Sam Blakeley

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.

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

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…