Happy Chinese New Year!

February 8th, 2010

I’m (very) probably not gonna update my blog next week, since it is Chinese New Year.

I’ve got my Plustek OpticPro A3 scanner, finally.
It costs SG$950 (approx US$668).
Expensive as fuck and there goes my month’s salary. :(
Here’s some pics (click to see full size):

However, it’s very worth the money. Regardless of A5, A4, A3 in grayscale / PDF / color in 100 – 300 DPI, it scans them all in exactly 8 seconds.
I’ve yet to try color scanning in 1600 DPI, but the specs says 8.5 seconds, and I’m not surprised. :D

Organisation of Illustrators Council (OIC) – Portrait Day : 6th Feb 2010
There was a portrait drawing session organized by the Organisation of Illustrators Council (OIC), a local sketch group. I was late by 1 hour and there were no seats left when I reached there.
I MUST change my punctuality attitude. It is very bad and I’m always late. It was a pity – everyone was drawing and all. I did hang around a bit to see some of the drawings by others, and a couple of it were really good.

A fellow CA member here went there too, and he uses purely pen (no pencil) to draw the full figure + face without any re-statements. It was perfect. The line confidence was the best I’ve seen so far and I think of Matisse’s line power when I saw that work. It was out of this world. In the portrait day next month, I’ll bring my camera and take pics and post them here. I can’t even draw a decent portrait to save my life.

Fort Canning
I went to Fort Canning on Sunday to draw some of the stuff there.
This is the most historical part of Singapore with many parts of it dating back to the 13 – 14th century. It’s a very tranquil place compared to many parts of Singapore.

Here are some pics (click on images to see full size):

Below text are shot from the info panels at Fort Canning:






And below are my sketches at Fort Canning:








Trashy? You bet. All these drawings are done on my A5 sketchbook, and this sketchbook is going to end up in my trash bin sooner or later.

I realize that I have problems drawing small and I don’t want to draw small. Thanks to those folks at CA like DPaint and JeffX who insists to always draw large. I really feel like buying A2 paper sometimes. Sigh. :D

With the souls of the dead artists as my witnesses, I vow to always draw on A3 or larger for my outdoor sketches. I drew on A5 previously to reduce attention from passer-bys, but I don’t care now. Quality of sketches is more important. I must endure the torture of unwanted attention and curious looks.

And below are the sketches of still life which I did last week on A3:







Below 3 drawings are my new couch. The 1st ended up horribly, the 2nd is better but still wrong, and I redo and that was the 3rd:










Below is a drawing of my living room’s new glass table. Full of curves and hard to draw as hell due to wrong approach (focused too much on details of the curves at the beginning). I had to re-draw 2 times before I got satisfied:

The couch from another vantage point:

I can never draw a realistic self-portrait. I’ve drawn the eyes and nose and face shape EXACTLY as I see them but the result has only a bit of likeness. It looks like a 7-year old’s work. I guess the line of the bottom part of the face went haywire when I tried to darken it using 6B pencil. It wasn’t like this at first:









Sketch of wooden Eiffel Tower model in extreme perspective (tower laid flat pointing towards me):
The 2nd one is a better one, but still doesn’t look real:



The hand sketch below is based on a pose by a fellow CA member here….can’t remember his name. :D Hands + many pens:


Plustek OpticPro A3 scanner:

xBox 360 controller in extreme perspective:



After finishing this, I realized pendulum at the bottom is wrong! Should be an ellipse:

Below are some sketches drawn from a live model in a session last month (the ones you see here are 10 – 20 mins poses….the 30 seconds type is too much for me).

The male model was wearing blue boxers, not nude. :D
I drew these by eye, so if you’ve any comments on proportion or has feedback, let me know so I can do better next time. I didn’t see anyone use sighting, so I didn’t use either. :(
I’ll use sighting next time. :)

Click pics to see full version:






Where am I headed now?

Well, I realized only yesterday that it is impossible (at least for me) to wholly perfect my life drawings. Meaning, no matter how hard you try, you’ll find that the drawing / sketches can be further improved. Just like gesture drawings….you can do them your entire life and still find there’s lots of room for improvement. So, I think it’s time for me to move on.

After I’ve finished studying the Perspective Drawing Handbook by D’ Amelio, I’ll move on to studying the construction method of drawing, followed by gesture drawing. Then, I’ll very likely move on to intensive portrait drawing, followed by figure drawing. I feel like learning from Vilppu’s method.

My drawings needs lots of polishing, as you can see from all these shit posted above. Art is harder than hell, but well, at least it’s fun.

That’s all! Happy Chinese New Year and herald the Year of the Tiger! :D
Xeon

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A3 drawings are up!

February 1st, 2010

First of all, I’m not happy with how the A3 scanning of my drawings turned out. The service was bad, but the scan quality was worse. I told the guy to scan in 200 DPI grayscale but it seems their machine don’t have grayscale, so it became black-white scans. Lots of the details, line quality and halftones were all lose. Result? The drawings become hard-edge black-white drawings.

Worse yet, my drawings now have greyish zebra-like stripes horizontally across them. Fortunately, these stripes ain’t so dark, so it doesn’t show up in the scanned images.

This is my 1st time I’m getting people to scan for me, and also the last time (other places that do A3 scanning are charging a freaking US$8 per piece / grayscale). I’ve decided to get this Plustek OpticPro A320 scanner. It costs a bomb over here in my country (almost a thousand bucks), but it will be way cheaper in the long run, and I’ll have more control over quality too.

Below are the drawings which I’ve done the previous 2 months or so (in un-sorted order). Bear with me; the black-white shit isn’t pleasing to look at (click on images to see un-distorted size):





















































Below is the pagoda in the Chinese Garden I was talking about some time ago. A couple of months ago, I went to draw it again, and although it’s no Rembrandt, at least I managed to get the thing out. It was overwhelming with details and I’ve already skipped like 80% of the details, otherwise it’s too hard to draw! :D




















Below is a sketch near the Singapore River. I believe this bridge is called Governance Bridge or something. Compared to most bridges here, it does look like something from a fantasy game with all those spiky drawbridges. :D Unfortunately, as you can see, the perspective of the 2 columns is all wrong. I should have corrected it before darkening the lines:



Below is a sculpture drawing from the Asian Civilization Museum. The sculpture’s head is bigger than the body, so I drew it as such. Next to that is a black straw vest. The actual one looks very cool like some battle armor:



Below is another drawing from the Asian Civilization Musuem. This type of ship is called “twakang” if I’m not wrong. Our Chinese forefathers came to Singapore from China via this sort of ship several centuries ago:

Freehand perspective of a corner of my living room:



That’s all, I guess. I went to a figure drawing event organized by a local sketch group here, and am gonna post those trash after I’ve got my scanner, together with my more recent drawings.

I’m gonna go back to reading my Perspective for Comic Book artists tonight. Meanwhile, I’ve also revved-up my schedule and I’ll be drawing 2 hours from Mon – Fri, in addition to the usual schedule on weekends.

I find that if I don’t draw from Mon – Fri, my standard of drawing plummets to a total low and it’s hard to get back up. To be honest, I nearly fell back to Square One during the past 2 weeks when I didn’t draw at all. Line was shaky, huge fears in me, no confidence…scary as fuck. Thank god it’s all good now. :D

As a side note, I don’t see myself improving at all, though. I’m kinda stuck at the same level as I was a couple of months ago!

My graphic design course….aye. I don’t wanna talk about it except that I totally regret going there. That $$$ could be better spent on more useful things, like a basic western art course at NAFA. Come to think of it, I think if I had a choice, I would prefer to burn that S$5000 away as an offering to the gods than to spend on that school.

Chinese New Year is coming!

Good day,
Xeon

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Art is most important!

January 18th, 2010

It’s been a hellish week. The workload just gets heavier and heavier, with considerably less time to draw, and the school projects are starting to bog me down completely.

That said, I’ve pretty much cut off all video gaming altogether since a couple of months ago to maximize my time.

I’ve also signed up for an event or two with a local sketch group to have the chance to draw still people in different poses etc. :D

I now have about 112 A3 papers awaiting scanning. I found the guy (a religious man) and he is now scanning the shit for me. Should take some time before I post them up here.

Last Saturday, I went to the BodyWorks exhibition at the Singapore Science Center. For serious figurative artists, this is Paradise. You will probably learn a lot here than from all the figurative books you have read. More than 10 human corpses on display, with their muscle fibres all intact, exposed and shown in various dramatic poses, including exposes organs in some of the displays. They also have a couple of life-size real human skeletons for you to study, as well as a huge giraffe corpse and giant squids too.

I’m not a figurative artist or anything, but it was a challenge trying to draw those things, so I went for the overall contour or pose, if you call it.

These displays are harder to draw than living humans, because their muscles and flesh are all exposes and the details are highly distracting.
Of course, top dogs won’t have problems drawing these.

The admission fee is expensive, but I’m gonna go there twice per month as a drawing challenge. The exhibit ends in March. :(
Bad thing, though, is that no photos are allowed, but sketching is.

Below are my sketches. Some of the Egyptian mummy ones are from the sketching outing to the National Museum of Singapore, where they had an ancient Egyptian exhibition. Some of the rooms were too dark for me to see my own sketchbook. :D

Below are done on my A5 sketchbook. Click on images to see actual versions:

I deliberately exaggerated the nose of the 2nd mummy below (the female one), as I’ve always like girls with beautiful large slightly-oversized noses. :D

Extreme perspective can be seen below. I’ve always like to draw such extremes as it poses a big challenge:




Below are stuff from the BodyWorks exhibition:


The text below is quoted from a panel in the exhibition.
It reads, “Nobody grows old by living a number of years. Years may wrinkle the skin, to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul”.









I’m very ashamed to be using symbols in the 2nd sketch below (the basketballer). The arm (the one not holding the ball) is in a very foreshortened view and I was tired so I just rough it in. :D



I would have probably fared somewhat better if I had drawn on A3….maybe. :)

Anyway, hope my workload eases in the upcoming weeks, or I’m gonna….

Art and drawing is more important to me now than anything else.
I can give up my job but not my journey to become good at drawing.

My “Perspective! for Comic Book Artists” is coming next week.
And maybe in my next post, I’ll post a picture of my easel which I got last week, but which I kinda gave up after 1 week of using it (it’s just insanely HARD).

See you! :D
Xeon

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Happy New Year 2010!

January 6th, 2010

Happy New Year 2010!
(I know, this post is late :D )

No, I’m not dead yet, but buried with work. It sucks, as usual.
A pen, or a pencil for that matter, is not used for writing numerical figures etc…it’s for drawing.

Not just work, but my graphic design classes has a fair bit of homework too and I’m rushing them so that I can finish everything fast and continue with my drawing practice.

For the past week or so, I went to the Singapore Botanical Gardens, as well as trying to find interesting shit to draw.
Sadly, nothing caught my eye and I didn’t have the motivation for it. The Botanical Gardens is a place choked full with all kinds of plants and all, so if you’re doing landscape sketching, this is THE SHIT, but I’m not at that stage yet.

I also went to the Singapore National Library to draw too, by looking out of its windows and sketching the city scene outside (it’s a tall building with gigantic, clear windows). Sketched a couple of church domes, as well as a head cast of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.
This is the 1st time I drew from a plaster cast, so I was scared as fuck, but I went ahead anyway. The result sucked.

More importantly, I’m having increasing difficulties drawing while holding the A3 drawing board, so I’m getting an “easel” soon.
Not an actual easel, but a music stand (the ones music conductors use to put their musical notes in a concert).
This is the one I’ll be getting:

http://www.musicstandsalone.com/product/PK-SMS-50

Better than an easel cos’ it’s lightweight and much more leaner.
If it fails me, then I’ll get an easel. :D

Its been 1+ months and I haven’t uploaded any drawings. They’re accumulating in my room, but thankfully!
I found a shop which scans A3 drawings for me at a pretty cheap price! Praise the Heavens! :D

I believe maybe somewhere before end of this month, I’ll be able to upload my drawings again.
The only thing is that the shop looks a bit like a terrorist outfit in Iraq. :D

I’m still at Norling’s book now, and will be some time before I’m done with that, then I’m gonna breeze through Perspective! for Comic Book artists, then I’ll move on to more advanced perspective books.

These few weeks, I guess I’ll be drawing indoors till my music stand arrives, then I’ll go out to draw again. Drawing in public on an A3 board tucked into your tummy produces total trash (lines go haywire, things go crooked, hand can’t move properly etc.) At least for me.

And it’s NOT a nice day today, cos’ I’m stuck in my office (I call it Hell) doing boring shit work. It’s a sunny windy day today, and on such days, you should be drawing beautiful stuff in public, not stuck at work.

Last but not least, I’ve found this local organization called Organization of Illustrators Council : http://organisationofillustratorscouncil.blogspot.com

I’ll be going to their museum sketching outing this Saturday. Hopefully everything turns out well. :D
In Feb, I’ll attend their 5-hour portrait drawing session in. Well, pretty much everyone there are art elites, prodigies and professionals, but if you seriously wanna improve, this is the way to go.
Lose your ego, your pride, and learn from the best. I can’t wait for Feb to arrive, though! :D

Hola,
Xeon

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Merry Christmas!

December 24th, 2009

Today is Christmas! I exchanged gifts yesterday with my colleagues and had a “potluck” party with my classmates at my graphic design class. The thing is, everyone attended the party including the lecturer and we didn’t had any lesson.

Bad? U bet. Waste of time and money, but well, once in a while, it’s ok. We did some “creative playing”, like seeing what everyone can do with a simple object, then some goofy poses to get everyone into the creative mindset. All these sure beats SITTING DOWN AT SOME FUCKING DESK STARING AT SICKENING PAPERS WITH NOTHING BUT ACCOUNTING DIGITS AND NUMERICAL FIGURES PAGE AFTER PAGE.

Oh, I did learn some “important lessons” like cohesion and socializing, because I’ve always been a quiet-loving type of guy.
I mean, if I had a choice, I would rather go fishing than playing football. If I had to choose between watching movies with friends and watching movies by myself, I would choose the latter. :D I dunno, I hate noises and disturbance most of the time.

Anyway, I went to the Chinese Garden to sketch last week, and managed to draw out a simple basic pagoda at least. The sun was hot as fuck and I was sweating like a pig.
Another thing I learnt about life drawing in public is: you need to have insane stamina and physical endurance. I have weak stamina, so I was tired as fuck after standing and drawing for a while. 2 hours later, I was so thirsty I could barely walk. Next time I’ll bring my water bottle along.

My next public sketching place would probably be the Singapore Botanical Gardens. Seems that there’s a lot of small structures there to draw.

Tomorrow, my “Perspective Made Easy” book should arrived. After that, I’m gonna go into gesture drawing, and then learn shading from there. Then after that, I might go into portraiture? :D

I can’t scan any drawings yet…the Mustek A3 scanner can’t be shipped to Singapore so I’m finding alternative ways to get this shit.
SCREW THIS ALL!

Next week, I’m gonna get owned by my boss. Not my fault, though. My colleague left and now my workload has doubled. It’s killing me. Hopefully, after I get my graphic design cert next year, I can leave this shit job and at least get a job in the creative industry. Even if the pay is low as fuck, I don’t mind. I just don’t wanna stare at sickening Excel spreadsheets with numerical figures. *shudders*

Anyway, so long for now!

Good day! :D
Xeon

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Down with flu

December 19th, 2009

I’m down with flu as I’m typing this.

Work has been very busy recently and I find it near impossible to draw nowadays during work, unlike in the past. I wanna quit but well, times are still bad and the amt of jobs are still pathetic.

My workload has doubled, my work now requires me to run in and out, to-and-fro places, look at even more insane spreadsheets choked full with nothing but FIGURES, FIGURES and FIGURES. The salary is still the same old shit.

By figures, I don’t mean human figures, which are beautiful to look at, but numerical figures. Those truly SUCK HARD. I don’t understand how anyone want to choose a career in accountancy, but numerical figures and spreadsheets are the most hideous trash in the world. Fuck them hard, I say. Screw them.

If there’s anything in this world that’s cramping my mind and drawing, it’s shit like these. Even the doodles of a 1-year old baby looks way more appealing than those trash.

Next week, I’ve 2 consecutive night classes in graphic design and have to attend my cousin’s wedding on the 3rd night. However, 25 Dec 09 is a public holiday (Christmas), so I’ll have that day + Sat and Sun to draw real hard to make up for not having much time to draw this week.

There’s a huge insatiable lust in me to draw but my time is taken up by nothing but work. I’ve always been thinking how great it would be if I could just quit my job and draw everyday, read art books, watch art vids, meet art folks for 16 hours every day per every week per every month : 24 / 7 / 365.

Tomorrow is Sunday. I hope my flu gets better tomorrow so that I can draw for 8+ hours!

It’s not a nice day today. The weather is rainy and chilly and cold.

That’s all for now!

See you! :)
Xeon

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I’m gonna quit my job soon!

December 6th, 2009

I’m back from my mini burn-out! I gotta say I was really tired last week, but it’s gotten pretty good now, and I did some drawings this week, though a lot less (usually, I would draw on weekdays but this week, I rested on weekdays and drew only on weekends).

I got 3 new toys:

The blue pad of paper is my new A3 drawing pad, and I love it! I dunno how much I missed out previously when I drew on A4 paper. Drawing on A4 totally forces you to draw only with your wrist / fingers due to the small size of the paper, and it’s like, you’re afraid to move your arm for fear of producing too large drawings which exceed the paper.

A3 pretty much solves this, though I wish I can draw on A2, or even A1, A0 or A0+ so that I can move my entire body. :D

Bottomline: Draw only on A3 and larger. I use A4 only for doodles, warm-ups and perspective exercises from books. Drawing on A3 allows me to move my arm and I can feel the joy I get out from it.

The 2 boards at the back are for sandwiching my A3 drawing pad when I carry them, so that the drawings don’t get crumpled.

The left one is a thick transparent plastic pane (it’s wrapped-up here), which I also use as the drawing board to support my drawing. The right one is a plastic pane on one side but a mirror on the other. It has a dual-function and serves as a big mirror for self-portrait drawing and studying reflections. ;)

I hereby name these 2 boards “Dragon’s Claw and Tiger’s Fang”. My HB pencil can be the Dragon Sword. Anyone who’s played the Ninja Gaiden series will know what I’m talking about here. :D

I won’t be scanning and posting any more drawings here, cos’ I’m gonna quit art. It sucks….

Nah, just kidding! Well, my office’s A4 scanner is too small to scan my A3 drawings, so I’m gonna get a big A3 scanner end of this month after I’ve got my annual bonus! So, no posting of drawings these few weeks. :D

My graphic design classes started this week, and it sucks. The room was so cold till my fingers turned bluish and my ribs were shivering. When I went to pee, I realized that my dick has temporarily shrunk to smaller than my last finger (in extremely cold temperatures, dicks can truly truly shrink, no kidding). I’ve since bought a thick furry sweater to counter this.

Through this graphic design course, I realized that graphic design isn’t really art. It’s more like marketing with some visual designs thrown in. IMO, it’s very different from illustration / fine arts. People once told me that to be a graphic designer, you don’t really need to know how to draw. I thought they were joking, but it’s true. Graphic design = more about understanding the mindsets of the target audience

Due to this, I’m starting to hate this course but since I paid huge $$$ for this, I’m gonna get the cert.
Graphic design made me love drawing much more than ever.

There’s no tall, leggy, busty, pretty chicks, though. Pretty much all of the chicks in my class are the exact opposite. I won’t go into details here, but one thing which has happened to me recently made me realized that if a fat ugly chick with a good personality and a slim pretty chick with a rotten personality and both fall into the ocean and who would I save, I would save the fat ugly chick without hesitation. Pretty girls can really be disgustingly manipulative. Not all, but well…..

Anyway, over here in my working life, I can foresee myself losing my job sooner or later. Workload is gonna pile up insanely and I’m not gonna sacrifice my life or drawing to work at that kind of insane level.
Oh, and it’s gonna be me firing the boss, not the other way round. I quit my previous job some years ago due to insane workload too, with no overtime pay (imagine yourself taking on the work of 3 – 4 people!!!!).

Even if I gotta leave, it’s gotta be after I get my annual bonus. Screw all these gross corporate cunts. I hate office work and office life. Art never betrays you.

That’s all! Cheerio! :D
Xeon

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Burn-out!

November 29th, 2009

I think I must be suffering from a mini art burn-out now.
Friday was a public holiday, so I drew on Fri, Sat and Sun, and on Sat, I drew for 8.5+ hours straight. When I wasn’t drawing, I was reading art articles, art forums, art books, art videos.

By Sun morning, I was feeling so tired that I had problems making observations by eye and every line was a real struggle to get out. Parts are wrong, some lines go off, some angles are haywire….

I’m gonna take a rest for several days and not draw for now. Even watching porn didn’t cure my burn-out immediately. I’m not happy with some of my drawings this week.

The drawings, as usual (click images for undistorted view):

Last camera is the best, though. I looked at it top-down, so it has a bit of 3-point perspective. :D


Made some quick sketches of cars parking at the petrol station from my 7-storey apartment. I think cars are easier to draw when you’re closer to them. Some details are too small to be seen. One thing is for sure: my cars suck hard.







































I’m pretty happy with how my messenger bag turned out:








Tried to copy the below picture from a photo for fun:

Shoes are very interesting to draw and I’m gonna draw more:

I’ve slightly exaggerate the drawing of the table below by throwing in bits of perspective:

Nowadays, my warm-up routine consists of 10-min blind contour drawing, peanut-doodles and hand-eye coordination of negative shapes (for the last 2, check out Drawing-Tutotorials-Online.com by Matt Archambault). ;)

What’s next? Well, my graphic design classes starts tomorrow and I think it’s good to take a short breather away from drawing. The more girls there are in the class, the faster my burn-out will go away. Yes, gimme hot tall tanned long-hair leggy slim ones, please. Throw them my way.

I’m still studying perspective now, but am going into Yotisu’s (spelling?) cubes + cylinders’s tutorial at CA.org. After I’ve understood those, I’ll move on to Norling’s book and after that, more advanced perspective. But that won’t be until middle of next year.

For now, I fucking don’t feel like drawing. I’m really really tired!

That’s all! :)
Xeon

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Chinese Garden rulez!

November 23rd, 2009

OK! To further cut down on precious time scanning and uploading my oictures, this time, I just scan them all in, open them in Photoshop 7 (I know it’s a dino), re-size and save them as JPEG, done. No Brightness / Contract / Magic Wand or anything now. That results in the images appearing greyish, but time is more important. I know to get a new scanner this week if possible.

I went to the Chinese Garden near my home to try doing some perspective drawings of the pagodas, but this is the 1st time I drew in public and the stuff is so big and huge! The pagodas were detailed as fuck and those skyscrapers and corporate buildings look so simple compared to it. I was nervous, of course, and couldn’t get past the 3rd line. In the end, I trashed the whole shit and went home like an effing oser.

Chinese Garden is a sort of big park we have here in Singapore, with nothing but nature aplenty and pagodas / houses / bridges / chinese statues all built in ancient China architectural style. Sort of a humble tourist attraction and it’s free too. I even saw a hot blond chick all by herself that day.
This place is one of those few places in Singapore where you can hear the music of tranquility and revel in Nature.
The government of Singapore should stop building those trashy corporate buildings and build more of such scenic parks.

The sad thing, though, is that the government is gonna build some tourist resorts / hotels next to this place a couple years from now, and that’s going to really ruin the stillness and calm of this place. It’s really sad those clowns can’t even leave a place like this alone. :(

I’m going there a couple weeks from now and try to draw those stuff again. Next time if I go there and leave empty-handed, castrate me. I MEAN IT.

Drawings for this week as follows (click on images to see actual undistorted version):

A wooden model of boat with a wooden man fishing:

The ellipses on a can is harder to draw than I thought, even with the axle method. The watch’s ellipse is easier cos’ there’s non-ellipse edges around the ellipse to guide you. :D

The little curve looks like a parabola when seen in non-foreshortened view, but in this foreshortened view, it no longer looks like one. And I gotta say I didn’t draw this part very well.


A sketch of my colleague’s desk again, this time more detailed and larger, but done equally fast and sketchy:

Had some fun drawing dormers from Phil Metzger’s book. Phil is a superb painter of landscapes and his book is so fucking idiot-proof. I’m so fascinated by all these drawings of buildings and perspective that after I’m done with this book, I’m gonna read Norling’s book and then Loomis’s Successful Drawing, then get a book and learn how to draw cool buildings and castles. :D

A drawing of my wooden, 2-feet tall Eiffel Tower. The overall thing looks ok, but the parabola at the bottom-left corner is so screwed and wrong. The drawing exceeded the paper slightly. :(

97….98….99….100th hand!….Book of a Hundred Hands! I admit, some of these hands here have fingers that look off. My drawings suck most in the morning and I’m at my peak in the afternoon to evening (4 – 7 PM):





















You probably can’t tell the stuff below are sliced pears in a plastic container if I didn’t tell you :D :



Some warm-up exercises from Drawing Tutorials Online.com:

Using the axle method to draw ellipses will really help you get the orientation of the ellipse right in any view. The rest depends on your hands :D :


That’s all for now! 1 more week before class starts. I hope there will be lots of hot cute sweet chicks in my class. Best of all, let the ratio of girls to guys in the class be 20 : 1, with me being the only guy.

My boss is giving me a new project (I work in a sort of employment agency) but if it takes up too much of my time and leave me with barely any time to draw, I may consider quitting it next year. Art is my first priority now.

Meanwhile, I’m at the last part of Phil’s book and will do some of the more challenging perspective stuff before going on to more perspective. :)

Good day!
Xeon

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The more I draw, the more I want to

November 16th, 2009

I spent the past week reading Phil Metzger’s book (that guy has wonderful paintings in his book, and most of the paintings were his!), and managed to at least grasp something about 3-point perspective and drawing ellipses and curves (especially those in challenging perspective).

School starts in another 2+ weeks time, and I’m kinda nervous. I just hope there are normal people in my class, because when it comes to art / graphic design, I always have thoughts of people in super-trendy clothes with super-uber-ultra-bohemian hairstyles speaking in african rap-talk and keep rapping “YO YO YO!” with that fucking irritating peace sign made with the fingers.

No offense to anyone, but everytime I see some guy rapping with the peace sign going “YO YO YO!”, I just wanna grab a chair and slam it hard into their face till they can’t “YO YO YO!” anymore.

In order to streamline and cut down precious time wasted on inserting links to the images, I’ve used Excel to auto-generate the links to my scanned artwork and just copy / paste them here, and in CA. Saves me around 20+ mins of time, and lots of stress! ;) It’s always good to have some basic programming knowledge. :D

As for my artwork, I’m not gonna clean them up too much and I’m using a lot less of the Brightness / Contrast editing in Photoshop cos’ as one CA member (TASmith) says, the grayscale is all gone if I do that, so I’m trying to cut down on it. The result is that the scanned stuff looks messy with the other side of the paper showing through, but that’s ok with me. As the saying goes, “Never beautify your sketches”. ;)
I’m also doing away with the categorizing and just posting the images all in 1 load.

Result: More time to practice. Cheerio!

Click on images below to view undistorted version.


Haven’t done my feet for a long time:

The last few hands at the bottom were all done in less than 10+ mins using very fast sketching. This is something I only started trying out seriously last week, and I’m surprised that the result look like a hand. This is a very good method and I’m gonna try to use this way of sketching for most of my sketches that doesn’t require insane precision (my sketching is usually slow and meticulous).

















Below are 2 drawings of my (model) wooden house. Such small models are very good for learning perspective! The wheel (ellipse) on the 1st house is DAMN wrong. The 2nd one looks way more correct after I’ve got a better understanding on how to draw ellipse and see which way they’re oriented. They can be confusing to draw especially when the subject in life is tilted at neither-there-nor-here-angles:


I’ve tried to incorporate some gesture drawing into my manikin studies, but as you can see, my gestures fail hard. I still don’t get the gist of gestures and I think I’m the only one in the world who can’t get it. Feel what action? I don’t feel excited or energetic in my heart / blood / veins, if that’s what they’re talking about regarding “feeling”.















A drawing of my Trasher T-Rex toy, which I got during the Jurassic Park : The Lost World era. I hope they make Jurassic Park 4. T-Rex shouldn’t have lost to Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park 3. Screw the scriptwriter:




I’m gonna do more clock studies cos’ it has a number of curves and ellipses and I’m trying to master drawing accurate ellipses from life now:

What’s next? I’m gonna draw more this week but schedule is quite tight but I’ll try. Screw this. Oh yeah, and I’m gonna try doing a drawing of the 2-foot tall Eiffel Tower model which I have. :D

Have a nice day! See you! ;)
Xeon

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