Friday Reflections

So I've decided I'm going to do a new thing on this blog which entails recording my thoughts from the past week in regards to Illustration class. Which should entail three daily assignments which theoretically is twelve hours of illustration work.

So, since last Friday, we've made a lot of changes. A whole new medium was introduced. No more just line art, no more getting by with a few Micron pens and some run of the mill paper. No, this week we expanded into the wonderful world of watercolor (I have a thing for alliteration. An affinity for alliteration, one might say).

Actually, let's just evolve this post into a list form. Because that makes more sense, right? (Right)

1. The first round of watercolor, I believe, went well. I enjoyed trying out different techniques and mixing and setting up my palette and the whole nine yards. Choosing photography wasn't super difficult and I actually enjoyed it.

2. Watercolor demands a different kind of energy. That sounds kind of hokey and not actually legitimate but when we were just doing line art, it was possible to get by with just drawing and making decisions about what lines should go where and what the thickness of the line was and what drawing technique was to be used (actually that sounds like a lot of decisions but that's fine). But now, there's so many more components to the decision making process. And one of those components involves not making a decision in a way ... it involves letting go. It involves laying down the pigment and then letting it run free. Or, in this sense, drip/absorb/dry free. But you get the gist of it.

3. I have fears of ruining the whole piece with above decisions but I'm learning to take risks in my work. I suppose.

4.  The second round of "sky dominant" landscapes didn't go quite as well for some reason. I'm really trying to get into the whole "shoot your own photography and don't illegally take someone else's work" thing so I've been using all of my own photos as reference. Which, somehow, I only have a limited number of photos of the sky.

5. Also with the second round of watercolor was the fact that I did all of them at once because I was putting off studying for my Modern Art test. (Which is a completely irrelevant detail.) But anyway, I spent about fourish hours the other day just doing watercolor and I think I got a liiiiittle bit burnt out by the end of it and didn't feel like putting in the effort to try out new techniques or mix the colors I should have and it's definitely reflected in a few of the later pieces.

6. Also #6 doesn't really make sense because I haven't blogged about round 2 so there's that. But I'll go into more detail about experimentation and techniques utilized for those watercolors on a later date. Or basically when I get my watercolors scanned in.

7. That's all for this week.

Watercolor Thoughts

(Writing these thoughts in the midst of the 10 Landscape Assignment) 

1. Sometimes watercolor takes a long time to dry and sometimes it dries really quickly. That sounds like the most educated sentence ever. But despite my 2nd grade sentence structure, it's taken a little bit to get used to different applications and how quickly they dry.

2. I've also been experimenting in which order I lay down pigment. In some landscapes, I had the intention of doing a wash over, say, trees but in other exercises I did a wash first and then did detail over. I prefer the latter approach so far.

3. I have a fear of totally and completely screwing up by adding too much pigment/too much water/my hand uncontrollably spasming and ruining the entire work.

4. But that being said, it's nice to be able to quickly fix any wrongdoings, which I learned when I added too much water at one point and was able to lift it using a dry paper towel.

5. So far, this entire process has been trial and error, learning how to use proper pigment, discovering texture techniques, and really just figuring out what I'm doing with this whole thing.

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10 Watercolor Landscapes

So below are the notes that I took during Illustration regarding the four stages of watercolor. I promised I'd put these notes up on my blog, Rusty, but apparently the janky library scanners couldn't handle this sketchbook so maybe I'll try again with the lab scanners. We'll see.

I really enjoyed experimenting with the different techniques we learned today. As noted in my mid-assignment reflection notes (where I decided I needed a break from nonstop watercolor and just jotted down the thoughts I was having about the assignment), it was really just a trial and error process. 

In regards to time: I took the full twenty five minutes for each of these (except maybe the last two, those were about 15 minutes each) and had a hard time being patient waiting for the watercolor to dry. But I did take my sweet time on each of these which really just means that I was using this assignment as an excuse to distract me from the ten page research paper I was writing this afternoon as well. But anyway, I used my budget wisely for these ones. 

I posted these in order of which they were completed: 

Below is a landscape of my family's farm and from the Missouri Botanical Gardens. I struggled with the top landscape in regards to adding tone and figuring out how to distinguish between different layers (is that even the right word for that? I don't know) of trees in the background vs foreground. Also, there was a bale of hay in the foreground that I painted and then decided it looked horrendous so i just got some water and smoothed that one right out. Which is also why the "grassy" area is a liiiiittle bit more yellow in the bottom left hand corner. But who would know? Not I. 

And on the bottom one below I also neglected to lay down tone in the beginning and rather painted the trees and reflection first which let's just say was not the best idea. I did a wash of a brown murky substance over the water area and this illustration would have been much better suited if the trees/reflection were painted over tone. 

I'm not really digging the color distortion that these lovely scanners provide. But in regards to the above comment, for this next one I put the tone down first after learning from my mistakes and I think it works much better. 

And the bottom one ... What would a watercolor be without some kind of sunset/sunrise picture, right? 

The next one might be my favorite out of the ten. I liked the contrast of the detail and the water. 

And below that is just some trees, which were kind of fun to paint because of the shadows and figuring out the best way to tackle that challenge. 

I think as this assignment progressed, I got a little bit more loose with my style, and experimented with different methods and brushes in order to achieve texture and detail. Which resulted in "I'm not really sure what is happening in the lower left hand side of this one but we're just going to go with it" 

Also, I noticed that my shadow technique that I had used in the trees above does not quite apply as well with the beach scene below. Noted. 

Going out with a bang, with the most boring beach scene ever. 

The Poison Has Been Picked (Pre-Landscape Assignment)

So I spent this awkward gap of time between Drawing III and Modern Art choosing photographs to use for this watercolor assignment. My goal is to spent two hours today (doing half of the assignment) and finishing the other half tomorrow in order to alleviate the pains of procrastination. Let's see if that works. But in the meantime, here's the photos.

Self Portrait Round Two

So for this assignment we were instructed to choose one (scratch that ... Rusty chose one) of our ten selfies from the previous assignment, and then re-draw said illustration at 200%. So here is the "chosen one" twice as large.

Confession: I didn't spent four hours on this one. I spent maaaaybe twenty minutes drawing this one, as I had planned on spending Sunday afternoon on Illustration and may have overlooked a previous commitment I had made when drawing out my time budget for the weekend. But that being said, Mary Immaculate's janky overgrown flowerbed looks really good with 87% of the weeds/jungle gone thanks to what we did yesterday afternoon. But that's not relevant at all. Moral of the story, I didn't use my entire budget (or even like 1/4 of my budget) but I'm somewhat happy with the result. 

My Snapchat History Contains Better Self Portraits Than This

(taking inspiration from one of my favorite SNL characters, the lovely Stefon)

So this assignment entailed drawing ten self portraits. I chose a variety of photographs to draw from, and attempted to find pictures that encompassed a variety of poses for optimum variety.

So here goes.

I spent a good deal of time on the first ones (and now they're posted out of order) and then kiiind of rushed through the last two. Which are just the contour lines (and are probably pretty easy to tell which is which). I don't have much else in regards to reflection on this assignment, other than I was much more critical and deliberate than on the earlier assignments. 

10 Random Things That Have Nothing to Do With Each Other

So here are the ten illustrations of just random things with different styles.

I think this was more challenging with the rest because I feel as if I didn't personally get to know every single nook and cranny of each photograph. Previously, I got to know each subject really well when I spent four hours examining every. single. detail. that I could draw. But this time ... this time was different. I feel like I just used these pictures then left them out to dry. I wanted more time with them. I didn't want to leave them feeling like they didn't get the attention they deserved.

Another challenging aspect of this assignment was choosing which photographs to draw. I kind of just browsed through photos that I had and then just selected various ones. This was kind of the same process with choosing which style to draw, as I saw the photograph, imagined the illustration, and then chose the line art style that would best suit the nature of the illustration.

Some of these are man made and some are natural, I tried to break it up in order to get a myriad of style options

Above we have a pumpkin and some soy leaves. The pumpkin was shot in St. Louis and the soy plant in Pershing, Missouri. Because knowing where these photos were taken is necessary to seeing this illustration. I mean not really I just need time to kill while the next illustrations are scanning. 

And here is a wheat plant or something that was on a beach in Cumberland Island, Georgia. And a very basic rendering of the steeple of the Old Cathedral in St. Louis.

We dont even need to talk about the one above. If you figure out what that is without my help, you win the prize. Or you can just shield your eyes. Either one. But below it is a little scribble tractor, photograph taken at Corn Fest in Edina. 

Flower from somewhere and then this green spaceship sculpture deal we found on the side of the road (legitimately) on the way to the Illinois State Fair last year. 

Annnnd then some kind of bug thing that was in my car once and a Coke can. 

The End.

Natural Illustration

Waaaaayyyyyyy overdue on this post. Sorry, Rusty.

So here are my ten natural line art illustrations.

In ways of reflections, I'm kind of happy with how these ones turned out. I spent about 25 minutes on each one, but towards the end I ran out of ideas of styles. Confession time: I couldn't find my black ink so I mixed some black paint (watercolor) and thought it was consistent and apparently it was not and I ended up with tone and I'm sorry again Rusty for jumping ahead and apparently ruining your life with that one. (This blog post is just turning into one big apology letter. Gooood.)

I've also been getting in this habit of doing 11 illustrations instead of ten (usually because I just miscount), which is kind of nice because then it allows me to find the least horrible one and not display it. Although usually I forget about folding it over or cutting it off and then I just cover it up with another piece of paper when all of the illustrations are out on the desk but then someone (looking at you, Rusty) foils my plan of hiding my imperfections and all just goes to hell. But it's fine.

Anyway, here are those illustrations I mentioned above before rambling on about nothing: