Refelections at the end of another Quarter...

Another quarter has ended. It was a good quarter, all in all. I never feel like it is long enough to accomplish everything i want. Ten weeks go by quickly, and no matter how hard i plan ahead, it always seems like there is a mad dash at the end of the quarter to get all finals completed (er, "mad dash" = many sleepless nights and many shared pepperoni and sausage pizzas with Pat).

I took two classes this quarter, one being Drawing for Sequential Art. My goals in taking this class were to learn new ways of approaching the figure, and learning human anatomy...and i have always been intrigued at learning techniques used by comic artists, such as inking techniques, so i am glad those things were covered as well. I think i made much improvements with the gesture, what we focused on most in class, and what can be the trickiest to capture. I was also overloaded with anatomy, and while i think i made a lot of good observations and improvements, i still have a lot of work to do to get better at it. I also learned a lot about applying line weights, and I am still practicing that, and hope to get better with it.


One of the things we did in this class were ink studies of the live models. These were done at home from our studies of the figure that we did in class.I think this was somewhat a break-through quarter for me in my other class, Concepts and Composition, as i tried out some new things with my work, style-wise. I have known for a long time, that i am not really a precision artist, and i kinda went with that notion this quarter and experimented. During the first part of the quarter, Julie, the instructor, had us focus on concepting and thumbnailing. She explained that if we keep our ideas small (more to the size of our actual thumbnail, bc i had been getting increasingly large in this stage), great things can come from that kind of freeness, and, boy, was she right. I think this let me get a little looser, and then i started liking the quirkiness of the images i was coming up with this way. It worked, and more importantly, they were more ME.

These were the images i created for the first assignments. They were illustrating scenes from the story of Baba Yaga . I stuck pretty close to the "doodles" I did in the thumbnailing stage because i was fond of the imperfect shapes that were created. Then, in the final stages of the finished Photoshop versions, I added some textures and patterns, from things like lace, and scrapbooking paper found at Michael's, fabric, and patterns i created in Adobe Illustrator.