Weekend Roundup – Titmouse and Little Tokyo Sketchup

Titmouse Internship

This past Thursday I started my internship at Titmouse Inc and so far it’s been cool beans. I get to sit in on dailies and work on a cintiq: i so want a cintiq now. However, I’ll try to hold out until they make a cintiq with the intuos 4 features. Anyways, the people there seem real cool, so hopefully i’ll get to know them better as the internship progresses.

Every morning I seem to get there about a half hour early because traffic on the 101 freeway does things on it’s own terms. Because of that, I’ve been using that extra time to do some morning warmup drawings to improve my skills. So the images above are of expressions. I didn’t really plan on doing expressions at first. But once i drew the first head, I wondered how she would look in different angles and moods.

Little Tokyo Skechup

On Saturday, I hung out with a few friends down in Little Tokyo. We met up at the Kinokuniya bookstore to start the day. Now me and Kinokuniya have this love/hate relationship going on: they love taking my money and I hate that they always have cool art books. I also bought a new pocket brush pen while i was there, i can’t wait to try that sucker out.

Anyways, we decided to eat at Daikokuya afterward and I felt ashamed of myself for not being able to finish my ramen.   I never ate there before, so i had no idea what i was getting myself into.  I felt like a teenager again: making decisions that seem good at the time but you end up paying for it bigtime.  The last time i felt like that was at a claimjumpers a few years ago: i got full off of their appetizers.  For those of you that know me, I am a heavy eater.  So imagine my feeling of defeat from a bowl of ramen.

In order to fight off our food comas we ended up doing some people sketching.  The sketches were done in ballpoint pen.  My line quality is slowly getting there, but it still needs a lot of work.  But compared to my pen drawings from a year ago, i’ll settle for anything better than that. haha.

Let me know what you guys think.  Cheers!

glendale galleria… what you got?!?

Had a last minute sketchgroup outing at the Glendale Galleria foodcourt this afternoon.  Still have to work on my line quality, but it’ll get there….. eventually.  It’s been a while since I went out to do people sketching, so it was fun to do that again.

Other notes: done in ballpoint pen while eating and shootin the shit.

Stuff I’ve been meaning to post: AKA sketchdumping!

Been busy with school and such that I haven’t been updating this blog as much as I would like to. Anyways, I’ve consolidated a bunch of pages from my sketchbook into the images below. They consist of people I ended up drawing from sitting in coffee shops, going to workshops, and other functions.

All part of my quest to be a better artist.  I’ll try to post some of the stuff I’ve been doing for the classes I’ve been taking recently.  But one thing is for sure: I realized that with the more classes I take, the less I know.  Try to wrap your head around that and you’ll get where I’m going with that.  So for the 5 of you that read this thing, cheers and stay tuned.

The Weekend Sketch

In an attempt to improve my character design skills, I’ve been doing more people sketches. It’s something that has been begging for attention as I’ve been told during portfolio reviews that my human characters are rather generic looking and less interesting than my animals or quirky looking creatures. The sad thing is that I’ve been drawing human characters a lot longer than animals and creatures. I think it’s because I’ve been defaulting to what’s in my head as opposed to looking at photo reference of different types of people. So to build up that visual vocabulary, I’ve been making more of an effort to design characters from life. Anyways, here’s my sketches from this weekend.

Friday

These sketches were done in downtown Burbank as I met up with some folks from my sketchgroup.  Been trying to get away from sketching with a pencil, so these sketches were done in ballpoint pen and sharpie.  I find it odd that I have more line efficiency with a sharpie than I do with a ballpoint pen.  How that happens, I have no idea.

Saturday

The irony of these sketches were that they were done at the zoo.  Tried drawing the lions, tigers, and bears, oh my.  However, they just didn’t wanna cooperate and would just lay there the whole time.  So I thought I would use the opportunity to sketch the people there.

Sunday

Done in my environment design class at the Concept Design Academy.  I don’t really know the people in the class that well, so I had no qualms about drawing them.  Some of the sketches where drawn in the dark during the teacher demo, so I kinda fudged on the features.  Bad for my eyes, but a nice little challenge  as I’m forced to simplify since there are no features to really noodle over.

It’s all a bunch of hit and miss with these sketches.  My teachers say that it’s all about mileage when it comes to art so I’m pretty much filling up the tank for some long ass road trips.  Luckily there aren’t any police officers to hand out speeding tickets in that regard.  So let me know what you guys think.  Cheers.

Downtown Burbank

So last night I was out in downtown Burbank with some members of my sketchgroup and we pretty much spent the time hopping from place to place drawing.  For me, it’s hard as hell to do any drawing at home because I get easily sidetracked by the internet and television.  So I find these outings to be very beneficial to my artistic growth since I am actually spending time drawing.

Anyways, these drawings were done as I was at the movie theater waiting for everyone to show up.  People sketching has been something I’ve been trying to improve on as of late.  It’s a whole lot harder than it sounds and is a bit of a learning process.  It’s forcing me to design on the fly and is really building up my shape vocabulary because of all the different people I’ve been drawing.  If any of you guys have some tips for people sketching, please share.  Until then, cheers.