Adventures with Gradient Mesh

Gave the gradient mesh tool a go in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and I think it turned out pretty decent:

(Original photo taken by benjamint444 and used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)

Not a total copy of the original photo (all the little details would have been incredibly tedious to re-create, but I've certainly seen others go to those lengths) but I think it gets the point across fairly well. Eventually I'd like to make a face with gradient meshes, but hey, baby steps... There are also a couple things I'd like to try to create some original illustrations with it. Let's see where the road takes us.

Anne Bonny, Pirate

I attended the September session of Aaron Miller's Figurative Illustration Workshop last night, and the model this month was dressed as Anne Bonny, the Pirate Queen. She wore a great costume with a ton of accessories, like sashes and pistols and swords. It was an overwhelming amount of detail; seriously, I could have spent days upon days trying to capture it all. As it was, I constantly had to fight with the tendency to linger on every little area, and instead concentrate on capturing the gesture and form. Hopefully there'll be good photorefs made available so I can go back in and give the paintings some more polish.

It's been a while since I've been to one of these workshops, and it was pretty evident to me how out-of-practice I was. I definitely felt very rusty, and slow. Still, it was a nice opportunity to use Colors!3D on the 3DS XL, and for the most part it worked out fairly well... I have to adjust to the XL's larger footprint; my hand cramped a couple times while holding it. But it sure was nice being able to paint on a (relatively) bigger touchscreen.

Overall, it was a great figure drawing/painting session, as per usual.

Tachikoma Tales: Almost There...

Here's the latest iteration of the Tachikoma illustration, with a bunch of changes... First of all, I looked up some more references and found out that the claw hand types needed to be swapped left-to-right, so I fixed that. Then I added outlines to help tighten the presentation some. There are a few more things I'd like to work on, but it's pretty close to done, I think.

New sketch batch

One of the things mentioned time and again in "Drawn to Life", one that's really made an impression on me, is the idea that gesture drawings are not about drawing "nouns" but about drawing "verbs". You're not just drawing a person, you're drawing an action... a person doing something, even if that something is just standing there, slouching about lazily.

As I've mentioned in my previous post, a good number of my commute sketches amount to the action "sitting down staring intently at a smartphone". I try to mix it up whenever the opportunity arises, though.

Smartphone poses

More commute sketches, this time with a theme:

It seems that people on smartphones make decent sketch models, since they tend to stay in a fixed position for a long time.

Tachikoma... Stiiiiill working on it.

This project is feeling like I'm rebuilding a muscle car in my garage... I work on it bit by bit, whenever the kid manages to take a nap, or my wife takes her out while running errands. It's coming along, perhaps at a snail's pace, but there's progress.

Here's my "to-do" list:

Out n' about

A smattering of sketches, mostly from my commute to work and back:

I recently picked up Walt Stanchfield's two-volume work "Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes" after reading about it on the Muddy Colors blog. Chock full of knowledge and great art, it's 800 pages worth of lectures on gesture drawing, storytelling, and changing the way you see. I've already read the first book cover-to-cover and just started the second, and it's genuinely been eye-opening. They can be hard to read sometimes– not because the books are poorly written, but because I find that every few pages I feel the urge to pull out my sketchbook and draw someone. Really good stuff.