Another post, Diary.

I just wrote the last post like 2 seconds ago. Trying to catch up because TERM 2 STARTS TOMORROW! YAY! I’m going to write a post about my first term recap and my teacher tonight also. Holy moly. But first:

Lesson 11. Faces!

This was a haaaaard assignment. This term we learned about skulls and basic human anatomies and the like. I know where eyes go (mostly) and ears and noses and junk. I can map a face like a pirate maps his treasure. BUT I haven’t been taught how to draw the dang nose. Or eyes. Or anything.

So I winged it. Wung it? What’s the past tense of Wing? I Wanged it (nailed it).

Obviously flawed. Ugh. Look at those gargoyles. A big part of the issue was the eyes. Remember I said I mostly know how to map them? Well turns out eyes don’t sit ON the face. They sit IN the face. Obviously everyone in the world knows that except me when it comes time to draw it. If I actually traced the entire eye balls on those faces they’d be sticking out of their cheeks. Bad work this week, Michael. Bad.

The other issues were pretty much everything else. But they are more forgivable. I’m only drawing eye patches from now on. On an unrelated note if someone did lose both eyes would they wear two eye patches? On a somewhat related note if someone missing an eye cries, does the socket fill with tears? I have some googling to do later.

I also drew hands. Reference ones and imagination ones.

I draw fat fingers. I’m mostly happy though with what I did. The first reference photo was such a stupid choice. It looked funny from the start and even worse when I started drawing it. My teacher pointed out that it was photoshopped and the thumb was moved out of joint. Ugh. Sabotaged.

And finally I had to do more architecture stuff. Blam:

My teacher, Tom, said the perspective was dead on so I was totes happy. BUT the rendering was pointless. The shadows were too light to really matter. It took me hours to draw this silly building and in 15 minutes he coloured it up with shadows and reflections and just made it look amazing.

Anyway this was my very last assignment of the term. Term 2 class starts in 15 hours!

L,
M

Diary! I missed you so much!

It’s been a bleeding month since I updated you. I can explain. My babies been sick for a month straight and I worked two auctions. Did I mention on here that I work auctions? I do that. They take a lot of my time.

But I still did my homework so here is the lesson 10 assignment and how I sucked at it.

Silhouettes! I had to make them. There were almost no rules really. They had to be readable and had to be characters. Real or cartoony it didn’t matter. Naturally I went for cartoony.

To answer your question: No, I don’t know how I got so amazing.

All right. False cockiness aside I did pretty good on the assignment. My teacher suggested a few tweaks here and there but ultimately understood what I was doing for all of them.

I also had to revisit feet with this assignment. First drawing from reference and then imagination. The ones with photos beside are the reference ones because obviously.

And I have to say the practice is paying off. They aren’t perfect but it only took me 15ish minutes to draw each one. 6 months ago that would have been my whole evening.

And from imagination. That was obviously much trickier. What I wouldn’t give to have a photographic memory.

Lurve Michael

Hi again Diary,

Remember in the last post I said I would explain what I’m doing to fix my human anatomy struggles? Here’s where I do that thing I said.

I have vowed not to get a mark as low as my last one ever again. So I started practicing torso’s.

And it took me bleedin’ forever to draw it too. I realized that I don’t have a clear enough understanding of the structures under the muscles to begin placing them in the right spots. I started drawing a skeleton:

I started to get it. I found a muscle diagram and began tracing the muscle groups. Once I had done that a couple times I thought I was ready to draw a torso. It’s right there on the right. …it’s awful.

The anatomy is there but it’s all wonky. I realized then that I don’t have a good understanding of gestures either! I’m right at the beginning! So I watched 4 tutorial videos about gestures and after a while I think I started to get it.

30 second gesture drawings. I know they aren’t perfect but they are easily the best gestures I’ve ever done. I’m going to keep practicing these for a few days (between homework assignments) and then move onto blocking shapes. Wish me luck.

Lurve Michael

‘Sup Diary,

So. Week 8. That was a fun week actually. It was all about skulls, hands and feet. I’m not good at skulls, hands or feet. I tried to really ace this assignment. I spent hours and hours (usually in the middle of the night) on each part. First the skulls:

Cool, right? I even rendered them. There are a lot of little errors and mistakes across the board but for the most part I’m pretty dang pleased with myself. This seemed like a daunting task when I started and now I feel like I could do it again in half the time.

The hands:

Sorry about the dark backgrounds all the time. I drawing directly on white. It’s so harsh on the eyes. Especially since most of my drawing is done at 2am after the baby has gone to sleep. Anyway you can see they are a little rough. I have a problem with drawing 3 or more lines for each line. Some people choose to draw that way because it gives the image texture and depth. It can be a good way to show implied shadow as well. But for a concept artist its a bad habit. If a 3D modeler was to render an image I drew, he has to be completely certain where the line is.

I did a little bit better on the feet:

Look how clean those are. The feet were easily the fastest part of the assignment. My teacher, Tom Jung (I’ll make a post specifically about him and how he teaches the class soon), says feet for him are the hardest. You wouldn’t know it though because I specifically used his technique to draw it. He said “Draw a wedge and then a block and make it a foot” and really really simplified it. And that’s exactly what I did. Good job, Tom. That’s some dang good teaching.

Overall I got 80% on the assignment. I really hoped to get more since I put so much effort into it. I’ve gotten higher marks for other classes that took a fraction of the time. But for the faces it’s clear I had some issues with perspective so I can’t argue that it needs work. I’ve yet to get a 90% mark so that’s my current goal. I’m doing Week 10’s assignment now. Perhaps this is my week?!

Luff Michael

Good morning Diary,

In an effort to catch up to where I am in school this post is about the first 7 lessons of my schooling. Just the finished assignments. After this post I can start getting into more detail with future posts. Art school is like any other school anyway. The first few assignments are super easy and not that interesting to look at.

Week 1:

Yup. Lines and ellipses. Pretty exciting stuff. But the last page was kind of neat. I had to draw a round shape and then copy it over. Then I made faces out of them. You’ll notice the first two and the second two start with the exact same oval shapes. (Ignore the last face. It was an experiment with the brushes).

Week 2:

Shapes in perspective! Awww yeah. You’ll notice they don’t look quite right in some of them. If you’re like me and you draw a cube first to draw a cone or cylinder it’s very important that IT’S ACTUALLY A CUBE! Ugh. I suck.

Week 3:

Shaded shapes in perspective! Those are some fine looking shapes, right? I was supposed to use the shapes I did in week 2 but they were so wonky that I chose to start over. Also look at those shadows! Those are mathematically derived perfect shadows. I really liked this lesson.

Week 4:

Here we go. Now we are cookin’. I had to do a street scene. Any street scene. I chose a western street.

Week 5:

It’s the same street scene! Only it’s way nicer. I lost some marks on my ellipses like on the barrel or water tower. That continues to be an issue for me. Seems every week I get an ellipse wrong somewhere.

Week 6:

Oh, I forgot to mention. There may be nudities in this blog. So like… don’t look at the pictures you just looked at if you don’t like anatomy. I gave you fair warning. (Just kidding. It wasn’t fair)

Week 7:

Gestures. Ugh. These are not good actually. This assignment was done about a month ago (at the time of writing this) and now I’m actually starting over. You’ll see another post soon about all the gesture drawings I did last night. Not for school. Just because I really really REALLY (really) need to learn it better.

Ok so we got all that out of the way. The posts after this will get much more in depth into each lesson.

Love Michael

Dear Diary,

Two posts in one day?! You lucky guys. I’m trying to catch up to the current assignments with school but I don’t want to miss any so I’m rushing through the first 8 assignments (currently on 9…duh).

BUT this is about the portfolio I submitted when I applied for the scholarship at the school. It’s not many images. Scroll past them to learn if I was successful.

I failed! That was the outcome. Yup. No scholarships. But that’s ok. I knew going in that there is a lot I don’t know and that it would be a stretch. I’m glad I tried so I don’t have to wonder.

And yes, the spaceships are from my Fuzzy Outlaws comic. What of it? I like them. Lemme ‘lone.

Lurve Michael

Dear Diary,

As I said in the previous post, I am going to start posting all my assignments and adventures with the Vancouver Animation School concept art program. (I added a link to the school at the top of the website).

But first I’ll start with the concept art intro class that I took back in January. The school offers intro classes that last a month (4 lessons) to see if you like the school or can even keep up with the assignments. I loved every second of it. Before I even finished the course I was already signing up for the diploma class.

My teacher was Adrian Enciso and he was very good. A tough marker but he explained all your wins and fails very clearly. I always knew after where I went wrong. Here are the finished assignments:

Week 1:

Week 2:

Week 3:

Week 4:

You can see detailed posts about all these assignments at my comic site www.fuzzyoutlaws.com (I didn’t have mikewarddraws back then).

The old posts said my final mark was 76% but it was actually increased to 84%. I’m not sure why they images were remarked but I didn’t mind the extra percents at all.

Love Michael