Landscape Studies in Ink and Acrylic
Although I ended up having to drop it because of time constraints, I took Landscape Painting for a few weeks. I was excited to learn this better, because I want to eventually do paintings based on the photos I took during all the traveling I did in my 20s. All I got to was studies, but they’ve been kind of fun because I’ve been working in ink (just using a single 0.5 Topic Multiliner SP pen). Most weeks, we have field studies to do, and we’ve had to do several in ink and then one 8 x 10 inch value study in grayscale acrylic paint. We’ve also had to do some “master studies,” where we recreate famous paintings in ink or grayscale paint. Here are a handful of my ink field studies (these are from the first week): These are all views around the downtown Renton library. Here are a…
A Hoarder’s Dilemma
Although my new term has started and I’m taking landscape painting and digital art 1 and I’ll be posting projects from those, I thought I’d share the final project in my illustration class this past term. I had to do an illustration of one of a list of mostly made-up “phobias.“ I chose the one where someone is afraid to throw things away, so naturally I went with the idea of a hoarder. I had a few ideas in my thumbnails: My first thumbnail was my first and favorite idea, of someone in a hoarder situation trying to find that important thing, and knowing exactly under which pile of junk it is. I worked that one up into a rough: I ended up not loving this because I was having trouble with how to depict the person looking under the pile. So I though of someone literally struggling to throw something…
The Cat Librarian
In my current illustration class, we had another assignment involving an animal, so I had another great excuse to draw more cats. The prompt was to put an animal into a situation that normally only humans would do. Of course I also love books, so I first thought of a cat reading or being in a library or bookstore. We had to start with thumbnails for this, as usual, so here were some of my ideas: My favorite were the ones with the cat as a librarian rather than just reading. And I liked the idea of a poor librarian trying to work while other cats wreak havoc. So my favorite was #8 because I loved the cart, especially with a cat sleeping on it. I also liked the one of the librarian sleeping on the job, because no way could a cat work an 8-hour shift without a nap.…
The Musician and the Dancing Cat
I’m in another illustration class, and we had three prompts to choose from for our first assignment: Dining with a robot. The musician playing for the dancing animal. How the magician sawed the woman in half. Obviously I chose number 2 so I could do a cat. My understanding of the assignment was that we were supposed to be doing the figures in silhouette, so entirely black. But it turned out that that was just for development of the idea. We had to do a bunch of thumbnails, so I did those, although I didn’t have any amazing ideas. I basically tried a person playing different musical instruments, and a cat dancing in different ways. Here’s what I came up with: I liked #7 because the idea was it was a line dance, but I developed that and a couple new ones for three rough sketches I had to do.…