My latest short story was a ton of fun, but not finished. So here’s a sneak peek.
My summer has been pretty hectic and I really want to just make and post work here. I’m working on plenty of great things, and I am having a blast just moving and settling into my new apartment. Things are in transition, and I’ve got plenty of new work to show. Much love!
This class is a classic. David Gildersleeve was my professor, who is also the original creator of the class. He seems to be the quintessential teacher to take this class with, so it was obvious to enroll in it. There are plenty of assignments, but I love doing lots of work where a lot of it is left up to the artist. There is a lot of research and reference-shooting done for this class, so come prepared with a camera or 24-hour internet access! I loved this class, the other artists brought their A-games, and I had to bring mine, too!
Project 1: Savannah Building
I was very pleased that my first assignment came out this way. We went on a field trip and took plenty of pictures, so I had lots of reference under my arsenal. I gave a lot of attention the pipes in the foreground and the blinds, and the rest was just fillin in the page. I had a vision of the kind of character I wanted to draw. I had a Mediterranean guy in my head with a huge nose with a similar look to how French artist Rudolph Guenoden draws himself in comics. It came out exactly how it was in my head (which is pretty rare for me). I even drew him in the exact angle I wanted.
Savannah seems to come up in almost every SEQA class at least once, so drawing from life wasn’t too hard. After a while, you just start drawing the town from your head because you know it so well. You don’t just realize what landmarks or recurring images are in the town, you know the feeling too, and are able to incorporate the emotion of the town into the drawing as well.
I took Visual Storytelling 1 in the summer quarter of 2009. I wanted to review the class and my work, just like i did for my Materials and Techniques class, but never got around to typing one up. I thought I would strategically release around class sign-ups, banking that my professor ould be teaching the class again in Fall 09, but it turns out he didn’t teach it, nor will he be teaching it for some time. My class may be the last Vis 1 class taught by Tom Lyle, but the other professors aren’t inferior. Ofcourse, I offer this “class review” not only to review how the class went, but how my work progressed from it. I also like to talk about the kinds of assignments that are offered and what you should prepare for before taking the class, because sometimes I like to look around deviantart or Google for the pages of students past, just to guage an idea of how they approached a project.
Keep in mind that the process that Tom works in is not how everyone works, but he expects you to work his way. For a versatile artist, that isn’t a problem. I had a little difficulty here and there working from thumbnails, then creating tight roughs on an 8.5×11, and then printing them out on a 11×17 sheet and re-tracing/going in tighter with my pencils. It’s a long process that made my work stiffer, but for some it makes finished pencilled pages more “designed”. I lost energy in places, but I think it helped to slow me down and plan things out before straight jumping onto a blank page.
Project 1: Chickasaw Adventures #7
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Tom Lyle did a comic called “Chickasaw Adventures” and proposes his students suffer what he went through. The script is not at all worthy of being transformed into a comic, and a lot is left up to the artist. As the very first assignment, it sets the tone of the entire class, and once you get through it, the other assignments aren’t quite as difficult. When I finished this project, I had thought I had done well, but I was torn to shreds (as was everyone). I didn’t think I would get any better than these pages (true!) and that this would be the culmination of my learning at SCAD. Ofcourse, I’d be proven wrong.
The last class review I had done (and the only one) was my Materials and Techniques class. There were many great assignments and of all of them, my drawings of the characters from 30 Rock were my favorite. In spirit of the show’s premiere this week, Thursday Oct. 15th, I want to share the designs I did for the first time here.
Project: Animated TV Show
This is my favorite assignment. We had to pretend our favorite television show never existed as a live-action show and we were to pitch it as an animated show. The character designs were to reflect the personalities from their live-action counterparts. Some people chose obvious shows like Seinfeld and The Office. The show I chose to redesign was 30 Rock.
With another quarter at SCAD completed, I want to post some of the work I’ve done in SEQA 122: Materials & Techniques. One thing I find when taking classes is that I crave to see projects done by past students for particular assignments. You know, just to see how it was done and to avoid some of the problems they ran into.
I’ll only be talking about projects rather than any sketchbook assignments.
Assignment 1: Crowquill (4 illustrations)
There were some simple guidelines for the first project. One still life (the sneaker), one environment (the downshot of the alley), one from a photograph (David Lo Pan). The other instruction was to draw two out of the four illustrations as a line drawing, and draw the remaining two with full value. I’m happy with my sneaker, David Lo Pan, but the environment is not what it could have been. I experimented a lot with it, but to show darkness and shadow the way I did is not the best way to do it.
Assignment 2: Aspect-to-Aspect Environment
I have been enjoying drawing environments a lot. My goals for this piece was that it could actually be a page I could use for a future comic that takes place in the desert. I did lots of research and used flickr for a lot of textures and general inspiration. Its really important to do sketchbook work just working and reworking different ways to actually record some of how environment work in a comic style. And after creating an arsenal of sketches, I just threw them into corresponding panel shapes and formed a composition onto the page. It was a really simple way to work and turned out spectacular. But I’m still not confident with drawings figures within my environments.
Assignment 3: Brush Mutants
Using brush, four illustrations were to be drawn, similar to Assignment 1. We were allowed to divide the page into fours and draw four seperate mutants with brush. Or we had the option to combine all four into a composition on a single page. I chose the latter, thinking that I could use this as a page in a narrative sometime in the future as well. It was a lot of fun coming up with monsters. Pictured is a stone-scaled worm, a tree pirate with a human peg leg, some Wolf-man, and my favorite, the Benjamin Button Baby Bats, all fighting a tough girl. Showing control of brush is very difficult to do. I try to make clean lines rather than do any feathering or dry brush work. I had some trouble creating the composition and some of the monster’s anatomy is unaccurate. It’s not a piece I’m particularly proud of, but I am glad to use brush more because it prepared me for the next assignment.
Assignment 4: Brush Pantomime
Every time I think about this piece when it’s not in front of me, I always think I had done such a lazy job on it. I think to myself that I just sped through this one and didn’t give it the care that it deserves. But whenever I see (like when we were given our pieces back after the grading period), it struck me that it was actually a beautiful page. It is one of my best pages done in brush, and I remember taking my time to handle the brush and create clean linework. It was tough, brush is a difficult medium to handle. But I was able to push through and create something worthy of being part of a bigger story.
Assignment 5: Inkwash Pantomime
Here are the two pages I completed. The first page was entirely environments. I worked differently for this by compiling sketchbook work into photoshop and collaging them into a narrative. I printed them in blue on watercolor paper, and then inked and inkwashed them traditionally. It was a different process that I might employ in the future, doing drawings on seperate sheets and then smashing them together to create one page of comics.
