More apes.

From our animal drawing class.

Head of a woman.

Another cast. This one is the head of a woman.

National Geographic: The Art of exploration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bur_Se9J2Ao

Very interesting.

David Coleman.

Just giving a shout out to one of my teachers.

http://davidcolman.blogspot.com/

Apple with peanut shells.

My teacher Bill Perkins scared us all with tales of the Orphan Works Bill and people stealing artwork off of the internet. So I'm going to try putting an ugly signature/mark on my pieces.

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Or I could just sign them...hah!

This is a still life from class I did with an assist from one of our teachers William Rodgers.

Cast paintings.

Foot and ear.

Diffrent types of onlookers.

Drawing at the zoo today reminded me of a thread I did at the DrawingBoard.org a couple years ago.

I sketch in public alot so I've gotten kind of use to having people stare over my shoulder. You get alot of diffrent kind of people and reactions. There are.....

- Mr/Miss look and run: People who only take a passing look at your drawing, shrug and then go on your way. These people are interesting because they kind of objectify you as an odd anomaly, diffrent than what they're use to.

- Mr/Miss superspy: This is the person who really, really tries to be sneaky about their watching you work. They don't make a peep, they don't even breathe to hard. They get right up to you and just stare for a while. It's almost like they don't think you can see them perfectly. My reaction is to either let them continue to assume that they're getting away with it, or if they show particular interest let them know that I can actually see them.

- Mr./Miss "wow I want to talk to that artist": These are the people who are the bravest of the bunch, they realize that you probably won't bite them, and will actually start up a conversation with you. Often times their parents with kids who are amazed that there are adults who don't grow out of drawing. I find that the conversations consistantly go in any one of several directions.

A.While you're holding your pencil and drawing filled sketchbook in hand they ask with total ernerst "Wow! Are you an aritst?" Obvious question? Yes, but you might be suprised at how much it's asked. I usually answer with either "yes" or "Yeah, I'm an art student." I guess to the person asking it doesn't seem as obvious.

B. There is the "can you draw me or my friend" request. I'm reluctant about that one because I'm not a spectacular charecterist/portrait artist and I'm just as likely to offend them as wow them. Another one I often get is "How long have you been drawing for?" Pretty straight forward one, and you just tell them. A variation of the first two categories of people though are the ones who whisper behind your back.

C. "My cousin/brother/child/parent/random relative is an artist": I find that alot of people will tell you about their artist relatives. Which can be pretty cool, as you can learn something that you didn't know before.

D. "You're a good artist." It's a pretty straight forward compliment, and I usually just respond with thank you. I think that anyone who's been on the spot drawing for even a brief amount of time will seem amazing to a non-artist.

-There is the parent who is morbidly afraid that their kid is going to break your concentration. I guess it goes along with the stereotype that we're all tempremental and will fly off the handle, or that we loose our concentration easily. Usually I just tell the person that it's okay if they want to look at the animal or my drawing.

Stephen Silver has an interesting practice of wearing dark glasses in public so that when people see that he's drawing them he can move his head and pretend he isn't. I think that's hillarious.

If any of you who read my blog have similar stories, or "types" of onlookers feel free to leave a comment.

Two great portrait artist.

John and Elisabeth Sanden.

Check them out.

http://www.elizabethsanden.com/

http://www.johnhowardsanden.com/

Bear.

Old study of a stuffed bear I dug up.

Some artist I saw in galleries in Hawaii...

There was some interesting stuff there.

http://www.pino-artist.com/

http://www.artbrokerage.com/art/hoffman/

http://www.lucelle-raad.com/gallery.html

Sketches for animal drawing class.

Hopefully my teacher will say those are some "great apes" when I show them to him.

That was a lame joke I know.

Head drawing.

Guy named Leslie (cool guy.)

Nucleus show.

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=70781314&albumId=2396097

Photos of the event are available at me Myspace.

Update.

The gallery show went well (today was the last day!) I'll have photos up sometime soon.

A new drawing (and a word about genocide)

Just finished drawing this piece which was a "redo" of a drawing I did in 2007 about the current situation in Western Sudan. In the last year or so I've learned so much more about drawing that I felt I could finally do this subject, which I feel so strongly about, justice. In reality this is an issue that our media hasn't payed attention to like it should.

The original drawing and info about the conflict can be found here. http://stephenpjames.blogspot.com/2007/10/one-of-things-thats-really-bugged-me-in.htmlThe new drawing will be exhibited at the Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra California from Oct. 25 to Nov 2 as a part of the Laafa Atelier student show.

All my pieces together.

All of my pieces for the LAAFA Atelier Nucleus Gallery show. A reminder that show will be up from Oct. 25-Nov 2nd.

Come join the fun.

210 East Main St

Alhambra CA

91801

Laafa Atelier student show.

Just wanted to alert everyone to the fact that our class is going to have a show at the Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra on Saturday the 25th starting at 7 pm.

Here's a link.http://www. gallerynucleus. com/gallery/exhibition/168

Hope to see people there.

Malo laying down.

5 week pose.

Socrates.

I think it's Socrates anyway. Here's the finished drawing from class (and yes I'm aware of the tape on the side, my photo editing program stinks.)

Break.

Yay free time!

Working on some pieces. Will post soon.

Art School opinions.

Somebody posted this at Conceptart.org. I thought I'd copy and paste it here. Not saying I agree with it all but it's certainly interesting.

1. Where you choose to go to art school is less important than bringing an attitude of "doing whatever it takes" to learn about art to where you are studying.

2. If you go to a big name school and just do the assignments, you will leave school with very little of value.

3. If you go to a little bitty school that anyone could afford and no one ever heard of but work your ass off, you will end up miles ahead of the brats at the art schools who are only doing their assignments and the normal minimal workload art schools require.

4. The schools will not hand feed you the information. You will have to take it from them. If one instructor doesnt know the answers, go find another one and get the answers from them. My best biz advice came from my illustration teacher and from the teacher who helped me to learn color theory. You never know who will have the answers...but you must push to find the questions that need to be asked. Dont expect it to be given to you with a silver spoon. It does not work that way.

5. What you do outside of school (outside of the student assignments and on top of the student assignments) is what will get you where you need to be. After school you will work four times harder than you did in art school so you might as well pick up the pace your freshman year and push as hard as you can.

6. One does not have to spend 100,000 dollars (which is what most end up spending after their loans are paid off) in order to get a great education.

7. 95 percent of what can be found at the big art schools can be found at the state and community college level and the other five percent (specific connections and work experience) can be found in places like conceptart.org (see employment section) and cgsociety amongst others. Of course one's major area of study will dictate where they must go to find the information. If any information is lacking from the less expensive education route it can be supplimented with great programs like the Illustration Academy and or the ConceptArt.Org workshops.

8. Degrees mean jack squat to an artist unless they plan on working overseas (required for the visa) or teaching full time at the university level. No one in my entire career has ever asked if I graduated from college. I didn't...but I did do six successive years in art school. I did not even graduate from high school. Now I own two international art companies which lead in their respective fields. However, my education was valuable. But, one can be educated away from a degree system and end up just fine. Degrees in art are mostly for pleasing your parents.

9. Art school is a blast. Don't let it distract you from being as great as you can be. Becoming a professional artist takes nose to the grindstone work. Art school can distract from that (oh it is so tempting to go to those all night parties where all sorts of debauchery is happening) but limit yourself there...if you are going to art school..spend the time doing art.

10. Art school recruiters will say anything they think you want to hear in order to get you to go. The best way to find out the truth about where you are going to study is to visit the school.

11. Ask to see the faculty work of those whom you will study under. If you blindly attend because of reputation you may find that you have instructors who cannot do anything of the sort that you wish to learn yourself. ie if your instructor is a fine artist who makes everything out of balls of rice, you are going to have a very hard time learning composition and color theory from them. Find out who you are studying under before you spend six figures on an education...that even applies to the more affordable solutions at the state or community level.

The original thread can be read here.
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=102315&highlight=Laafa

Drawing with charcoal powder

An illustrator I know recently asked me about what drawing with charcoal powder is like. I tried my best to explain it but I'm not sure I did it justice. So here are some pictures I took of my set up in class. I feel like they do a better job of explaining it than I would verbally. Anyway, it’s a far more tone based approach than drawing with a stick of charcoal or a charcoal pencil.


Comparing the two ways of applying charcoal to cast drawing that we've learned I think I kind of like this one better. Both methods have their strength (and I've kind of tried to use a hybrid of the two as you can see in the tops two pictures), but the brush and powder really helps you think in terms of tonal arrangements.

I spy with my little eye...

Something white.

Here's another picture from my cast drawing class.

Cartoony sketch.

So I did something really cathartic this weekend. I sketched a cartoony character, from a story I came up with years ago, on a sheet of ugly, wrinkled, old paper. This may not seem like much of a big deal but to me it was. You see most of my creative energy is being poured into school work and the upcoming show our class is putting on. Sadly I have very little time for things like this. It was so cool to sketch something that was just for fun with no strings attached. It wasn't for school, or a big project or anything just a way to kill time.It's also great to be able to sketch something cartoony again. It's what I want to do in life (as a career.) I have a natural inclination towards cartooning, and though I've been trying to fight it for the better part of a year I love being able to explore that side of my art again.

Johnsibbick.com

http://www.johnsibbick.com/

Just found the website of a book illustrator who I really enjoyed back when I was younger (though I didn't know his name.) Check out John Sibbick's stuff, especially his art illustrating the myths and stories of various cultures.

So...

It's the start of week 5 of the quarter and I'm feeling the stress of trying to balance my output at school, my personal creativity and the other aspects of my life (church, family, social stuff.) We're half way through, and I sometimes wonder how I'm going to make it through these next few weeks.
I love my school and I love the growth that stems from the intense nature of the full time program, but it's draining at some points. It demands a tremendous amount of investment in regards to time, money, and soul. I sometimes feel guilty whenever I'm working on something that's not directly or indirectly related to school work.
When I was at CSUN I had a teacher who constantly drilled the idea of maintaing our personal artistic projects while we were working at a studio, or on work for others (like school assignments.) At the time I thought it was an odd thing to say. How could any creative person not devote time to their personal creativity? For artist it's suppouse to be as natural as breathing right?
During my first quarter at Laafa I finally understood why he would feel it was so relevant to tell us that. Four days a week of 7 to 10 hour days, and many, many nights when homework assignments would take me well into the early morning (I remember staying up until 4 AM finishing perspective homework.) It scared me at some points because I began to seriously question whether it would be possible in the future to work in the animation/illustration industry and do independent work. Could a person devote an equal amount of energy and passion to both without burning out?
Laafa's made me think about that alot. Of course again, I love the place and all the Atelier students can see the incredible progress we've made, but it can be so mentally and physically exhausting.....

The irony of course is that I feel guilty about typing this instead of doing more studying and classwork.

Somethings a foot.

Yes I missed my update, and all I got was this awful pun. Anyway, here's a foot cast I've been working on.

From Allan Kraayvanger's book Figure Drawing workshop.

Walk before you fly."Most of us look with awe at the drawings of the Old Masters. Those works are timeless, made by the finest artists of their generations-artist learned from and contributed to the accumulated knowledge of all the generations before them, benefiting from a solid foundation and building one for those who followed. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, artists began the search for other ways to express themselves. There had always been innovators, but that was when the search began in earnest. The Camera had made realism in art seem almost redundant-and so began a new and very exciting chapter in the history of art.A major consequence of this new emphasis on novelty was the elimination of traditional methods of teaching art in most schools. The results are obvious. Only the very few schools that continued to teach the hard-won knowledge of the past were able to consistently turn out students who could earn a living in the fields of illustration or in anything but the rarified market of the avant-garde. And so a great many artist with potential became plumbers, carpenters-anything but artists or illustrators. (Here's the good part Brianna)The vast majority of people cannot understand or appreciate the so-called "fine arts" of today. These are the very same people who constitute the major market for reasonably priced art. Given that art is language, a way of communicating, it defies logic why anyone would speak in Greek when addressing an English-speaking audience and then complain when no one understands him or her. A whole new culture has grown from this new art that speaks only to a selected few. Throughout history, charlatans have taken advantage of those who need someone else to tell them what they should like. It is interesting that most of the artist who have withstood the test of time acquired the basic traditional skills of drawing before branching out in other directions-Degas, Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Klimt to name only a few. You must start from a solid base if you are to move into uncharted waters. Nothing is so empty as the search for newness, or the attempts to be contemporary when you are working from a wobbly foundation.

Grey headless figure.

From the last quarter.

Okay I'm a horrible person.

I missed my weekly update, but I'll have new stuff up soon.

Study of a woman from Western Sudan.

Something I'm working on. Here's a study.

Farewell Avatar.

Over Three and a half years ago I first layed eyes on commercials for a new Nicktoon about a kid who’s destiny it was to save the world. It seemed like such an adventure, and so different than most Nicktoons. I sat and enjoyed that first episode about two kids discovery of an amazing being that could save the world. Several years later that story has come to an end and I feel so satisfied with it. A wonderful story, well told, and while not always perfect perhaps the best action cartoon this country has ever produced. Dare I say it anime fans, but at points it even trumped many Japanese shows I’ve seen in story, imagination, and heart.
Nitpicks aside this wonderful special deserves an A. This was a strong finale, to a strong series that deserved all the praise it got. Farewell Avatar, you will be missed and I fear we will not see your like again for a long while.

Alma.

Alma is another model who we've had the absolute pleasure of drawing (and hanging with) this quarter. I just know this was a difficult pose for her to hold, and she endured it like a trooper. This one was about 9 or 10 weeks worth of work.

New Drawing.

Of my new friend, and sounding board on all things Iranian, Malo Youseff. A good model, and thankfully very patient with all my questions about Persian culture.

Yes this can infact actually happen.

The weird stuff that can happen at Laafa....

Hills and field.

From David and Goliath.

Updating soon.

Just having a bit of trouble uploading pictures.

Had a great 4th of July.

Hope everyone else did as well.

Figure Drawing (May/June 2008.)

A drawing that I worked on for about a month in Rick's class. I'm happy with it. I'm also experimenting with putting my name on my work when I scan it.

Master copy.

I think this is a copy of drawing from an academy in China, which was a copy of a Russian Academy drawing. In any case I enjoyed drawing it for school.

And yes a random picture of my favorite Beagle Cavay.

Figure drawing from Rick's class.

Over did it on the background shouldn't have gone so dark. It's definately Erin though so I guess I'm happy.

Rubens copies with self portrait.

Our head drawing teach Sean gave us the option of doing an assignment where we make three copies from a master artist and a self portrait in said artists style. One of mine was Peter Paul Rubens.

From my design class.

David and Goliath...with animals? Yup.

We're required to mount things in this class.

Life drawings from Rick's Quick Sketch class.

We're doing stuff with paper we tone ourselves.

Comics I've enjoyed this year!

Invincible.

Invincible is a really cool series written by Robert Kirkman. It's about a kid named Mark who inhereits the powers of his father, his father happens to be Earth's greatest hero. However, Mark soon discovers that there are dark secrets in his family that he has to deal with.
My brother got me hooked on this series, and I'm hoping to read more of it soon. It's a really good book with plenty of coming of age themes, and most of all it's fun. It enjoys the traditional trappings of the super hero genre.


Runaways.



Written by Bryan K. Vaughan this great Marvel series had me on my toes for weeks. Speculation ran wild in my head over all the likey plot twists that were coming.
The story was essentially about teenage rebellion turned on its head, the kids were trying to do good to make up for the evils of their parents. There were also alot of great themes about how you end up becoming your parents even when you fight it.

Anyway they're awesome.

A little something from my visual development class.

This is the David and Goliath picture I mentioned last Sunday. I think it turned out alright.

Refrence photos of myself.

Drawing/painting (whatever pastels are considered) the severed head of the giant Goliath from the Bible story. Took some weird photos of myself to get the expression right.

I hope to have some actual drawings back up soon.

Photo copy.

I've been trying to be less cartoony in my drawing style. So for the last three weeks I've devoted myself almost totally to copying Charles Bargue, and photos. Here's one from one of my mom's educational magazines. Freshly torn from my sketchbook.

Two artist blogs I've just discovered.

I didn't know until now that Chris Sanders, director of Lilo and Stitch, among other things had a blog. Honestly, I feel like the model followed in making the movie Lilo and Stitch is something that should be studied as a great example of how feature animation should be made. A strong creative vision, emanating from a small group of people, that informs an entire production. As few Chef's in the kitchen as possible.

http://www.chrissandersart.com/www/blog.php/

The other is a woman named Shelly who's blog I just stumbled across. I think I may have seen her work at Laafa, but I haven't really gotten to know her. Hopefully that changes now.
http://shellywan.blogspot.com/

Laafa open house.

Yesterday was one of those wonderful days that I think I'll remember for a long time to come. It was our atelier group's first official show. It was wonderful getting to meet the friends and family of all of my classmates, as well as seeing the finished product of our 10 weeks of classes. Here are some pictures I took of the event. I can only hope that our next gallery show is as fun as this one.
And yes it is in fact the 21st century, real men can carry roses.

Refined portrait.

Touched up the portrait of Erin in preperation for tommorow's faculty review. Hopefully it ends up in the student show. For some reason the camera picks up that weird dark streak in the upper left hand section. I had no idea what it is.

Eureka moment!

A picture I've just recently returned to after some time away from it. I'm going to use it to practice either my pasteling or watercoloring.