Zoo & Museum Sketches

I went to the Washington DC Zoo and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History a few days ago with my mom - DC is close enough to home (1.5/2 hour drive) that it's nice to visit every once in a while! I particularly like the zoo because there is no admission cost (though there is no admission cost for the Smithsonian museums either). If I lived right in the area I'm sure I'd go there all the time to draw animals! 

Below are just a couple (of many) photos I took while at the zoo, then below that are the sketches I did, none of which are anything special - it's all just practice. Sketching in pen is something I've only done a couple times before, so that was something relatively new for me. I'm a little rusty too because I have hardly drawn at all in the past two months due to being busy, and I don't feel like doing anything but relaxing with the free time I do have. I don't think any of these sketches exceeded 1 minute, I'd say most of them are around 30 seconds. I didn't sketch too much because it was hot, crowded, and I didn't have a stool or anything so  any position I found myself drawing in was awkward and uncomfortable. I did quite a few of flamingo gestures because no one else was in that area, which gives me a much better peace of mind when it comes to sketching in public!

Then here are a few (again, out of many) photos I took at the Smithsonian. I really love the displays of animals they have - it's really well put together and there's a ton to see. I only drew a few of them as my time was limited, but ya!

The Smithsonian also has great exhibits of skeletons. I didn't draw any, but there really is quite the selection if I ever do decide to sketch some of them. These two photos are just a very small taste of all the skeletons they've got on display.

Serenity

As with my previous portrait of the baby, this is also a cousin of mine! I drew this on Smooth Bristol Board and will most likely continue drawing portraits on it. From just looking at these recent portraits and comparing them, it's not difficult to see the jump in quality that resulted from not drawing this in my sketchbook.

I actually decided to use a grid to draw the initial lineart for this because I wanted the proportions to be as close to the photograph as possible. Since I've done my past two portraits without a grid of any sort, I'm sure I could have pulled it off, but in the end I chose to do it this way. Also, I was bored and felt like taking the time to measure out everything and draw out the grid, so yeah!

Below are just some digital photos capturing my progress with this. They're all pretty dark photos, but it gets the idea across!

Baaaby

I drew this from a photo I had of a cousin of mine from when she was a baby. This and the Jack Johnson portrait have been done in my sketchbook; I'm not too much a fan of the texture that is picked up from drawing like this in my sketchbook, so I think I'll go buy some smooth Bristol paper some day or something of the sort, and see how much better I like that.

I hope I will be able to keep up with doing portraits once school starts again...though I have a feeling I will be too inundated with assignments to be able to make the time for this kinda stuff. I certainly don't want to go another 2 years of not doing a single one, I know that much!

Jack Johnson Portrait

I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that Jack Johnson is my favorite musical artist. I never find myself getting tired of listening to his music, which is something I can't say for the large lot of other music I listen to. Yesterday I was listening to his first album repeatedly as I was sorting through things in my room for the duration of the day. That night I decided to just go ahead and draw the man. What adds to my admiration for him aside from his musical talent is his overall persona. He does so much for charities, the environment, and various other things he believes in. Take his current world tour as an example, where he's donating one hundred percent of the tour's profits to charity. If that's not respectable, I don't know what is!

I'll go on and talk about this drawing itself, and stray away from discussing the actual subject matter! This is more or less my first realistic portrait in two years, with the exception of like...one semi-quick portrait I did the other day for a friend. In my later years of high school I was really into doing portraits, but then I went on to college and I stopped. In Art Fundamentals we did have a later assignment that warranted a realistic rendering of a person's head/torso...but we had to use colored pencils and colored paper...that's just out of my medium. I'm a pencil on white paper kinda girl when it comes to doing portraits! Then, being in animation, I've never really had the opportunity to draw in this manner. Now that's it's summer though, I decided to go do what I loved to do just a couple years back, and this is that attempt! I don't really like the hair and various other bits and pieces, but it works well enough.

The photo I referenced from is here. I feel like I lost a bit of resemblance, but I don't know if that's because I truly did or if it's because I've been staring at it for so long! This took about 6/7 hours to do, but that's with the occasional laptop distraction added onto the fact that I just find myself to be an overall slower artist than many others. Though I don't know, maybe for all I know that's a reasonable time frame.

Lilo & Stitch

Lilo and Stitch is one of my favorite Disney movies, and quite possibly the one Disney film I've watched the most! Recently I found myself wanting to draw Lilo, so I decided to do so, and since I've never really drawn Stitch before I figured I would draw him as well. I painted this with gouache on watercolor paper. Initially I wanted to use a watercolor effect with the gouache...but I ended up using the more opaque painting method.

Last Assignments of 1st Year

Time for a blog update that encompasses assignments from a bunch of various classes! First up is a diagonal pan done for layout. Nothing amazing...wanted to do something pretty simple.

Below is our final painting assignment. I realize that the focal point is more or less in the center of the composition but I wanted to see if I could pull it off, because it certainly can be done effectively. I'm not so sure how well I succeeded in that, but yeah!

Here's our final animation assignment where we had to animate a flour sack interacting with a prop, mine being a sword in the stone. I don't particularly care for it, but I don't particularly care for most of my animations! Maybe next year I'll grow fonder of my animation assignments.

And lastly...some classmates and myself have recently gotten very much into Cartoon Network's show, Flapjack. I've liked it for quite a while, but had only seen a few episodes. That's changed in recent weeks, after having obtained a fair amount of its episodes.  

Anyway, Andy was planning on drawing Neilizza a panda because she is obsessed with them, but she couldn't be any more specific as to what she wanted. Sooo I suggested a panda in the style of Flapjack...and that is exactly what this below picture is - Andy drew it, I kept it! (Neilizza's not too much of a Flapjack fan anyway...) If you like strange and somewhat demented cartoons, and have never seen Flapjack...I definitely recommend it. ;)