Archive for the 'Process' CategoryPage 2 of 3

Puffs

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by
Lee-Roy
on February 6, 2007
in Process and Uncategorized
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I’ve just been experimenting with a Windsor & Newton Series 7 #2 brush and Speedball Super Black India Ink and testing its water-resistance. So far I’m pretty pleased. I was enjoying inking with the Sumi-filled Aquash, but the sumi ink is just so sensitive to water, that I couldn’t go back into the drawing with watercolor. The Speedball ink seems to flow nicely and adds the advantage of being “waterproof.” This was done on a smooth-surface bristol.
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Also, a special shoutout to my brother. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, V!!!

Kaimana Favorite in Color

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on January 25, 2007
in Field, Life and Process
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Pow! Here’s some intense color. Click for a larger version.
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Also, here’s the original drawing once again for comparison:
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Update: Note, I’ve been told that the colors come up a bit dark for some Windows users. Sorry, folks! It looks very bright on my Mac and I have no PC to check it with.

Holiday Lights Sketch

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on December 25, 2006
in Design, Illustration and Process
. 2 Comments
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This was my first and very spontaneous sketch for the design of Holiday Lights. After a couple of failed attempts to improve upon the composition, I ultimately just decided to follow it exactly. Sometimes the first ideas are the best.

Gots Mad Doodles: Color In Progress

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Lee-Roy
on September 8, 2006
in Character and Process
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Coloring was interrupted by some recent busy-ness, but here it is in progress, with the final version to come when I’m able. You might notice that I edited the original doodle a little bit. The “tee-hee” guy just wasn’t working as well as the other t-shirted blokes. I scooted the fairy over a little to balance the void.

Red Pimento Pondering

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on August 25, 2006
in Character, Illustration and Process
. 5 Comments
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This is my illustration of Bill Murray in the role of Jacques Chirac for the new movie, Jacques In America. I heard that prosthetic nose required several hours in the make up chair each day.
Read on to see earlier stages of this illustration.

Continue reading ‘Red Pimento Pondering’

One Colorful Suspicious Character

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on August 18, 2006
in Character, Illustration and Process
. 2 Comments
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Post-It Doodles Probiscus Party, Plus

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on August 10, 2006
in Abstract, Character and Process
. 6 Comments

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I’ve been holding back, but here now is more glorious ball-point pen on Post-Its. Some familiar schnozzes in profile. Three of them. And since they say three’s a crowd, then I suppose it can be a party, too. And since I did my drawing of Dave Letterman, I’ve periodically been trying my hand at Regis Philbin. He had been on the program that night, but I just couldn’t capture his likeness. You’d think he’d be easy, but I was surprised. Included above is my latest attempt. Still has a little ways to go to being recognizable. I think it looks more like a somewhat heavy-set Conan O’Brien doing his impression of Regis, but it’s a lot closer than my first attempts.

And then, well, sometimes these things just happen…

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All of the above were drawn with one of these babies:

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When I saw this in the back-to-school section of the drug store, it instantly took me back to about 4th grade or so. An impulse buy to gratify the inner child.

My Favorite Pencils

Published
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Lee-Roy
on July 24, 2006
in Process
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I love the feel of a wood pencil, but for the sake of never having to sharpen that wood away to get to the good stuff, I’ve taken to the mechanical pencil more of late and this recent purchase has made me even more of a fan. Check out the gushing comment I sent to Pentel:
The Twist-Erase is my new favorite pencil! I do a lot of erasing and am annoyed by most brands’ way of using the eraser as a plug, so the design of this pencil is really ideal. Also, the quality of the eraser is superb. It yields a greater range of erasure from just a lightening of the line to a total clean erase and rarely ever smudges. Thanks, Pentel! Please don’t ever change this design or compromise the quality of this product.
For those folks who would turn a nose up to drawing with a mechanical pencil, note that a lot of the doodles, and café and beach sketches that I’ve posted on here recently were drawn with one. You can still get a fair amount of expressiveness out of that 0.5mm lead. With a light touch, extend the lead out a little further and hold the pencil to the side, and you can get a bit of tone as well (see the shading in Dave’s suit jacket in my previous post for an example). For the broader strokes and shading, though, I pick up my 2mm mechanical drafting pencil with a 4B lead. Here’s a pic:
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A nice thing about the drafting pencil as a sketch tool, is that it often doesn’t need to be sharpened. If drawing at an angle, the lead seems to keep itself sharp enough just rubbing against the paper. In fact, I’d say you get a more interesting point than one straight out of a sharpener, because it has a bit of bevel to it, so you can get a wider variation of lines. But when I do want that pristine point, as is pictured above, I use a lead pointer. Because you’re only sharpening the lead and not the wood, it’s much faster to sharpen one of these. You also don’t have to fuss with cheap sharpeners always breaking your lead because they can’t cut through the wood.
By the way, all of my recent life drawings posted here were drawn with this last pencil.

April Figures: Dynamics, Part V of V!

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on June 29, 2006
in Life and Process
. 2 Comments

The last of the April Figures and Dynamics series, I promise. Then I’ve got a little stack of post-it doodles to post …it.

More of the whole image with detail(s).

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April Figures: Dynamics, Part IV of V?

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on June 28, 2006
in Life and Process
. 2 Comments

Still not done. I think I should have one more post from the “Dynamics” series after this one. Here are a few more drawings of Clay from Karl Gnass’s drawing seminar. I tried something new with these images, giving you a full drawing and a detail of that drawing in each.

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I exaggerated things a little on this last one.

April Figures: Dynamics, Part III of IV?

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on June 27, 2006
in Character, Life and Process
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Now here’s a hodge-podge. A quick sketch of the class skeleton, a character doodle, and some anatomy notes squeezed in, alongside a “serious” drawing of Clay.

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And a quick portrait sketch I sneaked in between taking notes from Karl.

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April Figure: In Color

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on June 24, 2006
in Life and Process
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I did some color experimenting with one of the drawings from my previous post. A bit overworked, maybe, but I thought it worth the post.

April Figures: Dynamics, Part I of II

Published
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Lee-Roy
on June 23, 2006
in Life and Process
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figures200604_05fThese are drawings I did in a day-long drawing seminar with Karl Gnass, titled Using the Force: Dynamics of the Figure. The dynamics we concentrated on were, as Karl explained, not the dynamics of Burne Hogarth, which are more about dynamic action poses and drawing the figure with lots of really well-developed muscles all working simultaneously. Perhaps if you’re drawing a superhero lifting a car or a locomotive, it might be appropriate for every muscle to be engaged, but for anyone else you might draw who isn’t a superhero, it’s an unnatural and, in several respects, non-dynamic way of portraying the figure.
Karl defines dynamics as opposing forces working together. So, for example, if you are reaching up with your right arm, your left arm is hanging down and your feet are pushing into the floor. Some muscles are stretching and pulling and others are dropped or relaxed. There is a push and pull, a give and take in the body. The dynamics reveal themselves in the anatomical elements, or stage 3 as described previously — in the muscles, bones, and joints — and so we concentrated a bit more on those elements in this seminar. Attention was still given to the first two stages — gesture (which gives you vitality) and conceptual forms (building a 3-D model of the action, not a stiff) — and their importance in describing the dynamics of the figure, as well.

April Figures: A Couple More

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on June 15, 2006
in Life and Process
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These were drawn when I sat in on one of Karl’s evening painting classes and so it was quite a long pose. It had been a while since I’d had this much time with one pose, so I had a little fun getting into the superficial details. I’m referring to the one on the left, of course. The one on the right, I drew just in the last few minutes of the same pose and from a different angle. It’s perhaps not as pretty a picture — it doesn’t have those dramatic cast shadows or the weight of the first — but it may just be a more successful study of gestural, three-dimensional, and anatomical form.

April Figures

Published
by
Lee-Roy
on June 14, 2006
in Life and Process
. 5 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve posted some figure drawings. There are a lot of them, so I’ll post them in increments. Here’s the first batch. I think all of these are from April.

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The above drawings were short poses, I’m not sure how long, from Karl Gnass’s class. Karl teaches us to concentrate on three main levels in drawing the figure.

  1. Gesture (What is the Model doing? What’s the Story? The “Spirit of the Pose.”)
  2. Conceptual/Volumetric Forms (Spherical, Cylindrical, Conical, etc.)
  3. Anatomical Forms (Bone, Ligament, Tendon, Muscle.)

There are more levels beyond these three and of course, more that is involved with just these three, but these are the main ones, and the ones we start out with. They are three aspects of drawing the figure that we may examine separately or simultaneously. However, if we separate them and move through our drawing in the order of these three stages, we can begin to pinpoint our weaknesses. The goal in the end, I think, is to have each of these three support the other. You should not have anatomy which does not reinforce the gesture or help tell the story, or anatomy that does not describe volume or three-dimensional form, for example.

I found, in examining these stages, that I wanted to skip over the second stage. I didn’t like conceptualizing the forms of the figure into cones and cylinders, etc.. I felt like I was turning the model into a mannequin and anyway, I knew I could draw well enough to get those nice curves of the anatomy. Why mess around with this kid stuff? Well, what I realized was that although I understood a fair amount of the 3-dimensional forms in front of me, how they took up space, that’s not what I was drawing. Or rather, that is what I was drawing, but that’s not what I was communicating. I relied very heavily on the contour — the outline shape of things — and on duplicating those details, albeit in a stylized fashion, which seemed to be describing the form in front of me. Perhaps ironically, simply drawing what is in front of you is not the best way of describing what is in front of you. Now, to be honest, I did have some capacity to describe the 3D forms of things, but I was pretty lazy about it, really.

So, I am continuing to try and develop my skills of “drawing in the round.” I still think I have a tendancy to fall back on my old ways of seeing the figure and it’s a constant struggle to see in a new way, but more and more when I look at my drawings, I’m seeing little things that I don’t think were there before. That’s exciting. And at the same time, there is a little nagging part of me that seems to mourn the old comfortable way of working. Growing pains.