Some vis dev pencil layouts from Will Weston's Sketching for Entertainment.

Prompt: A beaver dam, as influenced by some form of building style. In this case, shanty town.

Prompt: A submarine built by an extremely intelligent 6-year-old girl, who has scavenged parts from wherever possible to realize her vision.

And a repost of the color version:

Here are a few in-class pen, ink and wash drawings from Gayle Donahue's class, Drawing for Illustration. In her teaching, she really encourages students to embrace freedom of expression and creative flow.

For a third term project in Gayle Donahue's class, I combined the bodies of friends with the heads of their pets. Still one of my favorite projects to date!

More work from last term's Dynamic Sketching with Norm Schureman.

Some fantasy forms and applied textures:

Zoo-based caricatures:

And insect-based character designs:

Some work from Will Weston's Inventive Drawing class, fourth term.

Will asked us to create a cast of mean girls, with a leader, a lieutenant, and henchmen, as well as victims.

Another assignment was to draw different men's and women's hairstyles.

An in-class expression drawing from first term...

Portraiture

I've always been fascinated by faces. I love finding the unique parts of each person's face and mentally reconfiguring them into a caricature. That said, I also thought it was important for me to learn a more classical approach to portraiture. To that end, I took a portraiture class with David Luce last term. He has a very traditional teaching approach: begin with a rub-out, proceed to grisaille, limited palette, then move to full-color. Here's some in-class work.

I couldn't resist doing just one caricature...

Dynamic Sketching

Another class from last term, Dynamic Sketching with Norm Schureman, focused on drawing organic and manmade objects, with a goal of capturing form and texture. The class covered an amazing amount of ground: plants, insects, marine life, mammals, tanks, planes, cars, and more. Field trips included the Los Angeles Arboretum, the LA Zoo, the Autry Museum, the Nethercutt car museum, a military vehicle museum, and the Long Beach Aquarium. Here's a selection of my sketchbook drawings from that class.

Digital Life, aka Goodbye Cruel World

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a traditional media person. The transition to digital has been, and continues to be, a bit of a challenge for me. One class from last term in particular really tested my limits. Digital Life, with instructor Cliff Nielsen, involved painting still lifes and nude models using a tablet and PhotoShop or Corel Painter. I believe in humility, but I'm still not posting any of those in-class paintings. We also had three long assignments for homework.

The first assignment was to do a digital master copy. It had to be a stroke for stroke copy, all on the computer, and all in one layer. I had no idea what I was doing, and consequently there were many, many CTL + Zs. I copied a Jenny Saville painting. I spent two days and 30 hours on this.

The second assignment was buffet-style, from several options. I chose to do a promo piece for Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter: Warlord of Mars. In doing the research, I was struck by the outlandishness of the story, and also by the, um, sexism, of much of the art. I opted for a tongue-in-cheek take on the franchise, and called it John Carter: Boarlord of Mars. The line art is traditional brush and ink, with digital color.

The final assignment was fairly open, so I chose to apply digital color to a vis dev drawing I did for a previous class. The prompt for that drawing was to create a submarine that an extremely intelligent six-year-old built in her dad's ship-building workshop.

Style Class

During the last term, I took a style development class with Mike Humphries. The assignments involved receiving a prompt scenario, choosing an artist with a distinctive style, analyzing that style for key points, then applying those style points to our own design process.

The first scenario was a hunter's shack in the Smokey Mountains, set in the early morning. I chose to analyze and apply the style from "101 Dalmatians."

The second scenario was a San Francisco art school in a renovated Victorian house, set at night. I chose to work with the style of Charley Harper.

The final scenario proved to be quite challenging, for many reasons. The prompt was to design a playground attached to a themed restaurant. I chose to study William Joyce, and, rather foolishly, chose t0 theme the restaurant with the elaborate Louis XIV style of design. Complicating matters, this was also one of my first attempts at a full, vis-dev PhotoShop painting.

All in all, the class was incredibly informative in terms of understanding how artists adapt universal design principles relating to contrast, hue, value, simple v. complex forms, etc. to create their own unique style.