Remington

These are a few horse sketches I did from Remington paintings when I was figuring out the composition for Our Schizophrenic Present. I was trying to find the most expressive horse faces from the book I have on him. My painting was originally intended to be several horses coming out of the rose spiral, but I was having difficulty fitting them into the format. When I started playing with the idea of just the horse head/skull, it synced visually. I'll share more on the process for that painting soon, but for now the purple horses:

head piles

drawing exercise: head piles:

Artist Books

For my Intro to Art Education class (that was finished almost a month ago...geez) I made these little guys for our artist book assignment.  It was a nice final project we got to do at the end after a hard semester of reading and writing papers.  Lookit:

They each have three little graphite drawings (2"x2") with imagery derived from the concepts of learning, discovery, exploration and vision in the art classroom.

For those of you familiar with Shaun Tan, I was really inspired by his book The Arrival for this project.

It was fun to have another chance to revisit my book making skills.  It had been quit a while since I had made any.  The accordion pages are such a nice format and unfold to an elegant display.  

I'm the hero of this story, I don't need to be saved.

Gustav and Bernard

Lately I've been drawing many sketchbook studies of my pet rats, Gustav (white) and Bernard (White + Black).  The little guys, especially Bernard, move a lot (even in their sleep!) so many of the sketches are quick and gestural.  Here are some of the most recent ones I've done:

Dori

I did a few drawings of Dori last night and I thought I'd share my favorite with you while the coffee is brewing:

Life Drawings (Part One)

I've been going to free life drawing sessions at Rmcad the past few Thursdays with my fellow Illustrator Andy Musser. Here are a few choice cuts from last week's session:

I hadn't done too much life drawing with pencil since we always had to use vine charcoal in class, but I ended up really enjoying it. I was inspired to try it out by Andrew Wyeth's pencil preliminary studies for his portrait paintings after looking at his autobiography. I'll post some more life drawings soon from this week's session where we had to improvise after our model didn't show.

Celebrate Thanksgiving!

Below is a page I recently found of drawings I did in my Humanities IV class last semester. If I'm drawing, I'm not falling asleep, right? (Not that the class was boring, I'm just really good at sleeping in class)