Famous Artists School Exercise

Recently I bought the 3 book set of the Famous Artist School books off of EBay. This is the old (mine is 1960)correspondence school with the ads that have you draw the parrot and send it in.

I've worked on some of the projects in my sketchbook, but this is the first one I've really sat down and spent several days working on the lesson.

The lesson was on drawing textures and patterns. The assignment was to duplicate a photo with an emphasis on the textures and patterns.

I wanted to take my time on this lesson because I feel this is one (of many) areas where my skills are lacking.

My goal with these lessons is to deconstruct my drawing skills, to go back to square on. I am, for the time being, forgetting about comics and focusing solely on my drawing skills.

Syrobots!

I saw this today on the wired blog and I thought Oh Holy Cow, I should not have seen this!

This is a robot made of those Styrofoam wedges in the sides of the box when you buy something electronic nowadays.

The Wired blog was this first one, which the writer and his son made.

This is so cool! I could waste serious amounts of time doing this. Before I strated drawing every spare minute this was the kind of thing I would do.

Well, maybe not this cool. But just obsessive projects.

The original inspiration for the father/Son project was this:

Seriouly, how sick is that?

You can read more here:http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/08/the-styrobot.html

Congratulations D. L. Nelson!

D. L. Nelson is the first holder of the coveted 'Paul', the travelling trophy for RISK: The game of world conquest.

In a bold move, D. L. eliminated his last opponets in one sweep down North America, through South America, up Africa and finally decimating Europe to become the current Ruler of the World.


Keep watching here to see who will next hold "The Paul".

My Birthday!

This weekened was my birthday and while my family party is next weekend, I still had a lot of fun.

To start with, on Friday Michelle & I went to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. There is a travelling exhibit of Roman art from the Louve. My only problem with the museum is I've been fortunate to travel around some and been to some really good museaums and ours isn't quite there yet.

(However, if you ever visit Oklahoma City, I HIGHLY recommend you check out the Western Heritage Museum, one of the nicest collections of western art anywhere.)

Then we went down to the tunnels under downtown Okc. Now called The Underground, this was The Concourse when I was a kid during the '80s. There used to be a lot of shops, but the late '80s oil bust kinda caused them to fall into disuse.

I visted the concourse 2 years ago when I had jury duty downtown, but was fairly unimpressed, but I did see potential.

Not they have done some renovation and I think they may be trying to re-vitalize The Concourse.

Which would be cool because every city needs a series of underground tunnels under it, because where else would the trolls live?

Finally, on Saturday my ebay purchase of the Famous Artist Course books came in. I had flipped through a set of these a few years ago at SDCC, but they were $200-$300 and that might as well have been a million dollars.

I had totally forgotten how cool these are. I am planning on taking some time and working through them. I think I will learn a lot from them.

Finally, on Saturday night some guys came over for a game of RISK, the game of world conquest, but I think that gets it's own post!

Octopus

WHEN I was a kid, I had this very vivid dream about going into this large old house. Inside, the house was done up like some kind of aquarium, like a house Captain Nemo would live in.

(If you've been to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, the house felt kind of like the room with the big whale.)

The dream ended when the floor opened up and I slid into a large pool of water with some big fish in it.

When I drew this, I was thinking about that dream and the vibe I got from that house.

Batman

In the same sketchbook I found my Confederacy of Dunces drawing I found this drawing of Batman.

I was trying something a little different, using more of the side of the pencil.

Not sure if I'd like to draw everything this way, but I still like this drawing.

And after all, isn't the point of a sketchbook the freedom to experiment?

maybe if I did more of these...

Confederacy of Dunces

I was looking through an old sketch book and found this drawing I did about 8 months ago.

It's the main characters in "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole.

Dunces is one of may favorite books ever, I even have the audiobook on my cellphone.

If you've never read the book, it the story of Ingantius Rielly, who is a pompus slacker who is engaged in writing and indictment of this century, on big chief tablets, no less.

What really makes the book enjoyable is the juxatosition of Ingantius' pompus attitude and his complete inepitutde and general inability to complete the easist tasks.

Iron Man

A quick drawing of Iron Man. A co-worker told me he thought the best art i've ever done was my 24 hour comic I did 2 years ago.

Holy Cow, what about all the work I've done since then?

Anyway, his point, I think, was he thought my work was better when it was loose and an easy way to draw loose is to draw fast.

Sounds good, except that can be really tricky. Where's the line between loose and sloopy?

Anyway, we were slow at work today so i drew this trying to work fast and stay loose. It was done with a H leadholder, but I had to darken the scan so it looks like I drew it with a ballpoint.

(If you look close, you can see where i spilt coffee on my scratchpad! You can also see it on the Batman drawing!)

More Sketchbook stuff