guerillustrate

Another Page from my sketchbook.

This is more of a concept I suppose, I’m having a hard time actually creating compositions or tableaus in my sketchbook. It all just feels like concept drawings. But I think this one is pretty charming. I like to think that this has a Life Aquatic feel to it.

I’ve had a crappy couple of weeks, apparently that helps fill my sketchbook.

Here are a couple of pages I’m happy with:

This weeks session was great. My friend Kyle joined Taylor and I this week and will likely be a regular to the weekly figure drawing sessions. I feel like I’m starting to get back into the figure drawing groove again. I was also very impressed with the rest of the people there too, there were some fantastic drawings and paintings made at that session and they’ve really inspired me to experiment with different media. I’d like to bring watercolour or something else to paint with next week and really focus on lighting.

Anyway, here’s a few drawings from that session.

So this was the second life-drawing session I attended, and it went much smoother than did last week’s. It’s all about getting into the proper head-space and not trying to rush your lines. Last week I was all worried about the time limit and not having enough time to finish, so I just scribbled everything in and it looked bad. But this week I was like “man, I don’t care how much of the drawing I get done just so long as whatever I DO complete has some effort put into it”. And that totally worked. I feel much better about my drawings this week, but they’re still by no means anywhere near to perfect. I’ve got a long way to go.

UGH. So I decided to try and use photoshop during our sketch club sesh yesterday and I ended up doing this picture of a girl underwater. Man, it did not work at all. I re-did it like a billion times and tried to finish it when I came home. And today I tried fixing some of the things that were bugging me too, but there’s just too many problems with it. The pose was not working at all; I wanted the head to be twisted in the opposite direction of the body, but I was having trouble doing that. And most frustratingly of all, she kept trying to turn into a man. Even still she looks a little masculine. Strong jaw, masculine features, shoulders like a football player, and boobs that totally look like a bad implant job.

Maybe I’ll try and fix this one at a later time and re-post it. But probably not. I think I just need to be done with this and move on. Let’s chalk this one up to a learning experience and call it a day.

Tonight’s sesh was alright, I think I am going to pick up some color markers this weekend.

From tonight:

This is an older one that I have messed with a bit in photoshop; being able to fix up drawings like this is such a (great) cheat.

So today I watched the first part of a 2-part video featuring Bruno “Nox” Gore (of Massive Black fame) working on a digital painting in photoshop. His finished piece is pretty amazing and he accomplished it all without any reference or planning stages.  It was pretty inspiring to watch him work.  So much so in fact that I had to quickly pull up photoshop before I left work to try my hand at just coming up with something from nothing.  I haven’t had much experience in doing any speedpaints, and I certainly have not done one in quite some time.  This is the best I could do in about 25 minutes, and while it’s not great I’m not disappointed by it either.  I got to quickly try my hand at some of the ideas I picked up from the nox vid, and more importantly I tried working with “LAB” colours which is something I just discovered today. To think I’ve been working with photoshop on a daily basis for at least the last 2 years and it never even occurred to me to stop and wonder what the LAB colour format was! Using LAB colours is quite a radical concept for me (in a good way) and I will definitely talk more about this in a later post.  But suffice it for now to say it has to do with how colours mix and are represented by our eyes and by our screens; and believe it or not this colour mode includes “imaginary” colours that don’t even exist!  I am excited about this! 

This one’s from a sketch club from last month. I should probably fix the back tire in photoshop – maybe later.

Edit: I fixed the back tire!

Hey, my name’s Phil. I don’t have too much to say about myself, but I am really excited about drawing regularly with these guys again. I went through an artistic dry spell for a while but seeing Scott and Zee’s work again is really inspirational. Here are my figure drawings from last Friday’s session.

Hey Internet, my name is Scott.

I’m a fourth year student at the Alberta College of Art and Design and I study Illustration and Character Design. Right now thanks to my counterpart ZEE, I have nailed a pretty sweet summer job to fill the gap between my third and fourth year at art school. I work under him as a junior artist and together we persuade Photoshop to make video games look good. I draw every day. 

The three of us started drawing together almost five years ago. We used to meet every week at a coffee shop and draw for hours until the staff dimmed the lights and lit kerosene candles on our table to set an awkwardly sensual and inhospitable scene for drawing. This blog will hopefully capture some of the highlights of our weekly “draw-seshs”.

Here’s a few drawings from the last two figure drawing sessions I went to: