Father's Day!

A very unflattering pastel portrait for him to hang up in his office... Maybe.

The Great DQ Tree

Thanks to Charlie for the idea. 

Suppose for a moment, that time was water.

Imagine then, that the span of the Christmas break was a bowl. The time that constitutes that span is the water sloshing in the bowl. 

Now let's assume that Productivity is Shin brand Ramen noodles. These ingredients would be put into the bowl of water, and God willing, become something edible. That bowl of Ramen would be the culmination of a productive break well spent.

Follow?

Now imagine taking that bowl of water, going to your bathroom, and dumping both the bowl and the water into the toilet. Suppose then that you took the packet of Ramen and rabidly tore at the packaging with your teeth, scattering the ingredients onto the bathroom floor. From your rabidly foaming mouth, you would deposit the shredded packaging into the toilet, and you would flush. Repeatedly.

You do not know why you are doing this, and in your mind, you reel in horror from the inanity of your actions. Yet you do not stop. You are gripped with a compulsion that gurgles from the dark recesses of your subconsciousness, and against the force of its necessity, you can do no more than let out a single, tortured rasp. You step blindly and wildly, crunching the scattered Ramen noodles on the ground like bone dry autumn leaves, as if to make for an exit. Yet still you flush, and flush, and flush... 

That is, I think, one way to describe my break.
It was actually pretty cool otherwise. One of my better Christmas breaks, in fact.

Crazy patterned fish from the zoo.

My Ecorché Totoro

But seriously though, I really need to do actual work.

Once More Unto the Breach

Welp.

 There goes the summer.

A squid headed goddess of death

"

An avian god of art

A richly adorned, fox headed god of thieves

I made a bunch of pastel sketches based on a random text generator a while back. My final project for the summer was to develop them. Beyond redesigning them, the point of these was to wean myself off of an over-reliance on digital tools.

 The digital painting in this lineup is the thing that frustrated me enough to drop the digital angle. It is decidedly unfinished.

I also have some lore-like snippets written up for these characters. Those I'll have to proofread a little more. There's  A LOT of made up words.

Clouds by my window

This is basically the only study I did all summer. Since I had my laptop reanimated, I haven't been able to get the color settings right, so these could look like... anything, really.

5 min

15 min

10 min

 Last life drawings for the summer. 

This is the same model as the one from the first session of the summer. 

Heh.

Stuff from the zoo.

 I caved and bought a membership on impulse, so now I have to go to the zoo more, if I ever want to recoup my losses. I'm always sort of hesitant to go to the zoo, since people there treat art students about the same as the animals.

I can't really read it either

Finally, this blasphemy of penmanship. I've been waking up at 3 in the morning and writing whatever comes to my head on this piece of newsprint the entire summer. Between this, a .txt file on my desktop and a few pages of Iphone notes are about 10 to 20 different ideas for the group film. Of these, only about 5 are worth anything, and of those five, only 3 have coherent plot beats. 

Still.

Breaking Todd and the Excellent Emo McGee

Pastel on newsprint and GIMP, a googol hours

I had this idea that I sketched onto a piece of newsprint on Wednesday, but it looked like abstract barf at the time. Above is sort of what I had in mind, like one of those classic Swamp Thing covers, with the same palette and everything. He was originally gently caressing a flower, but a Google search turned up another drawing with almost the same exact idea, but angrier.

5 min

 Last week of official life drawing classes this week. Do I feel like I've made any progress this summer? I dunno. I'm still only getting about 1-2 decent drawings per session, so that hasn't changed.  We'll see when school starts up again if this summer has done anything for me.

Do We Have a Gold Yet? No?

Until the repair people can get my laptop to function at a temperature above absolute zero, I'm back to wonderful world of open source software. Though this Ming Dynasty Thinkpad is incapable of running Photoshop in any capacity, it does GIMP like a Ferrari. 

I'm not entirely sure what Wilbur is.

GIMP, or as I like to call it, Photoshop for Freedom Fighters, has been updated to 2.8 since last I tried it. I tested the painting features by trying to paint the GIMP mascot, and tried the photo manipulation tools by pasting together a collage of pastel illustrations into Twin Peaks' Red Room. GIMP 2.8 has a more intuitive GUI compared to a year ago, but it's still got that frustrating almost-but-not-quite-Photoshop menu layout. 

Fire groove with me

I only went to one life drawing session this week because of the Olympics, but feel stupid about it since Canada's being outperformed by North Korea.

 I only got one good drawing, 20 min.

THIS WEEK ON IRON CHEF

THIS WEEK on The Martha Stewart Show, we take a look at an especially botched Ratatouille! God, were those vegetables chopped with a chainsaw? What is this, Cooking with Jason Voorhees? There's like half a bottle of thyme on that thing! Are we cooking or are we trying to OD on seasoning? Join us next week, where we'll hopefully be making something that doesn't actively degrade the sanctity of creation. This has been Hell's Kitchen. Don't under cook the risotto!

I'm going to use the time I have left this summer to try new media. This week, I tried actual brush and gouache, and got an entire set of brush pens. Not much else to say, it's "exploration".

This was actually an interesting exercise. These are rough drawings in pastel, 20 to 30 minutes each, based on descriptions from a random text generator. What this site did was basically cobble together a description from randomly generated information, things like body shape, anthropomorphic features, demeanor, etc. It's a nice exercise for the imagination. I now have rough color and lighting bases for at least 5 potential paintings.

Give it a try: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=deity 

Mad WASPs

How the time flies. I'm trying to finish up the last bit of Schoolwork/personal work cleanup, but before that, I've been trying to get off the computer. To that end, I've pulled out my pastels again. Just like I remembered, really. The choking dust, the smudges that stay in your clothes and stains your skin, the poisonous residues... it's a special kind of magic.

One small note. Most of these are life drawings, but the top is the eldest Billy Goat Gruff from the Dresden Files (or a crude representation of him)!