Archives: Student Art
A Narrative Quality
February 19, 2009 at 8:10 pm by Alex
I found it interesting that my life drawing teacher, Louise Captein, once said my work had a narrative quality to it. I suppose such a quality is the result of my sequential art aspirations. Even in a class that had little to nothing to do with my comics, a narrative shined through, enough that people took significant notice.
I suppose that’s evidence that I’m doing this whole art thing right. Even in a medium completely polar to my medium of choice (charcoal and paper vs. tablet and Photoshop) there is still the sense that I’m telling a story.
Posted in Musings, Student Art
Time-Lapse Photography
February 1, 2009 at 2:14 pm by Alex
Winter 2006
This set of time-lapse images was my final project for my film photography class.
These four images are time-lapse photographs of the music visualizer in iTunes, Apple’s music player. It displays random images and distortions of images based upon the waveform of the song playing, so these images got a very ghost-like softness to them as the film exposed. Exposure time varied from 5 to 25 seconds.
These two are Windowsscreensavers; Bezier and Windows XP Default, respectively. Exposure times varied from 25 seconds and up.
This was a 1-second exposure done by pointing an LED keychain flashlight at the camera. Though the light is out of focus, I enjoyed the softness that resulted.
Posted in Student Art
Flower Chair
at 1:38 pm by Alex
Spring 2007
The prompt for this assignment was similar to that of iCouch; combine an organic object with an inorganic object. Thinking along the lines of the previous combination of computer and couch, I decided to combine furniture with flowers, and the result was the Flower Chair.
I later used the Flower Chair in an animation flipbook along with other flower furniture, and did the following two Sketch N’ Toon renders to figure out how I wanted the end product to look.
Posted in Student Art
Stickman (So I Was Walking…)
at 12:42 pm by Alex
Spring 2007
Stickman, or So I Was Walking…, was the final project in my animation course. I’m a huge fan of Randall Munroe’s xkcd, and wanted to pay homage to a webcomic that has become so influential in such a short time, so this animation is heavily inspired by the themes of the comic.
Xkcd comic #150 and the recurring character of the girl with black hair, in particular, are what I drew upon in the creation of this animation.
I emailed Munroe a link to the video shortly after finishing it, but unfortunately didn’t get a response. On the bright side, since I mentioned xkcd in the video’s comments, it’s the most watched of my videos on YouTube.
Posted in Student Art
Garanos Rendered
at 12:36 pm by Alex
March 2007
Garanos first came about as part of a group project in high school. As happens with people at that age, the various members drifted off in their respective directions, and I am no exception to that. Still, I walked away with the character who would become my creative focus to this very day. I was bound and determined to tell Garanos’ story, whether others joined her or not.
As a senior in high school, I took a composition class, in which one assignment was to write a short story in the Gothic style, as we were reading Dracula at the time. Many many hours later, I went to class with a ream of 37 pages; needless to say, my short story was the longest in the entire class.
Nonetheless, during my first year of college, I attended panel about self-publishing one’s own comics on a very low budget. It amazed me how easy it could be, so for the next two weeks, I spent all my free time drawing Garanos from beginning to end, with intent to digitally color and finish the pages for printing. As is life, one thing led to another, and I wasn’t able to work on them again for a span of several months. The following year, I took my first Art & Tech class, Digital Manipulation. For my final project, I took three spreads of two pages each from my Garanos pencils, produced them in full color, and had the set of three spreads framed for the Art & Tech Show.
Seeing those pages in full color inspired me to take a fresh look at Garanos the following summer. Considering both my style of drawing and digitally coloring my artwork had improved immensely in the time since the pencils were first drawn, the task of going back and repairing 160 pages of old drawings was daunting, to say the least.
Instead, I started over from scratch. I began redrawing everything in a full-page, 8.5×11 format (I had previously been working at 5.5×8.5, half-sheet format) and used Photoshop to digitally color everything in my emergent style, almost completely lineless and vector-like. I started publishing the pages online in July of 2006, with any new pages I completed going up three days a week.
Since the Art & Tech program helped me to further visualize and improve Garanos with just one class, I wanted to see what three dimensions could do for her.
Posted in Student Art