I picked up the sketchbook and drawing textbook again this weekend, so here’s what I managed to draw:
First off, an attempt to draw Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who, based on a still frame from near the beginning of “Robot of Sherwood.” I tried to do this a week earlier with a full-face portrait of Jenna-Louise Coleman as Clara, and gave up in the middle because I couldn’t get her to look anything like right. It’s possible my standards were too high for Jenna. This doesn’t really look like Capaldi, but at least I got myself to finish and it’s recognizably a man:
Well, one thing I managed to do during August was pull out my “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” stuff and do a few profile portrait exercises, including a live sketch of my mom. First, though, was another copying exercise. Here’s the profile picture that I was copying out of the workbook, “Madame X” by John Singer Sargent:
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about drawing here on the blog; in fact, it’s been a while since I’ve done much drawing. I gave myself some goals in December and reached them, but I also realized that it was a little depressing to work on drawing in the winter without much natural light. But I do have some sketches that I wanted to share with you before I forgot about them entirely.
A September exercise out of the ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ workbook; my own knees and feet in perspective. 😉
I think this was my first try at the ‘books on a table’ still life perspective exercise. I probably have another whack at it around somewhere, because I wasn’t that impressed, but I couldn’t find it when I was taking stuff in to get it scanned. Read the rest of this entry »
So, I’ve been working for a while at the Storywonk Making Magic class. It’s taken me a little while to get into the magic groove, actually, (odd since I’m such a fantasy fan,) but there’s some great stuff in the course. I totally recommend it, especially for the encouraging tips Lani has about different ways to go out and hunt your magic; activities to help you get in touch with your muse, and sort out the inspiration you need for this particular book.
The first big exercise was the soundtrack. I love using music to fuel my inspiration, and Lani had some good tips for how to pick a good soundtrack, and avoiding the dangers of using something with too many memories that don’t really fit the book. On the other hand, I found I had some problems with her approach of going out and finding brand new music, because it takes me too long to figure out how I feel about a new song. So for my ‘Alien Love on a Kitchen Scale’ soundtrack, I ended up going through the ‘mid-tier’ of my music collection, considering a bunch of songs that I kinda liked but hadn’t rated with high numbers of stars. A few B-list songs snuck in there, mostly because I couldn’t shake the fact that they’d shown me something important about my characters, and I had to work for a few days cutting the list down to a length that seemed reasonable. Here’s the final soundtrack, more or less in the order of priority I was using to axe the last few stragglers:
Hello again, dear friends and followers. Sorry I haven’t been updating more often, but I guess I got out of the habit when I was off at Odyssey.
So, first off, I wanted to share another ‘Right side of the brain’ drawing tonight. I did this at the end of August, another perspective exercise, featuring the corner of a room:
I do like the way it came out, though sometimes I worry that I’m not getting too much from these exercises the way I come back to them every few weeks. I need to get started on some more drawing for September, maybe I’ll get some done this weekend.
So, what else have I been up to? Well, reading some cool short stories on my Kindle, (and out of the free copy of Asimov’s Magazine that Sheila Williams gave us when she came to lecture at Odyssey; that was my ‘to read in line’ staple back when I was at Fan Expo.) Also keeping up with Team Ambitious, the Odyssey class of 2013’s online critique circles project. Back when I was in New Hampshire, doing two critiques a day didn’t seem like a lot. Now, with a full-time job, getting two finished in two weeks can loom large.
I’m back to the ‘How to Think Sideways’ course again, working on my Song Rater app for Android, (that’s going pretty well, except that my Singleton appears to be losing data!) still reading slush for James Gunn’s Ad Astra, and I finally mailed off a cheque for my tenant’s insurance. Oh, and I think I’ve managed to fight off an ear canal infection with the help of some over-the-counter meds. Fun stuff. 😉
Over the weekend I finally got back to some ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ stuff. The next assignment in the chapter on perspective, (after copying somebody else’s,) was to draw an open door by sighting it. I picked the open doorway out of my kitchen, and I think I like how it came out:
For comparison, here’s a (slightly tilted, sorry) photo of the same doorway I took on the iPhone!
It’s been a long time since I’ve done any fanvidding. It was February of 2010 when I released my Doctor who vid for Martha and Ten, “Out of Bounds”, and I think this time last year when I tried to get started on a Dawson/Jen video for “I think about it all the time”, and managed a grand total of 45 seconds of completed footage, sigh.
I put fanvidding on my goals list for August, (reaching 2 minutes on a project, specifically,) and played around with the Sony Vegas project I had for “I think about it all the time”, but it was pretty easy to tell that I wasn’t inspired, or even particularly interested anymore.
So, a new project. Back to Doctor Who, once again. Season five, specifically the two-parter of “The Hungry Earth” and “Cold Blood.”
The song? An Amy Grant tune called “Eye to Eye,” which may seem like an odd choice, but there’s so much in the lyrics that resonates to me with those episodes, and the music seems like a pretty good fit too.
The first step was to get ahold of some video to work with. I watched season 5 of Doctor Who on the LG DVR, and even though I burned those episodes to disk, they’re not really in suitable quality for fanvidding work. The next copies I happened to come across are gorgeous 720p mkv files, but Sony Vegas didn’t seem to like those, and I didn’t have any luck with the instructions to extract the video file out of the mkv container. Finally I’ve found something that seems to work, and I’ve got my project workspace set up with the two episodes and the song.
Before I start picking video clips to set to the instrumental opening, though, I figure it’ll help to review what I’ve got. So I’ve started watching “The Hungry Earth” just so I remember what happens, thinking of which bits would be good for what lyrics or what instrumental passages.
Hey. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything with drawing, specifically ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’, but I wanted to at least give it another try now that I’m back from Odyssey, so I pulled out the books last week and tried a drawing exercise Sunday morning. In February I’d gotten up to the chapter on perspective, and there was an example in the workbook where you try to sigh-copy a Van Gogh sketch with perspective in it. So, here’s the original of the Van Gogh:
And here’s my version…
Whatcha think? It kinda looks okay, especially from a distance.
Okay, it’s been a while since I did a drawing post, which is good, because it means I’ve got a lotta pictures to show you. All of these were ‘negative space drawings’ – a technique where you focus on the empty space around the object that’s actually there – because the logical left side of your brain is bored by empty space and doesn’t know what mental category to bucket it into, so it bugs out and lets the right side draw what it sees – or so the theory goes.
After a little back and forth, I started with an exercise where you draw a chair based on a photograph. The workbook suggested cutting one out of a magazine or newspaper – I used Google Image Search and decided to work with this:
And here’s my negative space version. I toned most of the page with a graphite stick before I started drawing and erased everything but the ‘negative space’ when I was done.
But I’ve still got nearly a week to draw my heart out! 😉
Earlier in the week, I was continuing with observational sketches using the plastic picture plane. I showed you a photograph last time of the picture plane with my hand holding a flash drive. Here’s the final sketch result. My fingers didn’t come out perfect, but I think I’m showing some progress:
Next, I did a still life of an apple with the picture plane, and I went back to toning my drawing paper with the charcoal stick: Read the rest of this entry »
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The Kelworth Files 