Downton Abbey Doodles Part 3

Just another quick doodle, until I can upload some landscape drawings that I've been working on. This is probably one of my favorite scenes in the series, when Mrs. Patmore manipulates the Ouija board to make it seem as though Williams spirit is communicating with Daisy. And of course Thomas is upset because she ruined his game :P.

"Artcation"

I went out of town to attend a couple of workshops last weekend, the first was a water color and gouache class being taught at Fort Mason in San Francisco by artist Erik Tiemens  http://www.watersketch.com/#home. It was really incredible to watch him paint, unfortunately my efforts don't measure up to his work just yet, but take a look at it anyway! : P

Modern art! (No, not really, these are pages of brush practices, to see how many variations of brush strokes we could create )

We started out with just playing with the materials first, just to see what gouache can do and the effect it had when mixed with the water color: 

We then made a mess thumbnails for inspiration while painting : 

And finally we made some "sketchy" practice paintings which were more like working out ideas for compositions rather than a complete painting: 

This one reminds me of a Fauvist painting (not what I was originally going for, but it's interesting)

 Strangely enough I like the simplest one the best ...

I then went down to Los Angeles for an animal drawing workshop taught by character designer/story artist David Colman (you can see his work here: http://davidcolman.blogspot.com/)

We started off by drawing skeletons of Ice age creatures at the La Brea Tar Pits: 

Bison skeleton

A mastodon skeleton if I remember correctly...?

Giant sloth skeleton

Camel skeleton

Some type of bird skeleton (They're all raptors! : P)

We then continued the class at the LA zoo, where we studied live animals (mainly giraffe's and eagles, as they were the most active during the time of day in which  we were visiting):

 Some corrections he helped me to see

 Really loose and sketchy eagles (Soooo many feathers!!!!Almost too many to draw!) 

And here is our final task, which was to draw a giraffe from memory, I still need to work on putting more 3D shapes into my figures, both human and animal. 

Both workshops were great! And make me want to keep drawing more than ever! More to come later! 

IF: Faded

Now that spring semester is finished, I'm trying to get back into the habit of doing a weekly Illustration Friday (even though for me it's more like every other week!) This weeks theme is Faded, which made me think of vintage photographs (maybe it's because of my new obsession of the early 20th century...or maybe it's because I went antique shopping last weekend) , either way I'm pretty happy with the results. 

Downton Abbey Doodles part 2

I think I may be suffering from a serious case of Downton Abbey withdrawal syndrome (January! Come faster!).  And so while looking at some behind the scenes photo's of season 3 I found this http://downtonline.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=314&pid=22883#top_display_media, and had to base a drawing off of it, because Thomas and Daisy are two of my favorite characters (William was my third  favorite :(  )

Yeah I know Thomas is being way out of character here, but it took me like 5 times to get his face just right. 

I may not have another post for a while, so please "bear with me" : P. 

Quick update

I have been trying to practice drawing more building exteriors and interiors lately (but mostly exteriors) because I feel that that is a real weak point for me, and is a pretty important skill. So I went looking for images of interesting buildings to practice off of, and came across a cool photo of the temple of Isis. 

And as a bonus! Here are some Legend of Korra doodles: Mako and his scarf

And the Korra crew in 1920's fashion, with an added sepia tone hue and saturation adjustment to make it look like an old photograph (I have nicknamed the Legend of Korra 1920's Avatar)

Downton Abbey Doodles

What? You've never heard of Downtown Downton Abbey!? Go watch it right now!!! I recently became addicted to this show and while I was watching the series for like the third time I made some character sketches in my sketchbook. And I am not sure why Mrs. Hughes head turned out so much bigger than the others! : P

Portraits and Pen and Ink

Here is some more work from my Figure Drawing class.  Last week we were focusing on the face and made a couple of portraits of the model, which was a good exercise because I haven't drawn faces (or at least not in great detail) for a long time!!!

We were then assigned to make a self-portrait of ourselves using dramatic lighting and wearing a hat, scarf, or just something different than what we normally wear, so here is me wearing a big floppy hat, looking silly but stylish (yeah you know you want this hat!)

And finally we began to work with ink this week which is fun yet frustrating, because it's a new material that I haven't worked with much and so I am super slow at getting things down on paper! 

More to come later...