Master Copies and Emulations

If anyone's curious about my method of study, which no one has really inquired about yet, but I'm going to share anyway, is I find the "Master Copy" and "Emulation" one of the fastest and best means of learning art.

1. Copy a master. In this example I copied Dan Lee.

2. Emulate the style.

Both images done by me, the bottom is the copy, from Ratatouille.

A few more pages...

I liked these ones so I thought I'd share!

The soulbone's connected to the good drawing bone

Bones are like souls--they only show through sometimes, but it's always at really important junctures.

The tany below is a marvelous work in real life--I spent a good 30 min studying it and whoever sculpted knew his anatomy...very, very well. He didn't have tension and relaxation down, but mass, volume, and twisting where all there. I was looking at a real dinosaur.

These were drawn sometime last summer...along with 3-4 (or more) other sketchbooks of this stuff.

If you're wondering eremotherium is Science for "giant sloth." I had a great joke about what it really means, but am exercising my right to discretion...*sigh* ...it was really funny, but alas, also terribly inappropriate...

Early Winter Sunset

Few things are as inspiring as a snowy mountain sunset.

A unique advantage of studying at BYU is having a giant white "Y" on our mountain as we have a perfect reference for what an absolute white looks like in the lighting scheme. Pretty cool.

These are sequential images

Please leave the story in a comment if you can imagine a relationship between the two images. Yes I painted them one right after the other so your guess is as good as any. I don't know how they relate myself.

Fun with Skeletons @ Thanksgiving Point!

According to the freeway signs, I live next to the largest dinosaur museum on the planet...hmm...Somehow I find that a little improbable. At an rate, I figured if they could claim to be the biggest it was probably worth the $10 entrance fee, and it was! The top two images are from a Gastonia (a type of Anklyosaur). The bottom is a crocodile skull. Did you know crocodiles have been around since the time of dinosaurs? That was news to me! Anyway it is a lot of fun.

Josh Black's Painting-a-Day

So my friend Josh Black claims he can do a painting a day. I'm not sure if I can do that, but I'm going to try to do more than him, at least. Hopefully one day I can attain to the quality of his, but alas, we will see...some day. If anyone else wants to join the contest--bring it on!

Progress

To brighten my mood I decided to post some work from this time last year. This is from our senior film, Crossing. Yes that is my "design" for a joshua tree. It was precisely a year ago that I recognized how incredibly inept I was, and although I could see things in my mind, yet I could not translate them onto the page as I wanted to. My understanding of 3-dimensional space was not very well developed. And while I still have a long way to go, at least I'm progressing.

Birthday

So for my birthday I woke up early and caught up on a lot of missed blog reading. It was depressing. I'm going back to bed.

Monastary

This is the most recent version of the monastary for Roák-Aradûn.
Kelly my instructor has been nagging me to finish stuff and get a
portfolio together. Finishing stuff is kind of fun. Ironically the
image above isn't quite to that stage yet but I figured what the heck.

Dryad

A tree spirit.