ArtCtrl

Life drawing from earlier this week - Monday. Since then I have spent most of my time working in Blender and Hammer. I’ve been experimenting with lighting - using blue to light a room.

Anyway, my digital camera broke. Awile ago I dropped it, since then it has only gotten worse. So I’m using my laptop to take photos of my artwork. With decent lighting it works fine. Focus is off on some of these. Sorry.

Warmups. This went for over an hour. It was a good start. 

On the right side - the model spent 10 mins on each pose - rotating on the spot. I’ll take a better photo of these and import it into blender.

Still no tablet pen for digital painting. Looking forward to getting a new one - I’ll be able to digitally paint my life drawings onto UV shapes.

Here’s something a bit different. My blue watercolor pen was used for the line. It had been a long time since I had used a wet media. I have gouache that I need to buy a new brush for. I had a brush but lost it. Shame really. I’ll buy another from French Art.

Colored pencil was used for the tone. This was majority imaginary lighting.

Here the spotlight was on the model. She was in the darkest place in the room. Another - rotational pose. Looking at the now - the light could have rotated around with the model. Creating a truly magical 3d drawing.

Still looking at each of the 3 poses you are able to get a sense of how the model is sitting in space.

I’ll like to keep with this color scheme. Seeing where I can push the blues and yellow/red mixtures. The tests I’ve been doing inside of Hammer involve blue lighting. Brick and green grass used for the envoriment. I’d like to texture it myself and spawn my own models. Maybe just walking about the level. Interactive town.

Lots of Life Drawing this weekend - Saturday and Sunday - then going though to Monday. It will be a clothed model on Monday so I’ll see how I go - two days may be enough….

So GIMP 2.8 has been released. It’s totally sweet. Loving the single window view - no longer are my buttons getting mixed up on other displays. There are other

Tribute. Planning to model this suit in blender. It seems easy enough and can use it as a costume for a character. I have a basic few characters that I’m happy with (still need to tweck mesh on many. More detail is whats needed more. Buildings. Streets. I need a world created. 

Planes with the drawings UV mapped onto them. I need to learn more advance texturing techniques. Need to watch more youtube

Here’s what I modeled (and textured) out of the life drawings. Again - no head was modeled. I think it works well. It certainly gives it a different look. Lighting in this cubes with colored material. I’d like to digitally paint the colors then use that as lighting. More interesting then using normal spot lights.

Here is a bunch of rendered material:

The most recent works. I’m looking forward to experiemtning with these more - opening up older blender files and editing them again with the skills I have learnt.

Made a new model. It’s rough and still need lots of work. I modeled it off a life drawing from Fridays class. It’s not exactly like the drawing - I let my imagination take over towards the end. I atttempted a walk cycled. I messed it up. It’s certainly something I need to pratice more.

For the lighting I used emited lights. These

Friday went well. Russel was the model again. I wasn’t happy with the works I drew on Monday - just wasn’t in a good space. Friday was much better!

My surface to work on was large. I turned a fold up table on its side and used it as a backing board! I had pre-cut most of the paper so the size isn’t larger that I’m working on - though I was able to fit more figures along the page. Wish I had taken photos! I’m planning on doing it again (maybe even on Monday if there is room) so will be able to upload photos of the setup. People were impressed!

Here’s the drawings from the day. All completed with 4b pencil and colored pencils:

Gestural, warm ups. I’ve been exploring turning the figure into shapes in order to capture the complete model quickly. Enjoyable. The pencil has been nice to use - I spent so much time with colored pencil, the detail and feel of pencil is different… strange really.

This was a final pose of the day. I had asked if we could do a series of poses. Each pose was two minutes - and I’d get the model to spin around on the spot - holding the same pose. This allows me to capture the front, side and back. Russel misunderstood this and choose a new ‘action’ pose each spin. I really love this one though - maybe I’ll have to ask other models to redo this pose. Bringing a gun (toy of course) to class could work well. The word for this pose was dance. Again - I could see this working well for a spinning pose. All it really needs is better lighting so I can capture the lights and darks quickly. Flat lighting is hard.  

With this Russel held the same pose in each turn. Can totally tell that he’s turning around. I’ll take this into Blender/3d and model it out. Wish it had color! 

Gestural works. Lots of experimenting with scale. I think I spent an hour working on the same paper so build up a large amount of figures on the same page. I’d like to work with more of those two min poses - collecting a large amount of model rotation poses. All on the same page would be impressive. 

Color. Different. Using green as a line 

Longer poses. I wasn’t happy with this pose - back poses like this always give me very little to work with. I had a go with my white charcoal - something I havn’t used since the beginning of last term

Another longer pose. I’m not sure if this is working - it seems broken and incomplete. Another turning model pose. Again I’ll take this into Blender and model it out. I had time to capture some light in the pose but would like to have a better lighting setup so I didn’t struggle so much. 

I quite like how this came out. Exploring perspective with both feet - especially the one that’s close! Dan talked about the negative spare - mentioning how some of the lines are working and some seem off. 

This is tidyer. I like tidy. Even though my bedroom is a total mess. I like clarity in my life drawing. The left foot is working well - got positive comments from Megan and Dan about this. The middle portrait is my favorite portrait of the day. Dan mentioned - It’s very Russel. The shading technique - straight lines is new for me and I’ll explore it further. An exercise Dan got some of the class to do was straight lines. I was impressed by several works in the class. Including Megans - who was using promarkers to draw. I’ve used promarkers once for life drawing and struggled. It could be good for me to give them ago again - pencil dominates so much of my work. It was good I used oil pastel for Christenas block class at the end of

An last - the final of gestural works. These are mostly done with my right hand (I’m normally left handed). These other hand works are working better then normal. So simple but creates a effective line. Maybe I’ll work like this further. COLOR. RAWR,

Just leaving IOGraph to do its thing. Some impressive and interesting works. Need to experiment with it in GIMP - colors… layers… would like to take these further into 3d…. textures.

Once the sun is out I’ll take photos of life drawing from Friday and write a post. Plenty to say. More life drawing Monday… then for the rest of the week I’ll work on creating models and textures within Blender. Should do some Java as well.

This week I’ve spent learning Java. It’s been fun and I feel I’ve made real progress with it. Aimed for at least 6 hours of it every day. I got to a point where I needed a break. I needed to do something creative. Not that Java isn’t creative, just need to get my visual art fix in.

I decided to get stuck back into Blender. I havn’t done anything in Blender for about 2 weeks and it was wonderful to get back into it.

Started a new project in it (I feel bad constintly starting new projects on it. But it’s all just a learning experience.

I want to take my life drawings into Blender and model and texture them. 

I took this into blender - splitting it into two image files and using it as reference on two planes.

This is the setup I used. Reference is very important - otherwise I just sit in Blender mucking around - and not get anything done. Using my own life drawings means I’m creating truly original models as well - no stock photos!

This is what I modeled. I tried to apply two legs to the figure but it just wasn’t looking correct - so kept with just a single leg. Guess the character can HOP along! Quick skeleton is applied as well - I feel more confident completing these models now.

To mix things up and learn something new I decied to not use lights but instead light with these three cubes. This tuturial was helpful to learn this technique:

I’d like to experiment with these effect further - maybe creating a texture on a surface then turn it into a light - could give some interesting effects. YEAH, LIGHT!

I’m not going to bother with a video for this - I’ve only rendered four seconds of animation. I’ll work on this further and upload when I have closer to thirty seconds of footage.

It had been a week since I’d been into TLC. Today was Dans life drawing class. The model was Russel. The class wasn’t partially full, a decent amount of people but still enough room to move about without bumping shoulders.

I used colored pencil for the majority of the day, with a small amount of 4b pencil in the afternoon.

Here’s the work

These are the warmups. All are around 20 seconds. I’m rather happy with these. It wasn’t my most successful life drawing day but I feel I started well and ended on a good note.

Fifteen minutes were spent working on these quick works - so able to get plenty of figures down. And If it’s not the best pose - Don’t have to wait long till it changes!

The left side of the page. Photo was taken close up in order to get a decent view of the art. Lots of line!

Series of three poses in the morning. These were 10 mins each I believe. The right is my favorite., it’s got the most going for it. Others commented about it as well including Dan, Leah, and Rachel.

Turning the model into ‘basic’ shapes. A new way I’m looking at the model - this will make it easy to take the figure into blender.

Afternoon scribble. 4b pencil was used. Some tone used in the arm and such - line has been a focus in my work.  Here I’m looking at the same pose from multipy angles in order to try to understand the 3d form better.

I said to Dan that I’ll like to paint on Friday. I havn’t painted for a long time, I strugged drawing for 6 hours today and I’d like to relax with paint for the day on Friday.

I’ll work on different angled figure poses in the Monday class and paint on Fridays.

I’ve been using a program called IOGraph. It runs in the background of the computer and records mouse movements - to create abstract artwork. I’m very interesting in this idea of letting the computer ‘create’ artwork and I’ve liked the several works made already.

Here they are. 

1.2 hours of mouse movement in the early hours of the morning.

3.3 hours. As you can see far more activity on the left side of the page. The black circles are clicks.

An hour. Guess whos using stumble upon lots?

I’d like to see this program developed to create color, and be affected by keyboard movements. Still, fun program. I’ll aim to keep it running and make regular updates of artwork created. Go download and have a go yourself!

The week of Vincents of life drawing is over. I won’t make it next week due to having plently of  life drawing classes at TLC to attend. My flatmate Kunal attended Vincents with me this week. It was the 2nd time he had done life drawing.

Had Lee for a model. I think it was the first time she had modeled for Vincents - her confidence levels seemed low compared to drawing her at TLC. But still, I enjoyed drawing her.

I worked from a sketch pad 16cm by 16cm. Sennellier. The paper had a slight texture and off white look. It holds pencil pigment nicely.

Two minute poses. These are all standing - many very similar. Fine though. I started color in one drawing, but two mintues isn’t long to capture much tone.

Leg studies. Focus like always is looking for those lights in darks in order to show the shape of the model. I quite like these. Decent for 5 min drawings.

A portrait. It’s always a good idea to work on a portrait regularly to keep those skills up :D

I’ve been enjoying this simple color scheme. Yellow for light, red for dark, and blue for negative space.

Normally on a Thursday Vincents has one forty minute pose. People wanted two twenty like Tuesdays - so it was decided. Two twentys.

I spent ten mins drawing the model in this and the rest of the time working with the background and such. Great to do when you lose interest in the pose.

Thanks Lee for the wonderful modeling. And Kunal for coming along