Giant Squids are Giant

This is part one of the giant squid drawings I did! (larger views here and here) There's two more drawings I did (also after famous works) that I'll scan in as soon as I can.

About these drawings - most of these were done by laying a piece of denril (a nice vellum paper made by Borden & Riley) over book illustrations and then tracing them with a micron pen. It's both very easy to do and surprisingly difficult - obviously the hard work of creating the artwork and translating reality into a bunch of marks on paper has been already done for you. On the other hand you still have to select what is the most important information to include in the tracings and what not to include - sort of a distilling if you will. Hand steadiest is also a problem, since small details in the drawing are easily distorted if you don't trace them just right.

Anyway from left to right, top to bottom we have: the crew of the French ship Alecton harpooning a dead or dying giant squid they found floating in the ocean. (There are a number of drawings of this event but this is my favorite, the squid just looks kind of nonchalant about being harpooned), two illustrations from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, an illustration of a (dead) giant squid on a beach in Newfoundland, SQUID VS WHALE, and one of two drawings I did after Pierre Dénys de Montfort's famous artworks of giant octopus sea monsters. (Yes, octopus. In regards to the kraken myth, people clearly had squid, octopus and cuttlefish confused there for a while)

That's it! For now.

Gessner

Long time no post. I got a little burned out on art, so the lack of updates is because I haven't really been drawing much of anything lately. It's mainly because I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing art-wise (which is silly since the whole point of taking this art course was so I could explore an area of interest - nature + illustration). So I've really just started getting into it again. It's funny in a way, when I do a lot of artwork I feel like I would just like to create stuff forever. Then before I know it I'm going on about how I don't have time and yadda yadda.

The latest project we're doing in class is the 'like Gessner' project, where we study illustration techniques and the (natural) history of depiction in both old & recent texts. It refers to Conrad Gessner (wiki) who was an avid, insatiable reader - he read everything he could get his hands on and then some. He then wrote and compiled all existing information (on many different subjects) in voluminous tomes. (Apparently he was so adamant on using every moment of his time that he had servants read to him from books as he was bathing and getting dressed. A classmate commented that they would medicate people like Gessner today - perhaps an exaggeration but he would certainly be seen as an eccentric). Anyway, we could choose any animal/plant we wanted, and were supposed to recreate, freehand or sketch existing artwork and then make it into a book or report. The text portion of my project is viewable on google docs. The artwork is still in the process of being scanned, which will have to wait until our professor is done grading them.

It's ironic that I started this blog to show other people my art and then I got shy and haven't really given the link out to anyone. That's my life there in a nutshell.

EDM #1 - Shoes

Just a quick sketch, getting back into the daily drawing habit. I was going pretty good for a few days there actually, but it's much easier to get off track than it is to get back on. Going to be trying some different styles over the next few days.. stay tuned..

Snow Day!

Just a little picture sketch from my snowy window. :]

Nature Sketchbook #2

These were some tiny yellow flowers I found. It was a bit difficult to make them out well enough to draw them, I think I partially succeeded.. but they don't look as delicate as they are in reality. Perhaps I should have used a lighter stroke.

Nature Sketchbook #1

This is the first (real) page of my lovely new sketchbook which I'm keeping as part of an art class (Art 333: The Artist Naturalist)

I decided to start doing these entries (starting with this page) as if I were a real old-time naturalist. It's actually much easier than I thought - for one, writing anything in cursive makes it look classy. And secondly it kind of looks like those old worn notebooks that artists and scientists used to scribble in when they jotted down their thoughts and observations.

I wish, in a way, that scientists and artists were still naturalists. It seems a shame that the two were ever separated.

EDM #24 - Fruit

First entry on my new blog, and first EDM challenge!

This was a speedpaint done on my tablet PC using Alias Sketchbook Pro. (3 hours) I actually got these fruits from some event at my college and I thought they would make a nice still life. Painting tasty things is terrible and requires a great deal of will power as it seems tempting just to call the whole thing off and just eat it already!

I'm still not quite happy how this turned out (namely the lighting source on the grapes and the featureless plate) but some things turned out better than I expected so it's a draw (ha..) after all.