School Continues

Today is week 4 of class and I can’t believe how this drawing has progressed in such a short time. Granted it’s just a picture to learn from but I’m impressed with the results. Take a look below and I think you will agree.

First up on the top is my final value study as you compare it to the first one I showed you two weeks ago on the botton you can see a vast improvement in it. Amazing how much better my final study is from the original line drawing I did.(see post March 5, 2016)

After this, I did a hand full of quick color studies to see which color combinations I liked. My instructor told me to keep them loose and just go wild with the color, which I did. Some of the more crazy color schemes actually had the potential to be used as a final color study which surprised me a bit. In this third drawing, you can see the color study I picked. This picture was the one I sent in for my mid-week critique.

Overall I was happy with it but I still felt it could be tweak more. I asked my teacher what it was missing and replied back that it needed to play with the saturation and hue in the shadows and highlights and to add some saturation and color to the transition from light to shadow. So back to the drawing board, I went and messed around with it till I came up with what you see in the picture below.

This is the one I’m turning in today for a final critique on this project. It is by no means a finished illustration and was created as a means to learn and expand my skill set. This week though we get serious. It’s time to take what I’ve learned from this project and to put it to use in actually creating a finished illustration that is portfolio worthy.

I’m really in awe at how fast my tech has been able to get me to raise my skill level in such a short time. I hope I can continue to hone my craft as an illustrator in the weeks to come, time will tell. Stick around and see what I create next you just might like it. If you have any questions please fell free to ask in the comment section.

School Begins

Well since my last post I’ve have learned a lot and I’ll let you be the judge of that by comparing two pics I’ve done, a before and after, my mid-week critique. It has been a week since I started back to school at Smarter Art School. The classes or so much better than I even thought they would be. I was able to sit in on all the instructors classes and just listen to their years of experience and picked up so much useful information that I had forgotten over the years or didn’t fully understand.

What I came away with was always use reference photos with good contrast, the more the better. Most stressed doing value studies called thumbnails sketches in order to work out your content and composition of your picture. There was plenty more information passed on but if you want to know all the facts take the course. Every instructor evaluated each of their students work in order to see where they were at presently, then asked them where they wanted to go with their work so that the teacher can guide them in that direction in the coming weeks ahead.

In my first class, my teacher also did the same evaluation asked me questions and looked at my website. He gave me clear feedback on my work and on my site. At the end of class, he gave us an assignment which you can see some of my progress below. Right now I think that I made the right choice in the instructor that I picked to study under and feel I will learn a lot to help me obtain my career goals in the future. Tonight I get to sit in on another class to listen and learn. This will be the class that I will monitor for the rest of the semester. Tomorrow is my class time, time to show my 1st drawing. l know that its not great but I think you’d agree it’s way better than my original line drawing I started with.