Watercolour postcard 01

I bought a small pad of blank watercolour postcards the other day in London. Here is the first of 12.

Yeah, still procrastinating on my homework!

Sketches 2

Since the project we were given last week in class was to span two weeks, I don't have a 'finished' piece to show, nor do any of my sketches for that piece merit any sort of public attention.They are at this moment a pile of rubbish and scattered ideas, waiting for me to reassemble them into a cohesive idea. Sue told me I need to 'work hard at simplifying' my work. At first, I thought it was a pile of art school mumbo jumbo, but after some thought, I completely understand and agree.  So, instead of a finished piece, I'm just sharing some of my other sketches that I've done. They're all from yesterday morning when I sat bolt upright at 5 am and just couldn't get back to sleep, so I spent an hour or so playing around with India ink and a straw. Blowing, not sucking. I nearly passed out from hyperventilation, so I think the next time I play with ink in this way I'll invest in a can of compressed air and save myself a whole heap of trouble!

Sketches

Just a few sketches today. The boat in the sunset was just me playing with my new pastels to see what they can do.

I also took a lunch break and decided there was no better way to spend it than to paint the people on the benches.

Illustration - Working Methods, Week 5: Expressions, take 2

This week we were instructed to carry over from last week's theme, expressions, and take the expression into an event, or non-event, depending on the point of view. I was in London for a birthday party last week and decided to take my experience and feelings from that night and try to represent the lifecycle of a party. It ended up being rather morose and melancholic, which is not at all how I was feeling that night. I had a good time, really!

The square piece with the disco ball was my final piece, but my instructor preferred a different piece. Any guesses which? The rest are the studies I did; colour studies and anatomy studies, mostly. I'm not sure why I decided to post all of my sketchbook work this week. I think most of the work in this class is done in my sketchbook with all the preliminary research and drawing that leads up to the finished piece. Funny that the finished piece looks tired; I put more work into the prelim

work than the final product.

Illustration - Working Methods, Week 4: Expressions

This week our task was to create expressions, using faces, hands or objects.  We were to do three entirely different pieces. The first one, the woman with her arms outstretched, came rather quickly to me. The next one was a challenge; I was attempting to emote 'tears of joy,' but the tears just aren't there, and instead the image looks a bit flat to me. The last one, the woman with the wine, I did extremely quickly in ink and wash, and only took 20 minutes (in comparison to the woman with arms outstretched, which took nearly 3 hours).

Woman with arms outstretched was done in pencil crayons, joyful 'tears' was done in soft pastels, and woman with wine was done in ink & wash, all on A3 paper.

I'll let the pieces speak for themselves. I got a lot of great constructive criticism from my instructor, which I will definitely be using in my future work. Overall, I'm not happy with the pictures, but I'm ecstatic that I'm learning so much, and I'm really enjoying the process. It's about the journey, right?

Next week we are to take expressions one step further and create a 'scene or event' with an emotion. I was in London over the weekend celebrating a friends birthday, so I'm thinking of drawing on that event for inspiration.

Illustration - Working Methods, Week 3 Studio Project: Midnight in the Garden

Holy crap, this was a stressful studio project! We were given the title 'Midnight in the Garden,' with practically no requirements other than that we had to work on at least A3 size. I was immediately picturing small animals in my head, all the night creatures and critters that come out to feed after dark. I remember as a child with friends jumping over fences and into the neighbours garden to nick vegetables (no, I wasn't that poor, we just did it for laughs), and eventually I came up with the idea of rabbits thieving carrots.

I went to the library to research rabbits and do some prelim sketches, and ended up in the kids section (who knew: that's where all the really good science books are!). The noise and the screaming and running around nearly drove me mad (and that was just me; you should have seen the kids! ha ha). I was pretty frustrated because the images of rabbits I was finding didn't match the images in my head, and even though I was drawing a lot, I wasn't getting any closer to the image in my head. I decided to ditch the library and head back to the studio.

My instructor asked if I could try the monoprinting again (the technique I used for 'Light Lunch,' and also asked if I could incorporate some of my drawing skills. I had a hard time with these requests because I thought they conflicted. The last time I attempted drawing on the monoprint it completely ruined the texture! No matter, though: it took me nearly two hours of monoprinting, playing with textures and colours, and finally cutting out the rabbits, and I barely scraped enough time together to paste the rabbits haphazardly onto the massive sheet of paper.

I was very unhappy with the finished piece, mostly because it had deviated so far from my original plan. I think part of this was due to a serious lack of planning (I didn't really do any thumbnails this time - ooops) and of course the time constraint.

When we were going around the circle critiquing the pieces, my instructor (henceforth: SUE) asked me how I felt about it. I basically told her what I just told you, and that it was unfinished and I hadn't added faces, etc etc. Then she asked everyone, "What do you think Cody should add to this piece to finish it off?" There was a resounding "Nothing!" from several of the other students. Sue looked at me as if to say, let that be a lesson to you.

Illustration - Working Methods, Week 3: Imaginary You

Our homework this week was to create a piece called 'The Imaginary You,' which is supposed to be a portrait of yourself as an imaginary being. I was going for Doppleganger at first, but then I'd thought I'd do myself as my computer. I spend all day in front of one at work, then I'm at it at various points in my free time as well, and at times I feel so attached to my computer that I may as well have one chained to me. In the end, I somehow combined the two ideas into one, and had my Doppleganger inside the computer, and my presumed normal self attempting to escape.

The piece is A1 size (OMG>HUGE!). The photos were manipulated and pixelated in Photoshop, then collaged onto the paper. The simple line drawings were done with a black Sharpie, and the Space Invaders with red, blue and green Sharpies. There are a few actual wires glued in the heavily wired area, but you'll probably not be able to see them. Also invisible is the graph paper I glued to the area below the normal me, then peeled off, leaving a sort of ghost image of graph paper. Didn't really work as well as I'd hoped, but the effect worked in the end.

I had fun creating this piece. The challenge for me this week was practicing restraint, as my instructor told me she wanted me to come to class with an 'unfinished' piece, in complete contrast to my finished painting of the previous week. Ironically, this piece took nearly as long as the painting. Perhaps that was due to the sheer size of it.

My instructor thought it was clever, which was a huge compliment. Her only criticism was that because of the strong colours in the top left, I should have used the colours again throughout the image so as to draw the eye around. Right now the eye is drawn continuously up to the Space Invaders.

Illustration - Working Methods, Week 2: "Angels/Demons"

This week our project theme was "Angels and Demons." I was pretty stressed out for most of the week. I kept getting hung up on the religious iconography behind the topic: angels, demons, jesus, the cross and the crucifixion, the church, the pope and the vatican... and as much as I didn't want to literally represent angels or demons, I just couldn't get the images out of my head and felt very stuck in a rut for several days.

I then decided I was going to go cartoon on the project and do a robot-angel motif, or be completely blasphemous and do a caricature of the pope looking more demonic than he does already. But, then I re-read my project brief and noticed it said to draw your own 'personal' angels or demon. That added to the stress a hundred fold. By this time it's Wednesday and I've already come up with two 'perfect' ideas and scrapped both; I don't have time to start from scratch! Not only that, but what exactly is a 'personal angel or demon"? Time to dig deep.

After a long brainstorming session, with angel on one side and demon on the other, 'seven deadly sins' appeared on the page, so I wrote them down and realised the only one I could connect with was sloth. I know I'm the opposite of sloth, and many would say I don't have a lazy bone in my body, but I have to fight sloth more than anything.

Theme: Angels/Demons
Working Method: 'Break out of your comfort zone'
Requesite Materials: A3 portrait size cartridege paper
Materials used: A3 paper, acrylic paint (oops, forgot to orient in portrait!)

The concept behind the piece reflects a portion of my view on what it means to be slothful. The sloth comes from the 7 deadly sins as represented in the bible, and I chose to represent sloth because it was one of the few sins that I could connect with. I don't consider myself particularly slothful, but that is only because I fight sloth in myself everyday, by keeping myself active and occupied.

The image is a man who has let himself go; he is reclining in a state of undress, in an unfurnished room save for the mattress he is sitting, which is barren of sheets, and a cross which hangs on the wall. The fact that he is lounging and drinking a beer is not the matter, it is more the fact that he is alone and he is taking for granted an activity that should be enjoyable. He is bored and contemptible.

The cross on the wall is a deliberate reference to the church and the man's supposed belief/faith, and it's juxtaposition in the room is meant to signify the man's disconnect with his faith and how he is not truly living in accordance with 'Christian values.'

Illustration - Working Methods, Week 1: "Light Lunch"

For those of you who may not already know, I've enrolled in a class at the University of Brighton called Illustration Working Methods, which is a freshman course for the illustration undergraduate program. They teach the first three courses of the illustration degree on Saturdays beginning in October. The following is my first studio project.


In the morning we were given the topic "Light Lunch." The only required elements to our project were that we had to do it on A2 sized paper (420 x 594 mm, or roughly 8 sheets of regular printer paper), and that we had to work in a method we weren't familiar with. For example, I'm used to getting ideas and images from the internet first, then I work out the sketches and thumbnails, then I do a colour study, then work on the finished piece. Finally, I'd ask for a critique, usually from Rob. I decided to work backwards and ask Rob what he thought of my topic first. Although I thought I had a pretty good idea as to what I was going to create, he totally blew my ideas out of the water with the things he was coming up with [Rob, you have officially been hired as muse!].


When we returned from our lunch break we had two ours to complete the project, from inception to completion, which is about a tenth of the time I'd normally work on a project. It was SO stressful, but in a really good way. Being around 11 other artists, all working frantically in the studio, scissors and paper and paint and glue flying, it really felt like I was in my very own version of Project Runway. Except nobody gets eliminated from my class.


Below is a photo of the work and a description I had to write to accompany it. (I think you may be able to click on the picture for a more detailed version). 

Theme: Light Lunch

Working Method: To work in the opposite manner we are used to

Requesite Materials: A2 paper

Materials Used: A2 paper, monoprints in watercolour, water-soluble pencils

The concept behind my piece is built on the idea of plant food and the science of photosynthesis, in that plants convert light into usable food energy. The plant is sat at a table indoors with a box of ‘cereal’ on the table and a bowl of that cereal in its ‘hands.’ The symbolism is representative of our modern world and how our culture is increasingly moving indoors – not only our people, but our domesticated animals and plants as well. As we move further from an agrarian-based society toward a more urban environment, the disconnect between our food and its origins increases, and the more we disconnect from our food, the more man-made it becomes.

The overall theme was to illustrate our disconnect from nature, and our complacency with our sedentary and synthetic lifestyle.

The plant itself does not appear happy; in fact it has wilting leaves at its periphery. The light bulb is bare and seems not to give off too much light, and what light it does radiate is cold. For me this represents poverty. The plant is getting it’s food from a box of ‘Shmellogg’s Light-Os.’

Che Guevara in watercolor

I painted Che Guevara in red, blue and green watercolors last night. I did a rough outline sketch and then blocked in color by first laying down water and dripping paint on that, then smudging it all about. Some things I learned: the paint travels wherever the water sits. In other words, if the water doesn't stay in the lines, neither will the paint!