Monday, December 29, 2008

Summer series - Bislett

Spent the summer back home in beautiful Oslo at the wonderful apartment in Bislett. My god how I dream about that place when I sleep at lower bunk in my shared studio in SF. I guess you got to sacrifice to be an artist. Starving artist and all of that. For a some weeks that summer I worked exclusively on toned paper with coloured charcoal, and this series is part of what came out.

Madlib, El-P
Made this illustration surrounding a few of my favourite music producers and threw in a few elements related to their hip-hop universe



Rock out
Started the series with left over toned paper, a sienna charcoal pencil and my dads old cd cover depicting Jim Morriosn. From there on that deloped into some rock theme, which then led to the illustration above.


Obama Christ
Got tired of musicians and decided to draw a real rock star. Depicting Obama as the saviour seemed to fit the times (even more these days!). Still working on rendering faces, charicatures quickly lose their edge without an instant recognition. I still hope you can pick him out in the end?


Oil Painting

This semester i picked up a brush and had a go at oil painting for the first time. Took the class Still Life Painting at school with teacher Brandon Smith. Really good painter with a beautiful handling of colour. Having hardly worked in colour before this semester I found it quite a challenge not getting my colours muddy or chalky. But hopefully we learn from our failures and I did enjoy the medium a lot!

Emulation of an artist (Final homework):
Pick a still life artist you like and analys his work method and visual landscape. Work in the methods of the artist, but do not copy a piece he has made. Being from Norway I've always enjoyed Odd Nerdrums work and chose to work in his method. He works very thick with small brushes and rags in the larger areas. At the end of a pass he dries the paint and sands down. Seeing as I did not have time to work on dry paint I skipped this part but tried to stay true to his painting technique. I found painting thick to be constantly exposing my lack of painting experience and kept going back to a thin application.

I found this great Odd Nerdrum referance; derekvanderven. A site dedicated to analysis of his techniques. Be aware that these guys are happy amatuers so don't take everything they write as facts. The site did help me a lot tho, it has changed a bit from when I used it. But as I could see, mostly for the better.

Mine worked out better as a rendering than as a painting in Nerdrums fashion. The coulour scheme worked out better. I achieved this with working a lot with venetian red and other earthly colours. Might have been a bit too ambitious to emulate an artist as sophisticated technically as Nerdrum. I have to say that I do love his rendering and might try to work more in this old renaissance fashion next semester.



In class work
Our classes were once a week from 8:30 to 14:50 in the afternoon. The object of each class was to paint on still life working with different tasks life birds-eye, high-key, reflective objects and so on throughout the semester. This one was the second to last day of the semester and we could compose our own still lifes. I chose a simplistic setup with a blue to yellow-red split compliment. I threw the cube with the letter "H" in there cause this was to be a christmas gift to my sister Hanna. H for Hanna, get it!? ... Hey, poort art students have to improvise




Homework piece (from photo referance)
Second to last homework assignment. My shared studio does not lend itself easily to still life painting, and seeing as I had allready painted my salt and pepper shaker and my only other interesting subject (shoes), were dirty. I decided to work from photo referance I took of my lunch. Had only ever painted from life before this and the photo presented a few interesting challenges. I found it easier to figure out the colours and to stray away from the referance in deciding what would make it into my painting. On the other hand when I ran into some issues with tangents and arias that did not read very well in the photo it was hard to make changes in the painting. So will I work more from photos? I think I will, but only in cases where it is important to capture something I will not get a chance to study in real life, i.e. interesting poses, moving objects, food that is rotting.


Vampire


Got a bit further on this quick sketch from the other day:

Set the mood ok, pretty happy with the way the light is hitting the vampires face. Still need to work on the softness of light, especially in a night scene like this. Got about halfway done with this one, but now my shoulder is aching and I need to get off the computer, so I am gonna leave it at this.



Friday, December 26, 2008

Photoshop and Photography for Illustrators - Final


Final Project.
Brief: Illustrate one of the Greek gods through photography and photoshop manipulation.

Had few models and little time, and ended up posing as the warrior god Aries on top of a pile of myself. Tank god this class is over, back to illustrating ;)

Intermediate Anatomy - Final


Final project for Intermediate Anatmoy. The project was open ended, as long as you proved an understanding of anatomy.

Sunday, December 21, 2008