Still life and shoes

It has been a quiet week... oops wrong blog, and actually I have been very busy, just not a lot of finished work to show for it. Things are mainly in-progress, I am working on our 2nd Graphic Design project (package design), the 3D large shoe (but I  have pictures) and I am still working on the mandalla. My one finished piece is below:

This is my final project with pen and ink work for Illustration. We had to do a still life based on a setup the instructor assembled for us in class. He had quite a collection of objects, a couple of skulls, stuffed birds, plastic flowers, a wooden owl, you get the picture.  We had to draw 4 or 5 objects that were part of the still life and render them in pen and ink. We used 2 classes to get the drawing in a final form plus some work at home. Then we transferred the drawing to Bristol Board and did the inking. I used a fine crow quill pen, and a fine technical pen. The technical pen was used for stippling the skull and the flowers and the rest of the inking was done with the crow quilt. I downloaded some pictures of live quails to use as a reference for feathering on the stuffed quail. Probably a good thing as his stuffed quail have seen better days and are quite faded and dull. Live quail have a lovely subtle coloration. I have to say that out of all the illustration projects we have had so far this is the one I enjoyed the most. Next would be the shell illustration. Guess that means I prefer to draw natural objects.

We are now moving on to a different medium for illustration, scratch board believe it or not. But this isn't the scratch board you used in grade school, crayon on paper with india ink painted over it, no this is clay board which has been covered in ink. Believe me when I say that the work can be amazing when done by someone who knows what they are doing. I don't expect amazing results on my part, but hopefully the work will look OK. Our first assignment on the clay board is to do a landscape. Our instructor brought in photo's he has taken and we had to pick one to use for our drawing. Mine has a structure (sort of a storage shed/barn) with trees. This has to be done for next Monday's class so wish me luck.

We are still working on our shoe design, this time the large version, in my case the shoe will be 20 inches long. Here are some in-progress photo's for you to enjoy. It is actually a bit further along but I will save that for next week when I should have finished pictures for you, as it is due at the beginning of next Tuesday's class.

Here is the sole with the finished heel section.

Shoe with the beginning of the front section built, note the real shoe and the small model in the background.

This is where I was with it before Tuesday's class. I have now started on the back section of the shoe and tonight finished (I hope) cutting out the cardboard pieces I need to do the back to middle of the shoe. This is the part that has the opening for the foot. 

That is it for this week. As I noted there is a fair amount of work in progress. Next week we are supposed to turn in our product packaging for Graphic Design so I will have photo's there, along with the finished shoe and my first efforts at scratch board. As an aside, I was terrible at scratch board as a kid, so I am not expecting great things.

As always comments are welcome.

First 3D piece finished

Well it is done, above is just one view, scroll down for more views. Because E-board, which we used to construct this planar object, is white on one side and cardboard colored on the other I took quite a few pictures.

First here is a picture of my workspace before I started gluing.

Sorry about the high contrast, the sun was coming in the window onto the table that I work on, I didn't want to wait to get started so the picture had to be taken under less then optimal conditions. On the left and toward the middle are the 2 stacks of E-board pieces, on the right is the stack of cardboard rounds that I used as separators. I cut the rounds in half and glued one half to each E-board section, then glued those sections together. I ended up not using the smallest units as the finished object would have been a bit larger then it was supposed to be, and I just didn't like the look, take your pick as to which was the actual deciding factor.  

Side view, showing white Side E-Board

Top down view from the Cardboard Colored side.

I have four images for you this week from my Illustration class. First two are from last week's class assignment of the berry basket, first my drawing of the basket.

Next my pen and ink version. Note these are all being done with quill pen points and bottled India Ink. Usually I prefer working with Technical type pens, not the real ones (too hard to take care of) but the disposable Micron's, the same as I use for my quilt labels, though of different tip sizes.

Over the weekend we were assigned two projects, one to reproduce a bottle that was part of a class hand out on various ways to use pen and ink, and the other was to finalize the drawing of a tool. My tool drawing is done, but inking the result is my homework for Wednesday's class so I will post the pictures next week. I did finish the bottle so I have the drawing and the pen and ink version images to show.

Pencil Sketch

Final Drawing Inked

I am not totally pleased with how this came out, I am finding myself getting impatient with the process and rushing it a bit, which isn't good. Still it isn't too bad an effort.

I was telling the instructor this morning, how I am finding myself a bit surprised at how I don't really like doing this type of drawing. I do and have always done what some might consider finicky detailed work, take the mandala, lots of detailed areas, and I had to do repeats, which does get a bit old. Still I don't have to use as much control to do those as I do when I do the illustrations. With illustration things need to be exact and tight, I am finding I don't enjoy working that way. Detail can be fun sometimes, maybe when I don't have to be quite so exact, I guess, have to think about this a bit more. I suppose it might just be the subject, but somehow I don't think so.

That is it for this post. I almost have my first Graphic Design I project done. I will have those printed this week so should have pictures for you next week at the latest. I also have a Fast Friday group challenge that I should be working on. That I am thinking about but not sure if/when I will finalize the design and actually sew. I am also making progress on another mandala, it might be far enough along to have an in-progress photo taken.  So there are several things in the works as it were, stay tuned for my next update, and as always comments are welcome.

Week 7 of School

School this past week was good though I only had classes on Tuesday and Wednesday because of the Columbus day Holiday on Monday. In Color and Design I am moving on to my self portrait project and we learned about one of our next projects (the one after the shoes) which will be to design 5 stamps (ACK). As a former stamp collector I am so familiar with stamps that it shouldn't be too hard to do this, still I am not really looking forward to it. One of our stamps has to be a sports figure. Hmm guess I should be buying some magazines to get some pictures, or check out the newspaper sports pages. I did manage to get my portrait done on Monday and used Wednesday class time to get my grid done.

In Computer Graphics we are still working on Illustrator techniques. We learned how to break apart a font, a handy tool if you want to create logo's from initials. I have to say that letters like the letter "A" are a bit tricky to cut apart, course it just could have been the font I was using for my experiments.

Drawing class this week had us working with pen and ink and using different line qualities to create shadows since you can't smudge ink. Below is my first try, I am not very happy with it, I didn't sketch in the sunflowers and when I was inking got them the totally wrong size, they look like daisy's not sunflowers (sigh)

Next try was this Bust, I can't recall who exactly it is, some Roman, I do know that . I sort of like this one, at least you can tell it is an older male human.

This next photo is of my 3rd try, ran out of class time and didn't finish, you can see the pencil lines around the top. I also need to do a bit more work on the face. This is from a photo, but is another sculpture. The mouth is good, and I suppose I should finish it. But, we have homework of 3 pen and ink drawings for next Tuesdays class, and so far I only have one finished. I do have two others that I am working on, but I think I need to finish them before I go back to this one.

My last photo this week is the still life charcoal drawing I did 2 weeks ago for my homework assignment. I am pleased with the bananas, and I think it really does work as a composition. That said the photo really isn't very good. I didn't realize until I went to crop it that it is a bit out of focus. Still you can get the general idea of what this looks like.

On the quilting front about all I have been doing is quilting a couple of UFO quilts. One is about the size of a baby quilt, my paper pieced mariners compass blocks. The other is a twin sized bed quilt. The top is hand pieced batik blocks that I finished ages ago, started quilting but never finished. I got the basic grid quilting done, but when I started quilting the blocks didn't like what I was doing, what thread I was using etc. so stopped. I took out the old quilting on the blocks and am using a different thread and a different quilting pattern. This time I think I like it so it is just a question of finding the time and energy to get it done. This next Friday will be our next Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. Wonder what it will be this time.