Palm Tree

Two hours. We practiced painting palm trees in Landscape Painting Essentials today. Bob Watts helped with some finishing touches.

Victoria

Five-minute quick sketches, two hour long pose.

Jennifer

Four hours. I'm still sticking with Mr. Ander Zorn's famous four-color palette (nowadays it's ivory black, cadmium red, yellow ochre, titanium white) and will probably adhere to it until I figure out its nuances to my liking. I wasn't paying much attention to the painting in the early stages and noodled far more than I should have, and as a result the drawing suddenly fell apart at hour three. I scrambled to salvage the painting during the last few sets, and I think I succeeded more or less. I doubt I nailed Jennifer's likeness this go around, but at least the end result doesn't look atrocious. I honestly almost gave up on it when the structure of the painting collapsed, which would have been the first time I would have quit out of frustration. But I hate the feeling of giving up more than looking at a crappy painting I made, so I've yet to do that.

Cassie, Week 5

Two-and-a-half hours. I fixed the lips, chin, and hair area to complete the grisaille painting. I'm now ready to move onto color.

Studying Chen Shufen, Part 3

Two hours. Worked a little on the nose and hair, refined the silhouette of the face, and added a canvas texture to try and kill the digital look. Haven't decided on whether or not that makes it too kitschy (it probably does). Still have a lot of problems to fix in this piece. I need to reign in the details before the whole painting runs away from me.

Studying Chen Shufen, Part 2

Two hours. I worked on the eyes and nose a bit for tonight. I would plow on through, but it is currently two in the morning and I've got to be up for a six a.m. wake up call. I'll step away from it for a day in order to get a fresh look at the painting and check if any features need to be tweaked.

FYI, I am looking at reference for this piece, combining from a variety of sources and trying to match the style to Chen's approach. It's proving to be a lot tougher than it looks, but I'm really having a blast with the study, and learning oodles about digital painting in the process.

Studying Chen Shufen

One-and-a-half hours. WIP (Work in Progress). One of my favorite illustrators these days is Chen Shufen, a Taiwanese artist whose artwork of gorgeous gals and guys has come to define the look of book covers for romance novels in Asia. Her recent collection of artwork, Pure Love, just came out and it reminded me that I've been yearning to try to paint an illustration in their style someday. Might as well give it a gander now. I'll be working on this one whenever I can, which is often these days, since my busy post-work schedule is starting to lighten up a bit.

My plans for the fall quarter is to cut back on classes in general and spend more time doing both creative endeavors (character design, illustration, etc.) and specialized studies (anatomy, master studies, etc.). I've learned a gargantuan amount of information in the past nine months and I need some time to sort through it all.

As far as this doodle goes: I started with a graphite drawing on sketch paper, and scanned that into Photoshop to clean up the line work. I then started blocking in some basic colors, always mindful to indicate the forms comprising the face (this is where all those head studies over the past year have helped a lot). The next step from here will be to further refine the turning of forms and figuring out where I can loose some line work and where some contours should absolutely stay.

This is going to be fun.

Toni

Two-and-a-half hours.

Anna Maria Pierangeli

Four-and-a-half hours. For my head drawing class, we're supposed to sketch from reference and take to a finished render one head a week. I honestly don't know much about Anna Maria Pierangeli. Looking her up at IMDB it seems as if she was involved with James Dean at one point, and like him, also passed away at a relatively young age.

Her neck right now is really bothering me. It looks like a goofy cast shadow, but it's actually the collar of a button-up blouse, which I admittedly should have indicated more clearly before I decided to call it quits for the night. I'll keep in mind not to introduce such bizarre reads into my drawings in the future.

(I'll probably work on the drawing a bit before class tomorrow, and if I finish, I'll edit this post with the revised version.)

EDIT: I fixed the structure of the head, pounded in the blacks, and cleaned up the halftones. This drawing could be further refined (for example, the eyes are probably too large), but I'm growing weary of it and am eager to move onto the next challenge. You know, that reminds me of a saying I heard somewhere: drawings and paintings are never finished, just merely abandoned. It's true.

Ian

Three to five minutes for the quick sketches, two hours for the long pose. Erik worked on the right arm of the long pose to illustrate how to take my drawings to a more finished render.