anatomy

As a drawing exercise for myself, I have decided to go through the book "Anatomy for the Artist" and draw from the drawings in order to get a feel for anatomy and how the human body is put together. I'm attempting to improve my figure drawing skills and I know an understanding of the skeleton and muscles will definitely help. I remember we touched on anatomy a little bit in drawing class at Grant MacEwan, but my memory needs some refreshing. I'm struggling with the drawing everyday habit, and am hoping that an assignment for myself will give me some motivation/kick in the bum.

pencil


pencil

block printing

I have been playing around with relief printing this summer too, and find I have been enjoying it. More than I thought I would, as I wasn't super excited about it after doing the class projects. But experimenting on my own is fun. I tried doing another woodcut today on a found piece of wood, but it didn't really turn out. And I broke another cutting blade. oops. I might go to Lee Valley and check out their wood-cutting tools (one of my instructors recommended them for wood-cutting stuff).

This fern print was a present for mom for mother's day.

linocut print

This is a random doodle that came into my head. I'm not sure what it is.

safety-cut block print

life drawing

These are a series of sketches from a free weekly life drawing class at ECU. Well, free for students. :) I've only been to two sessions so far, but am trying to go regularly during the summer.

watercolor pencil


watercolor pencil


pencil crayon


conte


conte


conte

the ol' sketchblog

Time to start up the ol' sketchblog again. Here are a few sketches from the past couple months.

This garden sketch was done in the Nitobe Memorial garden at the UBC campus. Very peaceful japanese garden, and cheap to get in too. I think it was four bucks or something, free if you're a UBC student.

watercolor

These goose sketches were done at the Convention Centre downtown. I was walking around the outdoor walkway and this canada goose was hanging out there and didn't move around too much, so I decided to draw it.

watercolor


watercolor

Sketch of various objects on a table while visiting at a friend's house in the suburban sprawl known as Chilliwack. That's a BB gun btw.

pencil

Statue outside Vancouver aquarium.

pencil

mmm.... coffee....

Finally submitted my t-shirt design to Threadless. It has been on the backburner for way too long. Check it out below and vote!

sculpture adventures

Here are some process pics from my adventures in sculpture class. I have found this class extremely challenging so far. I am definitely out of my comfort zone! My brain is having a hard time coming up with ideas in 3D. But we're learning some fun things. We had a plaster demo a couple weeks ago that involved the instructor pouring plaster into our cupped hands. So now I have a weird looking plaster cast of my hand sitting on my table. I think I would like to try plaster some more, it looks like it could be lots of fun.

Last class we learned how to do a vacuum-form. Really cool stuff. Well I think it's cool. The vacuum-form machine has a metal plate that you put your object on (whatever you want to do a vacuum-form of), and there's a heater on the top of the machine. Inbetween the metal plate and heater there is a slot that you clamp a sheet of special plastic into. Basically the heater heats up the plastic sheet, and when the plastic is hot enough and flexible you pull the plastic sheet down on top of your object. Then you pull up a lever to release the air pressure (?) and it sucks all the air out. And you're left with a plastic shell/container of your object.

For part of my current project I have a hand form/container. So I started by making a clay model of a hand. This was my first time working with clay since junior high, so it's not stellar or anything, but that's okay.


modeling clay

Then once I had the model of the hand, I put it in the vacuum-form machine which created this:


styrene


styrene

ta da! I was scared of using the machine at first, but it wasn't so bad. It was kinda fun.

portrait

charcoal

one more pic from drawing class. We did portrait studies in the last class.