Summer Doodles and Drawings

Here are some various drawings and doodles from my sketchbook the past couple of weeks. A lot of it is rather directionless but I think that experimenting and "play" is sort of what I'm more interested in right now anyway. I do hope to make some stuff that's more "complete" soon. The church ink drawing is a little more complete, but that was begun last December and I was only "finishing" it recently (and I'm not sure I'd call it completely finished yet).


The version on the right came when I copied+pasted the drawing into a Photoshop document that was in "Bitmap" mode, and everything ended up looking pixelated. I liked the effect so I included it here (you have to zoom in to see it).






I think I posted the "JAN" sketch before, but this time... there's dots.




My friend Liz, one night in Ireland, challenged my brother and me to draw all the Pokemon we could remember off the top of our head (without looking any up). I've played some of the recent Pokemon games for the DS, but I was still surprised at how many I could draw, because I don't remember seeing them as much in those recent games I had played. I also noticed that they were all from the first generation Pokemon games.


this is the church drawing I mentioned before; started December 2010, and then I worked on it more these past couple of weeks. It is of a church next to Kylemore Abbey in Ireland (I drew from a photo of it).

Florence, Venice and Paris - sketches and doodles

After my 4.5 months studying abroad in Ireland, my brother Dustin and I spent two weeks traveling in other countries around Europe. Dustin did basically all of the booking and scheduling (thanks again Dustin), and while it was still somewhat stressful at times, overall it was completely worth it and amazing. I didn't do a whole lot of drawing while there, but I did some, and most of those are posted here.




on the page with little faces: the building on the top of the left page was across the square in front of the Duomo, at night, during a crowded festival/concert thing going on. some of the gestural sketches on the right page are from people dancing on the stage at that concert. the little faces were just from my mind, based on a vague impression of people in Florence I had seen that night.


this was near the train station where we first entered Venice.


Paris blind contour sketches - I was sitting in a restaurant and all of these people were in cars or on motorcycles, stopping when the light was red at the intersection outside the window. I was pleasantly surprised at how I captured some of their faces (I'm still fairly new to doing blind contour drawings of faces).

Charleville Castle and Aran Islands sketches

While visiting the "most haunted" castle in Ireland, Charleville Castle, a couple of months back, I made a series of small drawings in one of my sketchbooks. Here are some of them:



Also, here are some pages from my sketchbook from a trip to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland (well, just one of the islands - Inis Mor):

Illustration Topics (fall 2010) - Other Projects

Phew - it took a while to compile this post, but here it is - everything else I did in Illustration Topics this past semester (in reverse chronological order).


These images are all from my final project for Topics. I was working with the idea "Invisible Worlds" and looking at the illustrator/author David Macaulay for inspiration. I was working at a pretty high resolution the whole time, so it was a bit slow, but worth it in the end because we were asked to print it out at 30 by 40 inches (I was working around 20 by 30 inches before blowing it up to that size). The final "banner" print looked pretty cool. It was fun taking different textures I had scanned and using them in this piece.


Around the third to last class of the semester, we were asked to create three illustrations during one class period (or at least part of the class period - it was about 3 hours). I came up with three and then one more. The ideas came from a list of prompts that my teacher provided.



These two images are two different versions of an illustration based on a non-fiction book. My teacher gave our class three different excerpts from three different books, and asked us to illustrate one (either the excerpt or other parts of the book if we read it). I chose the excerpt from a book that talked about the Crystal Palace, a structure build to house the "Great Exhibition" of 1851 in Hyde Park, London.





This project involved taking a pair of opposites (from a list provided by our teacher Tom). I initially chose the pair "flora/fauna" and channeled my inner 9-year-old self to come up with some ideas. Then, because I couldn't figure out how to draw the perspective of a deer pooping from the flowers' point of view, I switched to "inside/outside". And the rest....is history. (dramatic moment for no particular reason)

also, I know I posted at least one of the deer pooping images before, but I'm just including it here again because it was part of this project.





This project involved talking to a classmate and choosing from a list of major events in the past 10 years, and then asking what that classmate remembered of the time they first heard of the major event happening. I chose the 9/11 attacks, so my classmate (friend Cameron) talked about his life around the time that 9/11 happened. He said he had a dog, who would follow him into the pine woods around his house when he had to drag dead branches into the forest (as a chore). I only included a hint to 9/11 in the illustration, and it's mostly metaphorical.



This is my "State Fair" illustration. We were asked to visit the Minnesota State Fair and make an illustration based on our impression of it. So, I made one based on the fruit hall, in particular the apple area. Most of it was watercolor and ink, with some adjustments made later in Photoshop. I did a lot of color studies for this one, something that I've started to do more often in the past couple of semesters. My illustration was one of nine chosen (between all those submitted by the two Illustration Topics classes) to be displayed in a gallery on the Star Tribune website. Woo!

Illustration Topics (fall 2010) - Mug Design

(Class was taught by Tom Garrett)

These images are all from a mug design project (the final result was submitted to the MCAD mug design contest. I didn't win, but I still enjoyed making mine a lot).





I created these big blobs of watercolor on palette paper so that I could turn them into the smoke for the train (I tore them into small chunks and made them wrinkly, then glued them on). Also, the monster/dragon-like shape in the purple blob was NOT intentional! It just dried like that, somehow.



final illustration: