Sunday, 16 September 2012

Recent Practice Drawings

Here's a few experiments I did to get to grips with my new pens and brushes;


This was a very quick sketch of an eagle's head drawn using dipping pens, I didn't do any planning and I just dived straight in with the ink which is why it's not central and the proportions are all wrong. Recently I've been looking at a lot of illustrations created by drawing one half of an animals face and then flipping over the other side to create a perfectly symmetrical image, I love the really bold compositions this creates so I'll probably try that out at some point.
 This lion was another quick sketch using 0.5 fine line pen, I'm finding myself paying a lot more attention to the angles of my drawings and I'm trying to make everything less flat. Once again I did no planning for this and started with the nose and drew the rest around it.
 The other day i was watching a video on "Funny or Die" where Jason Alexander (the guy in "Seinfeld" who's not Jerry Seinfeld) was joking with people at a 99% rally and in the background there was the brilliant painting of a severed pigs head with a top hat and a monocle. I really loved the painting (it wonderfully summed up the entire movements ambitions) but I'm yet to find the artist behind it so as I was sitting at my desk and decided to do a study of a pigs head. As I was painting it I was reminded of the Barrack Obama quote "You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig" (referring to Sarah Palin) and I had this in mind as I applied the watercolour paints.
 When I used the diffuser to spray paint on the Robo Cop drawing below I put down a few sheets of paper from my 40p Asda notepad to protect the surrounding surfaces and when I picked up the drawing I was left with a rectangular frame across two sheets. I had my dipping pen and ink out and I hate to waste paper so I quickly sketched (from memory) a photograph of the actor Danny Trejo by Estaven Oriol. Although I literally thrashed this out in a couple of minutes so I was surprisingly pleased when it turned out like this;
 I read an article about Richard Branson in the Guardian website and there was a really good picture of him which I think had been taken as he was genuinely smiling rather than posing for a photo, it was a perfect reference for a caricature so I sketched this out. Although I think it works as a cartoon I would have liked it to appear less flat.
 Two of my favourite movie ingredients are robots and american police officers so as you can probably guess I love Paul Verhoeven's "Robocop". This one didn't really end up as planned (I was trying to replicate the style Frank Miller's "Sin City" comic noires) but I learnt a lot about dry brushing by not dry brushing very well...
 This was one of the first drawings I did with my new ink and I really enjoyed working A3 sized paper again. The photo doesn't really do the drawing justice but I used lot of shading and detail using dip pens to try to make the eyes a focal point. The rest of the shading was done using brushes and different consistencies of ink and water. The drawing is of rapper Killer Mike
Also I've put together a portfolio of my work so far, if you want to see some of my I.B. work or all my stuff in one place click here.

No comments:

Post a Comment