College Update #4: Digital Media

The fourth class I'm taking this semester is digital media. It's a class about photography and Photoshop. These are some of the pictures I took for this class. Most of these are already on my flickr.

One of our projects was to take a picture based on the theme "darkness rising," and to practice using some of the different lighting techniques we learned about in class. I decided to go with a fallen angel theme. I took this picture in my dorm room and used my desk lamp for the lighting. 

For an in class assignment, we could do anything we wanted using photoshop techniques we learned that day. I decided to further edit a picture I made for a friend. I think it's safe to say that this is my favorite class. 

For another homework assignment, we had to clone ourselves. These are the two pictures I made. 

Our most recent assignment was to create a portrait of someone by making a collage out of pictures our professor gave us. I decided to use a picture of Buster from Arrested Development. This was extremely time consuming and by the time I was finished I had around 300 layers.

College Update #3: First Year Seminar for Illustrators

Another class I am taking this semester is a seminar for illustrators. My professors assign us 7 sketchbook pages every week based off of a certain topic they give us. These are a few of the ones I did for line quality. For these I just used microns and watercolor.

Below is a sketchbook I did for contrast and focal point. I used Vine charcoal, prismacolor markers and microns.

Our first big project for this class was to create a board game, and this is the box I made for mine. i learned a very important lesson from making this, which is never to use spray paint in your room.

College Update #2: Figure Drawing

Figure Drawing is the other studio drawing class I'm taking this semester. It's definitely one of my harder classes; drawing the human body is not easy. None of these drawings are particularly good, and the first 2, which are from my first day of class, are pretty laughable. But in retrospect, it's pretty encouraging to see the improvement I've made in only 6 weeks. All of these drawings are rough sketches because we only get 1-20 minutes for each pose. Our professor just wants us to focus on proportions and capturing the gesture of the model.

College Update #1: Analysis of Form

Analysis of form is one of two studio drawing classes I'm taking this semester. We only use charcoal in this class which was pretty challenging for me at first because it's not a medium I've used before.

For the first few weeks of class, we learned how to draw man-made objects, like bottles. To make drawings of man-made objects look realistic, it's important to have really straight lines. These drawings may not look like much but they take a pretty long time to do, because it takes a while to figure out the proportions of everything.

For extra credit, my professor told us we could start a perspective drawing. This is unfinished but it was interesting to practice using vanishing points.

One of our first bigger homework assignments was to draw and render a sphere. The first picture is the first sphere I did. When everyone brought their spheres to class again, our professor told us they were all horrible and to redo them. The second sphere is the one I redid and as you can probably see, there's a huge difference. I didn't really want to post the first sphere but I think it's cool to see the improvement.

This is a cube I drew in class. Our professor said we could render it at home if we wanted so that we could get extra practice.

This was our first project. We had set ups in class of a still life and we had to draw and render the shapes.