Further Illusions

More from Illusionism! The drawing on the left was a one-night in class exercise about the appearance of volume, in preparation for this week's model session. Mine got picked as one of the ones that looked most round, though I kinda cheated by picking a real light source.




Next, the two week drawing that proceeded it. While doing the Dallas Allegory for homework, this trompe l'oeil was our in class work. I themed it around Meg and my anniversary, which was coming up with gleeful speed when I started the drawing. Both of those are graphite.

So this week, the homework was to start a piece that contrasts illusionistic volume against something else--so I thought to myself, what is the absolute opposite of shaded, volumetric drawing? The answer was obvious. Nothing can be flatter than flat vector cartoons. Nothing. So this is the halfway point; the flat is done, and the space is there for a volumetrically shaded Dunny toy in the foreground! That'll be my task next week.

Dallas Allegory

This new tablet (Intuos4 Medium) is amazing. And it's really late at night. And that's all I have to say right now, ask specific questions if you want more and I'll answer them when I'm awake again.

I am not the walrus

Waistcoated Walruses Walloping a Wastrel.

Quick getting-to-know-eachother assignment for The Illustrated Book--create and illustrate an amusing 4-word alliteration. Hooray!

I actually don't have anything more to say about this piece. Watercolor and graphite, still planning to tweak a little in photoshop to push the bricks back, but overall I'm very happy. I think walruses should always have mutton chops and waistcoats.

Mantyger/Satryal Sketch

First sketch for Senior Thesis! My plan is to illustrate ten (for the semester) of the craziest creatures in medieval heraldry, working on two digital paintings for each three-week block. I'm also working now on the Enfield Beast, but I don't have a sketch I'm happy with yet for that one, so I'm letting it sit on the back burner while I finish out this guy, who I'm totally crazy over. Going to lightbox him to a tight pencil drawing, then scan that in to spend many many hours paying digital homage to the image. The plan is full color figure, but no background--in the sensibility of the naturalist drawings of the 1700s. Fun times?

First Illusionism drawing!

Ah, September. Time for classes! I'm really excited about all my classes this year, but Illusionism is the lucky class to have the first finished drawing I can post, so I'm talking about it first. It's all about fooling the eye; making things look real, or right if they're just not real. The first thing we did was spend 4 hours drawing ripped up pieces of paper, which I won't post, but then we got to apply the skills to a more interesting assignment for homework. We had to take a drawing we already had--in my case, a sketch I spent some time finishing, since I don't do many physical media drawings that would work for this--and make it look interrupted and/or disturbed in some way. I chose Edo-Period Kyu because I like it, so there. There are no actual rips, folds, or disturbances of any kind in this paper. Everything that looks wrinkled was drawn in, painstakingly, with a pencil and a brush of graphite powder. It's a completely smooth sheet of paper, I promise.

Fun stuff? Check it out full size to see the effects up close. (also, in the upper left, an unflattering sketch of Zach without his glasses. He's as blind as I am without them)