I've got some more pages from my sketchbook, as promised, but I feel bad about not going through with the timing of fulfilling the promise. I do have a lot more to add now, and I'll get my photos added onto this blog very soon. (And I really do mean this, this time.) But for now, it will be some of my recent interests in art, as well as some books I'm reading and a couple that I desperately want to have time for, but don't.
Outlander (or Cross Stitch) by Diana Gabaldon, which is the first in a series of seven novels, and Witch and Wizard by James Patterson are two of the most recent books that I've been dying to read but have absolutely no time too. Heck, I hardly have time to sleep with all the homework and college applications I've been trying to get done, but that's high school for you. Not that my bookshelf needs any more unread books on it - its kind of overflowing with unread books right now, just a little bit...
I'm currently in the middle of reading The Lucky One, a Nicholas Sparks book, simply for pleasure. I had gotten about halfway through the book during summer, but I had to put the book on pause for summer reading and my English reading assignments. I'm reading The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver for my English Literature class. Its an incredible book so far, and I have high hopes for the rest of the book that I doubt will be let down, but the father, Nathan Price, frustrates me to no end. If I could remain mentally sane whilst strangling a fictional person, I would definitely do it.
"Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo pink." - Adah Price, Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
So now for the art! I have started studying different portraits and the proportions of faces, and have found that this website was greatly helpful in beginning to learn the correct measurements and proportions of a human face. It even gives you examples of different angles of a face and has a video tutorial if you want to follow along with the lesson. I found inspiration in Roy Lichtenstein's pop art style paintings, one of which titled "Ohhh... Alright..." is pictured below. I attempted to follow a pop art style in one of my projects, though I didn't use Lichtenstein's trademark dot-shading technique also found in comics during the era, the mid 1900s. Its on a 12x12" canvas, but I had to crop the image a bit to get it to fit nicely. The subject of the painting is a bit off center to the left of the canvas, and the background is a solid bright blue.
A great site for learning how to create proportional, realistic and cartoon drawings is Lackadaisy, especially the gallery where you can see some of the artist, Tracy J. Butler's, processes in creating her incredible webcomics. Some of the most helpful pages on the website I found were on facial expression, character construction drawing, and figure drawing.
I think that's all I'll be able to include from my sketchbook for now, but I'll definitely add more in another post soon, with more pictures as well.
