I really had fun with the final assignment for the Basic Perspectives class. I had to ditch the perspective guides in Procreate and make my own which helped immensely. It really helped me to work super big, lay out my basic box for the room, and then pick a spot to crop the image to. One benefit of cropping after I'd sketched out the box for the room was that I could crop out areas of the image that were becoming visually distorted at the edges.
I was encouraged with how my sketch turned out on this exercise.
My name is Charlie Lyons-Pardue. I’ve been working in creative fields for a couple of decades but in jack-of-all trades artistic roles. I’d like to shift gears and focus in on one area - illustration - with the goal of working as an independent artist.
The dream would be to work on projects like what John Hendrix and Nate Powell have been putting out. Illustrating something like “Faithful Spy” or “March” would be the ultimate goal for me.
Right now I’m working on regaining some dormant skills and going back to the basics as I spend the next year building up a portfolio worthy of submitting to a good MFA program.
Here’s my vehicle using boxes in perspective to build up the shape, then line work, and tone.
Last week when I was watching the season finale of The Mandalorian I spotted a new droid I'd never seen before in Star Wars. An R2 type droid with legs. I'm calling it a Gondola Droid. Anyway, I took it as an opportunity to just do a quick sketch, but then I decided to develop it a bit further into a more complete image. Doing the color and lighting on it was a lot of fun. Any feedback is most welcome.
Here's my original sketch.
Then I did some line work. You can see some of my reference photos in this one.
Started come coloring.
Then redid the coloring on the droid to reflect the lighting from the lava river and fog.
Over the last year and a half I've been dreaming of going back to art school and going into art-making as my full time job (I'm currently in a creative job, but it's a very jack-of-all-trades kind of role). Leaving the stability and community of my current job to pursue this dream is one I've approached with a lot of discernment. So much time has gone into research and doing my best to learn what the road ahead may realistically look like.
The 3-Point Perspective podcast has been an INVALUABLE resource for me this past year, and this episode in particular. I desperately want to go into this transition with my eyes wide open to all the hurdles and pitfalls and not romanticize what's in store for me.
Laurie Santos's recent episode of The Happiness Lab (Ep 7: Don't Accentuate the Positive) reinforced to me how important these honest conversations about the negatives actually are to achieving success. https://www.happinesslab.fm/season-1-episodes/dont-accentuate-the-positive
Thanks for spending some time dealing with the downsides, we're better for it!
Posting my work for the basic perspective class here. I’m really enjoying it. These exercises are really helpful to doodle throughout the day.
Here’s another attempt at the room to see if I can rein in my distortion problem.
This time I began by drawing a cube that was more in the middle of the room (the closest corner of the bed), then I worked off of that. Most of it feels better, but the toy chest feels too tall/narrow to me.
The image above feels a bit too “tall” to me, so I resized it by squeezing it vertically (below). Feels a bit better.
@davidhohn I keep struggling with the distortion at the edges. For this image I built a cube for the square unit where the two walls and floor joined, then built my measurement grid based off that cube, by the time I’m 3 units away from my first cube (the square between the bed and the door for example) things begin to look really distorted. When you’re laying out a room like this what do you typically start with? I’m trying the assignment again from another horizon line and playing with my vanishing points to see what helps.
I really had fun with the final assignment for the Basic Perspectives class. I had to ditch the perspective guides in Procreate and make my own which helped immensely. It really helped me to work super big, lay out my basic box for the room, and then pick a spot to crop the image to. One benefit of cropping after I'd sketched out the box for the room was that I could crop out areas of the image that were becoming visually distorted at the edges.
As I've been playing around on these I'm getting faster using the shading/lighting technique I've tried on for these. For my next one I wanted to do something with more energy in it and to get away from the Star Wars characters. For this one I decided to make the in-laws happy and do a Michael Jordan drawing.
While I was working on all these video projects for the University I had the latest season of Clone Wars on in the background and that naturally led me to do this piece of Ashoka. For this one I made use of a model posing app on my iPad to get a better sense of lighting and where shadows would fall. A super helpful tool!
After the Kylo piece I wanted to do something a bit more dynamic with some action and a second character. I decided to keep going with characters I've never drawn before and have Greedo and IG88 in a duel.
After doing the Rey piece I realized I'd never drawn Kylo Ren, so he was my natural next one up. I spent a lot more time working on the pose on this one and feel like it helped.
When the pandemic hit my job ramped up quite a bit (video production for a University) and I became a homeschool teacher for my first grader to boot! So I've had to pause my SVS classes for the past couple of months while things were nuts. But in the evenings I've been stealing some time away to work on some drawings to keep the fire going, looking forward to jumping back in here once the Spring semester was behind us. Here's some of the fruit of those late night drawing sessions...
I didn't spend enough time working on the pose. Her arms are pretty messed up. But a fun project nonetheless.
