Drawing Inspiration and Realization

I came into the Graphic Design program with what I thought were some fairly strong drawing skills.

You don’t have to be a visual artist to be a graphic designer but I definitely found that it helped me produce more well thought out pieces. When I was younger, almost all of my drawings were from photographs, I had a hard time thinking of an idea and actually drawing it out to look the way I envisioned it in my mind. I always thought of imitation as a weakness and never saw myself as a real artist because I always needed some kind of reference to look at. I believed that if I looked at something, then it was cheating and it didn’t count as art, but over the course of time my views on this topic have shifted. All of my years of drawing magazine ads and photographs have actually made drawing out my own ideas a lot easier. For every copy of a piece I made, I was learning something new about light, shape, characteristics,proportions, etc. Fairly recently I have come to terms with the fact that there is nothing wrong with using references for your art. I would never have known how to draw the face of an Orangutan for my school assigned animal portrait, it probably would have ended up looking like some strange unknown species of primate if I hadn’t collected photos and studied them.
Coming up with your ideas may be easy but you have to practice if you want to put them on paper properly.
Even when you have strong skills, never give in and think that its good enough the way it is. There is ALWAYS room for improvement, the harder you are on your own art, the better you will become as an artist.

An ink piece I completed in my own style in my drawing class this semester, it was done with indian ink and micro pens.

 

Hand Rendered Art is Always More Fun

Fun with Primates

For this project we were required to draw four separate black and white images each to do with the animal of our choice rendered in specific styles.
•The first, a portrait done only in circles and half circles.
•The second, was the animals geographical location. I was required to do this using only lines of different thicknesses and weights, going only one way. I had to find a way to create depth, it was by far the hardest square to draw.
•Third, the creature in its immediate habitat done using only thick shapes.
•The fourth and final square was of the creatures food, I was only allowed to use one line weight and I had to try and make the fruit look 3D without crosshatching or thick shading in certain areas.
It was a very fun project for me, I love challenges!

Illustration Project

 

This is the first project I did in my illustration class.
One of the things I enjoy most about creating art is filling my page full of lots of little details, I pride myself on it. Initially this class was very hard for me, I don’t like over simplifying things. I always viewed simple art as weak or lazy work, it feels so unfinished to me. I chose a portrait with lots of beautiful little details in it and I poured my time into this piece, first hand rendering each specific style and then putting it into the computer (Yes, there is an easier way to create something similar to this on the computer but it was a requirement to hand render the images first).  My teacher recognized it was a struggle for me to leave out detail and gently through out the course of the semester encouraged me to make my work simpler. Over time I really made an effort to try and simplify my work so that I could be more well rounded as an artist and a designer. Its been a struggle, I will never stop loving detailed artwork, but simplicity definitely has a big place in the world of design.