Sam Blakeley

Fall is here…

I thought I would try a sketch from what unconscious might think Superman should look like. For a first try I’m thinking it’s ok, but it brings up some interesting questions:

Sketch of Superman's face

How to handle Superman’s hair? Is it gelled back? Is it side-parted? Should we add the “S”?
What did I do with his ears?
How small should his nose be?
How prominent should his chin be?
This begs the question, is my Superman more comic book or real life?

I think some research is clearly in order!

I love Superman. Everybody loves him. As a boy I wanted to be him. He stands for everything that I ever want to be: quiet, humble, working for good…

In my search for finding focus, I think I have found a topic that I can put my energy into; I did a quick search of Google for superman sketches and found the following image:

Clark Kent - Superman watercolor sketch

If you read my previous post, you’ll know that I like Quentin Blake and his loose sketches filled in with water-colours. This image has that quality, but it mature. It’s Superman for adults. It’s artwork you could hang on your wall. This will be my inspiration.

Sometimes we get so busy that we forget what we truly love to do. I love to draw, doodle, sketch. Yet often we never practice because we obliged to do something else that isn’t as fulfilling – why is that? I’m hoping to change that. I own a Wacom tablet and I love it. Combine the Wacom with a program like Autodesk SketchBook Pro and you have a digital sketchbook.

Sketching Eyes Using Autodesk SketchBook Pro

I’m hoping to challenge myself to spend five minutes a day using the tool, then upload the results to my website. There are so many things to sketch, that it is hard to know where to start. I think of Quentin Blake and how graceful his sketches and I want something fluid and amazing. But what does sketching really involve? Observation and technique.

Observing everyday objects around us and being able to recreate them on paper (digital paper in our case) requires investigating and building this visual memory. This takes time to research but will allow us to simplify objects like how Quentin Blake does.

Technique is nothing more than interpreting what we see into its visual equivalent. My art teacher David Wright would always look at my work and tell me what I wasn’t seeing correctly. We should be looking and validating our drawing to the original. To clarify what I mean by that, we should be looking at the object and figuring out what specific points are in relationship to other point; The head is 1 in height, the position of the eyes are half way between the top of the head and the bottom of the chin. Then you check your drawing and measure from the eyes to the top and compare that the bottom. If you are not doing this at least once every minute, then you are not doing it right!

Anyhow, I’ve gotten a little too excited and gone off topic. I wanted to show you my first five minute sketch of a pair of eyes to practice using SketchBook Pro and my Wacom!

Toodles.

Listening to Brooke Aubrey Blakeley’s heartbeat for the first time…

A happy day in the Blakeley house-hold! May 28th 2009

Yesterday we rented a wide angle lense – the Tamron 14mm F2.8 for my Canon 50D. Needless to say I intended to get up this morning and take pictures on my way to work (I live in the Niagara region with lots of farmers fields). So there I was standing in a field, looking at a nice sunrise with a wee bit of mist to add a little atmosphere.

I am definitely a novice photographer but with enough knowledge to be dangerous and confusing to others. Nevertheless I wanted to share with you what I was thinking based on the knowledge I have and the lense chosen. This all happened over a few minutes:

Ok I want a good picture, lets start off on AV (Aperture Priority), I want the image to be sharp, there is a lot of light coming from the sun, I’ll set the F-stop to F11, everything will be sharp (so long as I hold the camera steady), the camera will take care of the shutter speed. White balance is set the sun. Take a picture. The picture is too bright, ok what else can I check. ISO, it’s set to 400 right now, I want that to be 100 because I’m not in a low-light and I want my image to be crisp, maybe I’ll set my F-Stop up some more… F18. Take a picture, not bad but still too bright around the sun. Maybe it’s the metering mode, crap, I forgot what the little icons meant again. Spot, Partial, Centre-weighted and Evaluative. Maybe I should choose centre-weighted. Take Picture; still a little bright. What am I aiming at? the horizion trees… but those are dark, if they are mainly dark, then the camera will want to brighten everything up, which basically means the sky will be too bright (known in tech speak as clipping). Ok, I know about this nice little feature called AE-Lock (Auto-Exposure lock). I’ll point my camera at the sky, get the exposure, lock that it by pressing the * (star) button, then refocus on the horizon, hold the shutter down partially, then frame the picture as I want it; take picture. I think this looks good. The picture looks slightly dark on the camera screen, but we’ll see out it turns out. Yikes!

I will post some pictures once I get home.

I thought I would share some of my coursework from the first year drawing class.

Four drawings of a pine cone.

Drawing of a teapot, cup, soft-boiled egg, plate and knife

Drawing of a man sitting down in the cubist style

Google is the number one search engine! Therefore anything they publish regarding SEO we should take note of.

Google has its webmaster tools and it has its webmaster central blog to keep us up-to-date with SEO best practices. But what can we take away from this plethora of information.

Here are my tips:

On your webpage

• Ensure each page in your website has accurate but succinct Title, Description and keyword meta-tags.
• Structure your pages to include <h1>, <h2>, <p> anchor tags
• When using hyper-links include keywords within the links

On other webpages

• Have people link to your website. The better quality the website (e.g. Apple) the higher the credibility of your own website.
• The more links the better but with relevant text surrounding the link too.

I’ve run out of time, more to follow…

We own a Canon 50D and it is an amazing camera (at least in my non-expert opnion). The reason I love digital SLR’s is that you have control over how the shot looks. In time I hope to share my tips and tricks as I become an “expert”.

I’m taking art classes at Brock University and in 2009 one of the tasks was to create a stop motion animation about colour. There were several catches though. The first is that we had to choose a colour from a list; I chose “russet”, a rusty-red colour. Then we were given an MP3 track from Ken Nordine’s album Colors. We were also given the mundane task of creating about 100 painted colour swatches based on our chosen colour from which we could “cut up” to create our animation. The result is shown in the video below:

Russet – Stop frame Animation in Art Class

Another love of mine is Wallace and Gromit

Another example of stop motion animation - Wallace and Gromit

More to follow later…