Summer Training >:)

**ArcZephyer** · May 6th, 2010, 12:12 AM

Hello everyone, my name is James Joyce, I'm 22 and like all of you I'm an aspiring artist. I changed my major a year ago from Computer Science to Studio Art and worked my butt off to finish where I was attending so I could move on to an art school to get some proper training. I tried to start a sketchbook last year but the work load was too much and I had to focus on my classes (you'd be surprised how little drawing there was in my studio art classes). My work has paid off so far, I've got my degree, I'll be going to LCAD in the fall, and I might have even improved at drawing

However I still have a long way to go and I hope this second chance at making a sketchbook here will be more fruitful than the last.

On a side note I have some progress from my past year on my blog(link in the signature) in case anyone wants to take a look.

We did blind contour drawings of these things then drew them after for like 20min

Self Portrait

First time doing gesture drawings

Some people we had 20min to draw

Mass drawings

Some sculpture drawing and cloth

Styrofoam cup

Hands (in order of which I did them)

My midterm (in order)

Portrait of my friend

My final which is the most recent thing I've done

and some random pages outa my sketchbook

**ArcZephyer** · May 16th, 2010, 03:44 PM

I'm not posting everything I did in the past week, frankly I'm embarrassed by some of the stuff I do lol I'm sure I'll get it over it eventually!

some loomis stuff

vilpuu, I've been playing around with gesture and the sphere form but I didn't want to post the pages of circles and spheres lol so here's one

an awful self portrait and after that I got frustrated and since I can't draw eyes or lips I decided to draw some using loomis head and hands as a guide

banana and pepper shaker thing

and some pen stuff, again theres more but didn't post it, didn't want it to get redundant

some pictures are wierd cuz of the lighting from the photo I took...

**Wr00m** · May 16th, 2010, 04:05 PM

Good thing you're checking out Loomis books, It's a good start. My main tip for you would be trust what you see (specially at the beginning). ex. If doing a portrait drawing don't think of the nose as a nose, think of the shape you see instead.
Sorry if I'm being confusing.

Another tip would be get a good quality and variation of line. (Vary thickness, speed etc).

**ArcZephyer** · May 17th, 2010, 11:10 PM

Hey thanks for posting

and your not being confusing at all, I've been through the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book (think it's betty edwards) and she talks all about that. Never thought about variation of line but when I looked it up you can tell it adds more personality to drawings so thanks for the tip I'll try it out.

Anyways here's something I did today of this sculpture in the garden

**NeloWolf** · May 17th, 2010, 11:14 PM

Good start, keep on drawing and posting. I'm liking where you're going with that pen sketching.
'long as you keep on doing those basic exercises and studies, you'll be on your way.

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2010, 06:36 PM

Thanks NeloWolf, I'm just working away on the basics

I've been away at Mass Art and Design taking a Life Drawing course where we learned how to draw the figure from life. It was an amazing class and I learned so much in only about two weeks and the teacher was just as amazing. His name is Gerry Hoag and I found some of his work http://www.giotto.org/cimabue/hoag/index.html in case anyone wants to see the quality of his work.

I'll be putting up all the things I drew in the next few hours...there's like 55 pictures so it will take a while.

**Philip133** · June 3rd, 2010, 07:12 PM

Nice drawings, you're way better than me

I decided to become a concept artist literally a week ago, and it seems that's my way to go, so I have to learn and learn and learn and practice much. Hehehe.
Post some more

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2010, 07:24 PM

The first thing we learned in class besides how to setup the figure with arcs was the bony landmarks of the body.

The first image I messed up on the proportion, the line farthest to the left is mine then the other is the teachers. Also for a while I had trouble making my drawings smaller so you'll see a lot of body shots before we go over composition. The little drawing in the corner of the third picture was because I was getting to curvy with my lines for the head and he showed me how if you were using straight lines(or arcs) how you could make a circle.

Next we had a to wait for the model so we drew the scuplture of the body used for anatomy reference, then we had a female model.

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2010, 07:39 PM

I think this is where we had another model (some of these are probably out of order sorry lol) Our teacher started to give us poses with foreshortening and as you can tell I had some trouble with it.

You'll be able to notice on these drawings that there are vertical and horizontal lines and that's because we learned some sighting techniques.

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2010, 08:13 PM

Ok switching back to male model and more foreshortening. The first picture I started probably three times the pose caused so many problems for me. But there were some I got the hang of like the one of him laying down.

and more pictures...

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2010, 08:22 PM

some more practice...I even started to refine some of the drawings and I made it bigger so some smaller marks could be seen.

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2010, 08:53 PM

So this should be the last post. We started using L frames to make a better composition which are basically those L rulers except cardboard and two of them so you can create a composition and size it to your liking. It's like a sizable viewfinder and it was very handy.

We only learned a small amount about shading and it was fairly simple.

So that's all I have sorry to have such a huge update but I wanted to get it all out there.

**ArcZephyer** · June 10th, 2010, 11:45 PM

Thanks philip, yea I'm headed to concept art too but I want to "conquer" some fine arts techniques along the way hehe.

**LadyLooLauren** · June 11th, 2010, 12:38 AM

Pretty good start for your sketchbook! Keep at it, yo. My advice is to work on making you figure studies more fluid. Use lighter strokes and think curvy! Don't be afraid of being a bit messy, it takes the pressure off to make the strokes perfect ;D

**shako** · May 15th, 2011, 08:16 PM

hey thanks for the comment! keep at the anatomy stuff, its tough but we'll get it eventually

**ArcZephyer** · May 17th, 2011, 10:43 PM

Here's some vilppu sphere stuff, playing around with line weight and some head studies

**ArcZephyer** · May 18th, 2011, 10:01 PM

Two self portaits today, I feel like today was one of those days where no matter what I did, the drawing was gonna be bad....ugh well I'll shake it off and do something different tomorrow.

**ArcZephyer** · May 22nd, 2011, 08:43 PM

I'm trying to get the construction of the head down, I think I'm finally beginning to understand it though, gonna try another self portrait tonight.

The other thing was studying Vilppu box forms until I decided to make it more interesting.

**ArcZephyer** · May 24th, 2011, 11:48 PM

Some Bridgman hands studies, which I think I took far too long drawing, and a self portrait.

**ArcZephyer** · May 28th, 2011, 01:07 AM

The digital painting is inspired from 30 rock, it's apparently the most handsome animal

And then I just had fun drawing some random stuff.

**ArcZephyer** · May 29th, 2011, 10:13 PM

A quick apple from life and head studies.

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2011, 12:33 AM

A few more things...

**ArcZephyer** · June 3rd, 2011, 07:56 PM

The first is a white container for a cylinder study I guess, I think I'll do more of them later with different lighting conditions. Then a quick character and still life of a lemon which I think came out pretty good, took just over an hour.

**ArcZephyer** · June 5th, 2011, 03:23 PM

Near the end of school I wanted to do a tribute piece to the character Ace from Eiichiro Oda's One Piece. If you haven't read the manga or seen the anime I won't spoil anything, this is just a tribute to Ace and Luffy's brotherhood.

I decided on making three of them where they would get older in each one. So the first one is as kids and the second one I just finished with the general line work. If anyone would like to critique the image so I can make any changes while I'm painting it, that would be awesome

**TheKuu** · June 5th, 2011, 04:46 PM

Nice One Piece work. The lines on the latest one look pretty good, but the perspective looks off. Unless Ace is leaping 4 feet into the air, then it's all good haha. Keep on posting.

**ArcZephyer** · June 11th, 2011, 08:14 PM

Finished with the one piece thing, though it didn't come out exactly as I'd hoped. I think I'll start working on color studies next, because my color choices tend to be too random

**ArcZephyer** · June 20th, 2011, 10:34 AM

I wanted to work on color so I've been going through the peer project thread from Apathy and so far it's been wicked helpful. Though I suppose I should work on value in black and white traditionally before I move on to color, I just can't help myself. Besides color I've been trying to quickly sketch things at work which more or less turns into giant mess but it's still fun, I'll post some of them next time.

**ArcZephyer** · July 12th, 2011, 11:38 PM

I pre-apologize for the state of these images, my moniter died last week and since I'm moving to california next week it would be unwise to get a new one until then. So I hooked up my tv to my computer which doesn't work very well

but it does the minimum that I need.

So I've been practicing gesture pretty much all the time lately, it's one thing I want to improve on before school starts so when I get live models I can use them to the best of my ability. Really everything below except for the dude in the grass skirt is referenced from some photo and even then I referenced the head! It was such a pain to add this many photos, I'll remember to combine all my gestures into one photoshop document next time.

**Ven S** · July 13th, 2011, 12:46 AM

Holy crap thats alot of studies. Keep going man

**ArcZephyer** · August 7th, 2011, 02:51 AM

As I mentioned in the first post I'm going to LCAD in the fall and since I was living in Maine I had to move out here. I have now officially moved into my apartment in Lake Forest, CA! I had to road trip it out here with my cousin since I need my car and so I've been on quite a long vacation, but it's been incredibly fun

I have finally settled from the vacation craziness and though I had little time to draw I'm excited for my classes coming up starting the 29th of August. The foundation courses are four hours long and when I get to the regular classes they are six hours long! The longest class I've ever taken was 1hr and 15min so this should be interesting. I did sketch a few things on the road trip though it's a meager effort on my part...it was one of those vacations where you have no time to yourself and you need a vacation from the vacation. Needless to say tomorrow I'm back to work with the Summer training starting right now!