 newsprint, 2 charcoal + white pencil on storm grey tone paper, 2 sanguine + white pencil on velvet gray paper. Most of these are all day (5-6 hours?) drawings, except the 4th, 6th and 8th drawings which are three-hour workshop drawings.



I'm also throwing in 4 of my least ugly paintings so far, also going from earliest to most recent. I am still struggling with this color and value fusion thing, but I think I've improved my paint application throughout the semester. 1st painting is 6 hours, second is a 3-hour workshop painting, third is an hour head study, fourth is a 6-hour portrait.



I still struggle with my various drawing and painting problems, but I've found that it's gotten to the point where it's really fun to work out all the puzzles and problems when I'm making a piece of art. It's a cool challenge trying to make sure your proportions and everything match up alright, trying to find subtle darks and lights that will punch out a portrait, etc. And the reward is learning how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future! Woot.

Kind of wanted to go on the summer Italy trip, but I don't think it'll happen because of my dirt-poor-ness, and my folks want me to work during summer so I can put some money away. My vegan-ness might also make things difficult depending on the housing situation there. Alas! Maybe next time :(

Gonna bust up some bitches!

Ufhghhghg god I have SO many paintings and drawings to post...but they're all scattered between Sutter and Federal and my apartment. Will post later on.

Just a quickie, though - I took a five minute sketch I did at Monday's Quickstudies workshop and turned it into this groovy guy. Colors hopefully coming soonish. I think Heads and Hands is really helping me with my facial geometry.
And my painting at workshop didn't suck too badly - I'll have to post it if I can manage to get a photo of it that isn't totally washed out.

Character Design fun time

In light of the extremely-helpful character 360 assignment from Chris's clothed fig class, I've been doing some three quarters front/back designs of some of my characters. It's a good exercise for making proportions consistent and drawing clothes onto figures. They're sort of for fun, but they'd also be cool to use later for like a senior project or something. They could use some tweaking, but I'm happy with the result so far. Couple other characters on the way.



The guy on the left is Joseph, he's uh, an angry, hairy type who likes to hang around the saloon a bit too much. The guy on the right is Dodge. He's a civil war surgeon-turned-outlaw. See, he has a suave manpurse full of goodies. With lock picking tools and weapons and crumpets and such.

Figure painting hurts my brainmeats...

Welcome to Episode 4 of Kelly-arts. I'm here to report, happily, that the first week (and a half?) of school were a success! I am enjoying my classes (even math!) and all my teachers are awesome, as usual.
First I had Intro to Printmaking, which I have on Friday with Termeh. Here are my first two lino-cut prints - apologies for the photo quality! Many of these are taken with my cell phone as I can't take all of them home while they dry.


Then on Mondays I have Intro to Figure Painting with Jason Bowen. I already had him for Intermediate Fig so we already get along and I know how he teaches, kinda...but I was NOT expecting to be awful at figure painting. I am awful with plane changes and my color is all wrong and I'm like temperature-blind and just BLUGH. The only thing I've done right so far was the still life homework which isn't even a figure. Woe! Ah well, I'll just have to go to tons of workshops. Here is my still life homework, and week 1 and week 2 in-class paintings.


Tuesday is Fine Art Heads and Hands with Tomutsu, which has gone swimmingly so far - pretty small class, it's really nice! I think I'm really going to grow this semester with my head drawing. Anyway, hopefully I can post some HH pictures later on, as well as some character designs I've been doing on the side when I'm not working or crapping homework assignments.

Direct drawing, continuous line...and pirates!

Sooo in Clothed fig today we did continuous line drawings, and I actually had a ton of fun with it - direct drawing was not as painful as I thought it was going to be, so I guess I should have tried it sooner, it's very liberating, and my drawings are a lot cleaner. Anyway, blah blah, we had the Baron today - those are him in the first picture there. Below that is two pirate drawings from a week before. Also our big last project of the semester was Joan of Arc! Giganto historical character project.



This pirate was actually a young woman but I made her into a greasy old pirate. Awesome.



This is the second part of my clothed figure project, the 4 action poses + expressions. So much work...but it was funnnnnnnn times.

Springy bits and Summer stuffs

Yay! Thought I'd upload some figurative stuff I'd been meaning to upload. Clothed figure is awesome, it's really helping me with my charcoal technique, and my line weight, and my gestures.
But I thought I'd throw in some anatomy drawings first - I took Intermediate Anatomy with Brandon Smith during spring. The drawing on the left is from the first day of the semester, and the one on the right is from one of the last weeks. I think my 5-value rendering has gotten a lot less crappy lately - I think I'm slowly developing better control over my shading. Whoo!



These next ones are from Clothed figure, from the last week or two, and some are from our midterm drawing test. I like that we're encouraged to really push storytelling, and to feel free to change the model over completely as we see fit.





Doing these gives me some neat ideas for character designs and such. Now, if I only had some damn time to work on personal art...

Such a lemming

Truth be told, I've just been meaning to get a blog for some time...apparently everyone at AAU has one, so...hey! Here it is. Like the title says, it's all about the journey, and it's a way for me to chronicle my progress and my AAU experience. Learning is awesome.

So without further ado, I'll go ahead and start with my first clothed figure 1 assignment. We do a bunch of nude studies, choose one, refine it, and do a costume overlay. After I turned it in I scanned it and colored it for kicks. It's this neo-crusader guy from a science fiction story I'm kind of developing with a friend for shits and giggles. Lineart in graphite, colors in potatoshop.