Sketches 11-3-10

Had an absolute blast working on these today. Could have easily stayed at school another hour or two just drawing and whatnot. Been feeling very inspired lately, which I attribute to finally having a grasp on Illustrator + Photoshop as well as seeing Father and Son play this past weekend.

Sniper Girl
-An original character with no name that pops up a lot. I have fun drawing her even if she has no place or proper title (yet).






Lonely Girl
-A sketch I did this weekend that was inked with a Caligraphy pen and ink, which was really fun and a nice change of pace (I'll post the others I did using those tools soon). This is each iteration in chronological order - each one basically a test in some way. I quite like this, but I'm not sure what direction I'd want to take a final version.
















Flamehead



If you didn't already notice, I like to draw on scrap paper. It's certainly better than just throwing it out. Part of the reason I like using scrap is because I sometimes put too much pressure on myself to do something brilliant when using good paper. Also, it's convenient. That said, "Flamehead" was drawn on a piece of scrap - on a test piece for my "Expressive Type" project (which I documented below). Since I thought the figure interacted in a cool way with the text behind him, I adjusted the levels in such a way that merged the 2 sides of the paper together rather keeping them separated. I think the results are kind of interesting.

I absolutely plan on doing some drawings in the near future with a heavy type/figure relationship. Something I've been wanting to do for a while.



and here's a color version...

Adventures in Photoshop

In my experience, Photoshop (and virtually any kind of software) is very hard to teach. The intangible nature, to me, doesn't exactly lend itself to easy explanation. I'm sure most would agree it's best to learn when simply indulging in play - messing around; clicking on things and seeing what happens. In any case, I've always been a novice in Photoshop, only being able to do the most basic actions. However, we went over it this week in class, and maybe it's the fact that I've had a slow accumulation of knowledge regarding the program, but it started to click for the first time. Every button was explained and demoed one by one, which may not be the quickest way to do things, but logically it's the most effective. In past courses, we used Photoshop on... well... images that weren't photos. Rather, we'd create images from scratch in Photoshop. Not that there's anything wrong with. PS is obviously very versatile (something I knew at the time), but in retrospect, it makes sense why I didn't fully understand.

I'm not an expert all of a sudden or anything, but now I plan on being one. I had more fun this past Monday playing around than I ever have, most likely because I actually had some idea of how to appropriate all the functions. Definitely looking forward to playing around more. These are some of my early experiments - hope you enjoy!