Imaginism Workshop Day 5

The Thierry quote of the day~ 1st place: "I would beat the shit out of some zombies"
                                             Runner up: "I just see their heads as cubes wrapped in people faces"

The lesson today was about cubes. T explained how he sees everything in terms on cubes, even cylinders and spheres.
He'd give us images to paint with a time constraint. Our job would be to delineate the planes as if they were cubes.

T then sent us an email posing as a client. Our homework was to answer the email and give him a quote as well as a delivery email for the fictitious job.

The Homework was to do the same exercise with the following 2 images as quickly as we could.

This is my submission. T alluded to the fact that we might be spending too much time on our construction, to the point where we get diminishing returns on our time. SO, I sent my under drawings as well so that he could judge if I did too much.

Lastly, my art of book for the day was "The Incredibles". Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie, but the book didn't focus much on the design. It was more about the story decisions, and I didn't find it very informative for character design.

Imaginism Workshop Day 4

One of the great things about the workshop in Montreal is T~s art book collection. I swear, he has the art of book for every animated movie ever. 

So much goodness here!

I thought it would be easy and a waste to let this month fly by without making use of this fantastic resource. So every morning I wake a little early to read  an art of book. 

Today~s book was Ratatoille. It was very interesting and dove deeply into
the concepts of character design and lighting. 

Today was T~s first lesson. We focused mostly on visually and mentally comparing while drawing. This took the form of meticulously drawing squares and cubes. Here is the homework that I turned in.

I know it~s not the sexiest thing, but it takes way more concentration than you~d think.

We had hotdog~s and fries at a road side restaurant

I found this cool house on my bike ride

Today was Rita~s 24th Birthday. T and Diana made some power cookies.
 Each one weighed 10 pounds.

Imaginism Workshop Day 3

Sadly, Bobby and Kei had to leave for Toronto today. I~ve only met them face to face 3 days ago, but it seems like way way longer. Since T drove them to the airport, we were left in the very capable hands of T~s assistant, Diana.

We played figure drawing charades and practised some other life drawing exercises. I mentioned that I had trouble draw sexy women, and it turns out that~s one of the things that Diana loves to draw most. She gave me a few pointers, and now drawing women is part of my daily exercise routine.

Some of Diana~s examples

My First Attempt

For some reason green felt like a good idea

Last Study of the Day

Imaginism Workshop- Day 2

Today was our last day with Bobby and Kei at the workshop house in Montreal, so we made the most of it.

The first 4 hrs of our day was spent learning about the business of art, running a studio and stories successful artists. Basically they all boil down to the same thing.  Work hard. Work really really hard. And, never burn bridges. Karma is a bitch.

We spent the second half of the day learning foundations. We started with thinking structurally, and then lighting. Bobby then taught an easy way to think about drapery and what it says about the structure under it. Lastly, we put the two together by lighting drapery.

Unfortunately, there isn~t  much to show you guys for today, but we did go to a fantastically tacky restaurant for a farewell dinner. We ate in an ice cave!

Ice Cave!

With a fountain!

The Tables were mirrors

I discovered poutine. We need to bring this to the states.

Tao's desert

Paul bought us all ice cream with fireworks.

Imaginism Workshop Day 1

Today. Bobby gave an awesome 3 hr talk covering the history, present status, and future of the art industry, as well as strategies for going viral.

Afterwards, we started learning photoshop. None of us here are photoshop experts, so this was a very valueable lesson. The instruction was very intuitive and easy to follow.

Personally, I~ve always been intimidated by the program because of the steep learning curve. I~ve always used Sketchbook Pro in the past. I~m really excited about how quickly I~m picking up the tool.

The first lesson was to take this image of an elephant that was provided for us, then use color grabbing and the hard round brush to add wrinkles.

The Given Image

I~ve made him wrinkly

Next, Bobby Demo~d panting a face and his approach to making an under painting. We all painted an old man.

Reference

This is my very first painting in photoshop

This is Bobby~s  Painting.

At the end of the day, Bobby Chiu, Kei Acedera, and Thierry LaFontaine took as all out to see The New X-Men Movie in Montreal. Talk about a great day!

First Impressions of the Imaginism Live workshop

I drove to the Imaginism Live Workshop yesterday. I live in Ann Arbor, and the workshop is in Montreal. Needless to say, it was a long drive. It was already worth it though.

Everyone here is so inviting and down to earth. I instantly felt like part of the group.
As for the house; it's beautiful. Everything is clean, new, and we all get our own bathrooms. The facilities get an A+

The whole house is crawling with sketchbooks, reference, and art of books.

There is art everywhere. And it's all great.

This is my morning view

Tomorrow is the first day of class. I've been warned to get ready for some intense training. I'll check back in here soon.

A return to Schoolism

The Time is finally here! I leave to go to the Imaginism Studios In-House Workshop on Saturday.

This means that this blog will finally go back on topic, and review online art schooling resources. I'll be keeping a photo journal of our month in Montreal.

However, I want to keep you guys in the loop with sketches, personal work, and bar room philosophy. I've separated that into a second blog. Come on over and check it out.

Motor City Comic Con Tomorrow!

I'm going to Comic Con tomorrow to gets some critiques. Stop by and say hello if you see a nerdy looking white guy pedaling home made comics.

Thoughts on Drawing Hands Part 2

This is part 2 of a larger series about how to learn to draw hands. Here's part one if you missed it.

Before we start, here's a short service announcement. Try to practice drawing from life rather than from photo reference whenever possible. I know this is a pain. It's tempting to do a google image search for "hand gesture." But, discipline will pay off in the later on. Drawing from life forces you to think about hands as 3D objects.

It's easy to jump straight into breaking down photos into lines and silhouettes when you're drawing from a 2D reference. But this approach tends to limit your understanding of whatever you're drawing, because it doesn't push you has hard. Drawing from life will help you draw from imagination later on.

Start drawing your friends hands, or your non-dominant one. When you want to view a gesture from a different angle, try using a mirror. If you absolutely must use a 2D reference, this is a great site that gives you a variety of poses and times you to boot! *Thanks DemonJack!*
Also, always include a couple inches of wrist and forearm too.

Enough preamble, let's begin!

Though hands can be challenging subjects to draw, they're not mystical. We can approach them like we'd approach any other subject; which is to understand their three dimensional structure. Once you understand how something takes up space, you're 7/8's  of the way finished. Or maybe it's 2/3's.... Wait, no. It's 7/8's.  Anywho, lets look at few ways that we can approach the topic.

First, I'd recommend drawing flat hands like this:

Try a few palm up and palm down. The main goal  is to internalize things like how long the fingers are with respect to each other and the palm. How wide is the wrist with respect to the palm? How do the knuckles line up? etc. Notice how I said "internalize" rather than "memorize." The goal is to get an accurate sense of what feels and looks right. Consciously knowing that the average pinky is 2/3's as long as the average pointer finger won't be of much use when tackling more complicated poses. The only way to get this sense is a lot of repetition.

I'll keep this post short and stop here for now. In part 3, we'll look at how to break down more complicated side poses.

SPREEPO

Here are the 4 pages of  that I wrote and illustrated to bring to the Motor City Comic Con. This is a little teaser that for a story that's been bouncing around in my head. As this is my first set of sequentials, I wasn't trying anything fancy. My main focus with these pages was to use line weights and value to draw the reader's eye to the important bits.

I had a lot of fun and learned a ton. Even though my teaser is only 4 pages, it took an incredible amount of work. I have boundless respect for anyone who can do a 24 page books.

Get Some Free Stuff!!!

Are you looking to dabble in digital painting/ inking, but don't want to drop a thousand dollars on the adobe creative suite? Well, you're in luck.

Sketchbook Pro from Auto Desk and Schoolism are teaming for an art contest. Regardless of whether or not you want to enter, you can download a free light weight version of sketchbook from their site. Some of the bells and whistles have been disabled, but it is still a great deal. The program is very intuitive, and you'll bee off to the races in no time.

If you're thinking about jumping into digital art but aren't ready to shell out for and expensive program or face the brick wall that is photoshop's learning curve, then check it out.

http://www.sketchbook.com/news/from-pencils-to-pixels-share-your-story-on-a-digital-canvas.html

Mighty Good 5/2/2014

Here are my sketches from this week. The place was a little empty because of graduation, and everyone had their back to me strangely enough. I've also noticed that I'm begging to be able to tell whether someone will make a good or bad character just by looking at them.

Last week I talked about a sketch that I did, and then ruin during the inking phase. I redrew it tonight, and I'm happy with the out come. Let me know what you think.

Inking gone wild

A bit more restraint on the second go-round

Thoughts on Drawing Hands Part 1

Getting better at drawing hands is one of the top goals for every beginning artist that I know. When it comes to expression, emotion, and character, hands are second only to the face. However, for most people, they're dense little cluster of foreshortening that turn into a little ball of sad sausages. To make matters worse, experienced clients, editors, and other artists will consciously look for the way you draw hands to quickly gauge your skill level.

For this reason, I made it my April goal to improve my skill at drawing hands by doing 100 life size sketches of hands drawn from life. I'm proud to say that I've met my goal! This post series is about the different methods I used and liked to learn/draw hands quickly.

I want to make make it clear before we begin that I am not claiming to be a master at hands. I still have many 1,000's of bad hands to draw before I'd consider myself good. These two posts are mostly about my thought process.

On a quick side note, if you want to check out a master at drawing hands look to Bouguereau. His hands are insane!!

Check out those digits!

So far, I've come across 3 anatomy books that I really like and would recommend.

Bridgeman's guide is must have. It's been in circulation since the 20's! That's how you know that it's good. The main idea of the book is to learn to break down the body into it's component parts. (All the way to the bones themselves when necessary). 

Anatomy for the Artist is jam packed with hi resolution images of both male and female nude models. Like Bridgeman's guide, it breaks the body into parts, but it also comes with a master class an assignments for each one. The language is very clear and concise as well. 

An entire book on hands. While the illustration is a bit stylized, there is a lot to learn in this book.  I'm still working through it.