Wish Upon a Whale!

One of my favorite collaborative blogs is the Toon Club. I've been wishing on a star that they would invite me to join....and they even received a stirring endorsement of my work from none other than... myself (my mom wasn't home). Haven't heard back yet, but the wishing continues (and the wondering if Jiminy Cricket was full of hooey); and in the meantime I decided to work on my own rendition of their newest topic (simply called "beach"). This is a rough draft of an idea that will be a bit bigger and feature more characters (and, I promise, it'll be less depressing!). Anyway, let me know what you think (and find out how you can help save the whales!). But I sure appreciate all the recent comments from y'all (and yes, mom, I'm wearing clean underwear every day).

Sketches are EASY!

I've been trying really hard lately to take my sketchbook everywhere I go (like the "My Buddy" doll that everyone else had when I was a kid...sob....) and doodle my noodles out. It's been a lot of fun (when I'm not getting too stressed out about it... sometimes I see something and my brain goes, "Whoa! Look! It's a [object/person/animal/flying buttress]! It's got [complex anatomical structure/expressive personality/super powers]! You should sketch that!" and then I get all stressed because I can't find my sketchbook and I need to be somewhere and my pens are running low and meanwhile the [object] is [walking away/flying away/being transmogrified]...I was lucky to get a good sketch of the wisk-handed she-pirate just before she shivered her timbers). Like I said, a lot of fun...

Gestures are HARD!

So since I'm immersing myself in every possible effort to get ready for the Animation program, I have been introduced to the lovely concept of gesture drawing. In case you don't know, it's basically trying to capture an expressive movement or action in a figure while maintaining a correct (albeit concise) anatomical structure in the drawing....and all that is done during a pose that lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to three or four minutes. So here are a few of the ones I've done lately that have shown glimmers of hope.

Happy August!

Holy canoli, the weeks just fly by. Summer term is almost gone, and Fall semester is just an Education Week behind. Things are going really well - I'm still learning a lot in my drawing class; but I'm learning much much more by viewing the work of so many talented artists (check the sidebar and browse their work! You may never come back to my blog again!). All in all, this translates into a couple of things for me: a) I'm drawing more, and b) those drawings are less and less resembling the section of the Friend magazine where the readers send in their own art.

Anyway, just to attach a visual to this post, here is something I made for an assignment in my Masterpieces of British Literature class. We got to kind of "translate" (in this case illustrate) the main theme of a poem. I chose Coleridge's "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison". Basically I used a tag cloud to find the most common words and transposed them over a portrait of the poet (that I did not draw), to give the sense that the work of any artist serves to shape who they really are (at least to the reader). It was hastily done (then done even more hastily after the original was lost), but I kinda like it. Enjoy.