Hey so many of you know that I finished my first semester at LCAD (Laguna College of Art and Design). I'm majoring in Illustration with an Emphasis in Entertainment. Right now it's taking a while to fill the more concentrated upper classes since it's brand new this semester, but I don't really have to worry about that until next fall. I transferred there in August 2012 after being in community college for so long. I have learned so many new things especially in art techniques and brush handling. This semester I mainly took Freshman and Sophomore classes so that they make sure that everyone is on the same page with the fundamentals. I feel like I've improved so much in such a small amount of time. I'm going to show some pieces from my classes.
The first four are from my Fundamentals of Illustration class with Michael Savas. What I liked about this class was that he combined multiple aspects into each project. For example:
This project right here was to show how to handle the brush using ink. He then had us pick a figure and show it's form using a banding technique.
This project was probably my favorite in his class. The project was to show how to use graphite pencils from however light you wanted (6H) to however dark you wanted it (6B) using hatch marks without blending. He also wanted us to pick a celebrity's face and make a caricature. So this is Michael Phelps. I hope he's recognizable.
This project was to show how to use acrylic washes and also how to distinguish different forms in a "visual jungle" (meaning a lot of elements in the composition). The description was to pick a music genre and illustrate it. Mine was polka. :)
This project was to illustrate a cliche using the opaque gouache technique and it also had to be inspired by three living illustrators. I picked Tim Burton (for the style of clothing), Will Terry (painting style - well as much as I could in gouache), and my favorite - Justin Gerard (lighting technique and background). My cliche was "killing him with kindness." The girl is so in love that she doesn't realize that she's hurting the poor fella.
This next class was Fundamentals of Perspective with James Galindo. This is my final 3-point perspective. We had to pick a cartoon and have at least 3 characters in it. I picked Phineas and Ferb ;). After we were all done with what we wanted in the composition, we had to ink it.
This was my midterm from my Figure Drawing and Portrait 2 class. Man Hope Railey really helped me understand how to construct the face. I really liked using the shadow-shape and measuring approach with the black and white charcoal on toned-paper. My strengths are definitely stronger with values than with line, but I'm still improving on that matter.
This class was probably my most favorite class that I took at LCAD this semester - Figure Painting 1 with Sergio Sanchez. Sergio seriously knows so much about art. Not only is he good at painting in oils, but he's good at every single medium. Man... If I could, I would just follow him around everywhere instead of going to school, but I like school as well. He's a fine artist who teaches at Art Center and LAAFA as well. I'm just going to show my color studies for homework, but it basically was the same in class but just with figures. Sergio really broke down how color light theory works. The shadows are the complementary color to the light source. Basically, if you have an orange light, the shadows will be blue colored, red light - green shadows, etc. So in every scene, you're supposed to still see that the local color of the object appears the same but if you isolate each of those colors and put them side by side, you'll see that the color is affected by the light source and not really the same color. It's the trick of the eye. Everything is affected by context. Also this was an excellent tool to break down light and shadow because usually when people paint in neutral lighting, it's very easy to muddy up the lights and shadows or make the figure look monochromatic. This tool really helped me understand what is affected by light and what is affected by the shadows.
This is Figure Anatomy also with James Galindo. Aside from learning how to draw the anatomy of the figure, we had to work on an ecorche throughout the entire semester. This was a really helpful tool in learning the figure because each of those muscles were layered on one at a time. Though I still don't know all the muscle names by memory yet, it was still cool to see where the bone and muscle insertions and attachments were. I know that humans normally don't pose that way, but we had to bake our ecorches and mine was too tall to fit in the oven, so I bent the spine further. Now his pose makes him look like he's from the matrix.
It's crazy to see how God's mind is so complex in making everything, especially humans. It's no mistake that He made every muscle and every bone to perform the way they do. Even though every single person looks different, it's very apparent that every body has an order and consistency to them - so much so that doctors know how to fix them when something is wrong, and artists know how to draw them (and when the body is drawn incorrectly it's very obvious). Just looking at the human body shows how amazing and creative God is.
I guess that's a wrap for my first semester. I'm excited for next semester!
