megacon sneak peak

heres an image i was asked to do for our annual megacon poster thats going to be hung up at the schools booth - i had oodles of fun!

pratt, thiel and perez about to put the beating on an a random anime character

buildings

the other day i was asked to draw some buildings!

its weird though, i get so lost drawing architecture. my mind goes blank and before i know it the paper is covered with all kinds of nonsense. anyway, heres a little update;

ink / gouache



and a montage test of them all thrown together




oddly enough i had fun doing these and hope to have the chance to do more soon.

more updates coming, ive been fiddling around with pastels a lot recently.

cheers,
tyler

Lawrence of Arabia...an artventure!

well,

this was an adventure all in itself for me! i kind of documented my process on this one for a change, so here we go;

first, and most obviously - i watched the movie again! i started taking notes and throwing ideas that came to me during the film, and once i narrowed down some concepts, i began super rough thumbnails for a composition




i was pretty happy with the designs on the upper right.

normally at this stage, i'd jump into a photo reference shoot - but luckily i just grabbed some people and had them pose for me and did drawing on the spot

from here i started to begin doing the final. i kind of have a rule i give myself for each assignment, some say it could be a good or bad thing, but for now, as a student, i think it's a good thing - always try something new.

ive been raving about this soft acrylic gel medium to my friends lately because it just such fun to use - i used it before to layer ink and gouache over eachother for fun times previously - but i had no idea it could ALSO be used to transfer imagery (!!) i had to investigate this, so a simple search on google led me to a couple of nice step by steps and i immediately hopped aboard. this was the start of the ink drawing i did of lawrence on the bike




after it dried, i scanned him in and printed out and prepped my things for the transfer test

basically it came down to these steps

1. print out the image with it flipped horizontally

2. lather the image with the acrylic gel medium

3. lay face down on board / paper and let it dry (at this point they said to let it stand for a day or two...i just hit it with a hair dryer hah)

and finally,

4. get cloth towel and soak it in water, then rub the paper until it starts to shrivel up and becomes brushed away, as documented here;




voila! it was a success! so here on out i was ready to go! i transfered it to the paper (rives BFK):



you may ask what the reason for doing the transfer was when i already did the drawing itself? well, let me explain simply. i believe no matter what type of imagery you work on, there should always be a sense of history to it. not the way you may be thinking as weathered or torn though, but rather the time spent on the creation of it. the end results of spending that time usually yield greater results.

the black mass of his jacket was given a great effect where some of the paper that i washed off was left behind, and the fibers seeped through the gel and gave it a cloudy look - it was a suprise when i washed it away to say the least!

from here i kept trucking;



at that point i brought out my pin roller and masked off all of the positive space, mixed some paint and rolled over the background. this photo doesnt pick it up, but the paint was really close to the undercoat of paint i used which led to some issues later on




initially the camel was done with oils and a galkyd / wax medium i mixed to give a nice gummy effect to the paint (and quickened the drying time). once the paint began to dry i mixed up more of that acrylic gel and some cad red (acrylic) and lathered it ontop of the already gummy surface. it resulted with some nice textures youll see below

here was the first draft of the final, the one i put up for critique in class



i got some great crits from my instructor george pratt about the background color being too close in value to lawrence and especially about the text used, which i will admit, is bland and lifeless in this version. he also suggested i explore more color's for the camel, so that was one of the first things i did. also while i was on the computer fooling with it, i tried lightening up the background to seperate the two and found a good solution for that.

also began thinking of new ideas for the type



in the end though, i thought the red held its weight. the others i liked equally, but the red had a certain gravitas to it that i thought worked well with the subject matter.

anyways i knew what i had to do now and that was to go back into it traditionally and lighten up the background with an off-white color and figure out more approaches for the typography.

i hit the paper again and came up with more typography (hand made) to be used later on



im sure you can tell some of these words dont make sense. well i get lazy sometimes and realize 'oh, i already made that letter, i can just clone it in photoshop'.. which is exactly what i did

anyways, after great guidance and great crits from my fellow artists and designers alike, i finally came to a version i liked and felt happy with



some detail shots:








(^this version, i believe, was printed out and hung up on campus somewhere... not sure though!)

there we have it, that was my artventure, i had fun, hope you did too~

till next time!

cheers,
tyler

art dump

i posted these on DAS couple days ago, but thought i'd dump them on here too! these are some pages from my recent sketchbook - digital color thrown in afterwards.















also started doing some more gesture drawing in figure which has been a nice change of pace and a great warm up.








hectic couple of weeks, excuse the slow updates please! heh

cheers,
tyler