Stretching my Skills

So....I've been taking a class to learn how to use my Corel Painter program.  I bought it a couple years, ago, and never really learned how to use it.  I see that if I am going to be able to do anything on it, I'm really going to need to dedicate some time towards actually learning it.  So here's an attempt.  I even took notes.

#1: 

#2: 

#3: 

4: 

And now I think I'm ready for some more traditional media....

Exercise in lights and darks

So I was reading James Gurney's book (sorry I can't remember the name) and he was talking about a painter (whose name I also don't remember) and a painting of a windmill, and how each of the blades of the windmill was handled differently--light on dark, dark on light, dark on dark, and light on light--and how interesting that is.  So that's what this is all about.  The guy is from a picture in our local newspaper (of a local college basketball player whose name I don't remember either--though one of my students recognized him and commented upon it when walking past my desk this morning).  I made a couple little tonal sketches, and while working on this realized that I do a lot of this in my drawings anyway, but not usually all four.  Getting the light on light was the hardest.

Oh, and here's a link to a page of Gurney's blog where he talks about this: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2012/11/bargue-study-of-seated-man.html

Illustration Friday: Pioneer

I was talking to one of the art teachers at my high school, and she was telling me that one of the things she has her advanced art students do in their sketchbooks is to copy pictures of various masters, and that was an idea that really resonated with me, since I want to develop enough skills to someday be able to do black and white pen and ink illustrations for middle grade novels, and I have a LONG way to go. Another thing I need to work on is narrative in pictures. So I decided that rather than just "study" pictures of illustrators I admire, to actually "copy" certain aspects of some of their pictures. I teach creative writing, and one of the things we do with poetry is called "copy-changing", where you copy the structure of a poem, and then change the content to make it your own. It's an excellent exercise for learning how to put poems together. And since I want to learn more about putting pictures together, this seemed like a good idea.

So here's my picture: The earliest pioneers were the heroes that myths are made of...


The little color picture is the original Arthur Rackham illustration...