Assignment: create a character model sheet, like people do for animation but not necessarily in an animation style. I enjoyed drawing this dog enough I think I might use her for an upcoming “design a children’s book” assigment in the same class.

Assignment: create a WPA-style poster about the contemporary issue of our choice.

Assignment: create an illustration inspired in some way by Norman Rockwell.

Greyscale marker. This is a gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago; I remember it mainly because an art history professor took us through it last year and said “hey, by the way, if you bring someone here on a date this is a nice dark private place for you to go!”

My friend Angie, drawn from life during class.

Watercolor rendering, copied from a White House, Black Market magazine ad–the ad was in black and white, and I chose a color on my own.

India ink, wash and dip pen, copied from another ink drawing I sadly don’t know the origins of. The assigment was just to let us get a handle on using ink.

Self-portrait.

And the first major project, also due yesterday, was a caricature of a famous celebrity. There is definitely a good bit of room for improvement in some places here, but my professor said it reminded him of a New Yorker cartoon kind of, so I am all aflutter anyway.

I thought I did a pretty good job on the art and the captions, separately, but I couldn’t get any of them in particular to click together.

It is a hallmark of how poorly my camera and sketchbook get along that I drew these in red pen on brightly colored index cards and they still photograph way better than pencil on my white sketchbook paper.

The captions I generated were

“MERLIN’S BALLS!”

“AND THEN THE ALIENS SPLIT THE DOG’S HEAD RIGHT OPEN.”

“WHAT IF YOU GET MAD AND I HAVE NO ONE TO TALK ABOUT GOURMET WAFFLES WITH ANY MORE?”

“HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WAITING?”

“THERE’S NO EASIER WAY TO KEEP TRIM, FIT, AND STRONG.”

Four out of five of these make the dog picture sadder, but otherwise I got nothing. I am open to input, if anyone sees any good combinations I missed.

Homework is to draw three single-panel cartoons, which I will post once I do ‘em!

Exercise 1.1: draw a car in 4 minutes, then in 2, then 1 minute, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 seconds. Repeat with a cat, a castle, a telephone, and a self-portrait.

I won’t spam with all of these, but I enjoyed the castle most, so have that.

Exercise 1.2: draw at least 25 famous cartoon characters in no more than 10 seconds each.

I am really curious to see how many people can actually identify any of these. There are only a few that I think are really obvious.

Also, I apologize for the sudden drop in image content here; I’ve been having problems with my scanner, so for the next couple of weeks it’s back to the camera and it just does not get along with this paper.

Exercise 1.3: pencil out a 10×10 grid, and fill each box with an illustration of the first word that comes to mind, taking no more than 5 seconds for each.

Brunetti calls this a “Zen” exercise, but it actually stressed the hell out of me, as having a beeper go every five seconds will do. The results were largely unintelligible and honestly not worth posting. I might try it again some other time.

Homework 1: create a 8×11 “doodle page” in black and white, arranged according to some larger scheme but with a dense variety of smaller drawings.

I worried about this one for a bit, because I wasn’t quite clear on what was being looked for, but then I decided the open-endedness was probably the point and if it isn’t, I don’t care, because I’m not being graded on this. I used sepia and white, because I’m a rebel I already spend a million hours a week drawing a comic in flat black and white and I wanted a bit of variety.

In the meantime, I just wrote a letter to my five-year-old cousin who is big into Doctor Who, so I drew her some little doodles on the back and– surprisingly– was really pleased with these little doofy things I drew in five minutes with a fountain pen.

Seriously. If I must be able to draw one person recognizably, why is that person Matt Smith? How did that happen?

There ought to be another big batch of these coming– I’ve been drawing them more or less daily but I am playing a bit of catchup, plus I’m going out of town for a few days and won’t be able to upload anything.

Day 1: yourself
Day 2: favorite animal
Day 3: favorite food
Day 4: favorite place
Day 5: best friend
Day 6: favorite book character (can’t be a movie)
Day 7: favorite word
Day 8: favorite animated character
Day 9: favorite TV show
Day 10: favorite candy
Day 11: a turning point in your life
Day 12: most recent accomplishment
Day 13: comic
Day 14: favorite fairy tale

I guess I should be grateful I went to Snob U., because if I hadn’t I would never have moved to this city and I might never have ended up going to art school.

But Jesus Christ did I hate it there.

Cheap and sloppy, I know, but true.

The last page of the prologue of a comic I started writing once. Also, the last page I wrote full stop

The Light Princess by George MacDonald.

These are all soft pencil on 18×24 drawing paper.

Batch 1

Batch 2

Batch 3

I gotta say– this felt like pulling teeth the entire semester and like I hadn’t gotten a jot better. But looking at these all in succession, damn that is some progress there, and I wish I could go on working at it for another fifteen months. I could use another month, at the very least, just learning to draw heads and hands that aren’t entirely terrible.