The Origin of O'ren Ishii

For painting we started oil last week. First thing we did was still lives, mine turned out pretty well but that's at school at the moment. For homework we had to take any scene from a movie and paint it. I asked if we could do videogames and my teacher said it was fine as long as it wasn't cartoony or anything with a unique visual style (I'm assuming this applied to movies as well).

At first I was going to do Half-Life 2's plaza during the intro, then I just scrapped the whole idea. I decided to think of a film that I absolutely adore that also had great composition and was visually appealing. I thought of any Wes Anderson film due to his prominent use of primary colours and 1 point perspective/symmetrical shots, more precisely The Royal Tenenbaums. 


Then I thought of the director I absolutely adore: Quentin Tarantino. I first thought of doing something from Inglourious Basterds, but there's that whole Nazi motif that I knew some would get offended. Then there was that dancing scene from Pulp Fiction. But I settled for my most favourite film by QT, Kill Bill. I went with the fight scene with O'ren Ishii in Kill Bill vol. 1, Chapter 5: Showdown at House of Blue Leaves; that scene had tons of beautiful shots it was difficult to choose. Anyway, here are the WIP pics and final:

The final.

Close-up of O'ren.

I'm very proud of it. Sure I can see the many faults in the painting, but I achieved so much of what I wanted I'm proud. I'm proud of the face, except her right eye. And I absolutely love how her left hand turned out it's perfect. I had Leyendecker paintings at the side to reference and it really helped a lot while doing this painting especially the hand. I didn't want to paint it exactly like it is in the film, because then I would have been scrutinizing over it all day. So I looked at the original and just referenced it, but drew it on my own and with a little bit of Leyendecker style. 

Let's just say, where have you been all my life oil paints?

SUPER AWESOME MEGA POST FOR ALL MY CLASSES (excluding Art History)

This past week was really busy, but I got through it. I'll go through each class in order since i had something due.

Painting

I honestly thought I took pictures of my egg tempera painting. Turns out, I didn't. I shall post a picture as soon as I get it back. In the meantime here's one of two boards we made to practice egg tempera on. I'll explain more next time and my opinions about egg tempera.

Although it was just to play around with egg tempera, I started to enjoy doodling on the board. I even began to balance out the composition and colour throughout; I was in the zone. I have to say that I like it, and it is probably my first abstract piece. 

Life Drawing

This one, along with another, was the one I handed in for those gestures. I'm not posting the other one because it's not that well done compared to this one and the one I posted last time. I handed it in because it had a face which my teacher seems to want unlike the previous one.

This project was pretty cool. I was nervous to start it, scared that I might mess up. Unfortunately I did.  3/5 of those drawings are great. After I drew the biggest one, I barely had any space hence why there's that awful looking one next to it. But my favourite has to the the far left one.

We also handed in our sketchbook with 10 drawings of interiors with minimum 5 people. Since that's a lot of drawings, I'll save those for another post.

2D

For 2D we had to design a billboard that was for a political issue. My first idea was the perfect one, everything I thought of after that was mediocre. Compared to the roughs we presented the week before, the text was the only thing that changed, I just added some space between each character.

Marco River a Billboard

I would just like to add, for critique, the class placed the billboards from the strongest to the weakest design. Mine was put first. I'm very proud of how it turned out and I'm glad that everyone loved it.

Also, for this week we learned about type contrast and did a quick in-class activity using random words given to us. We weren't supposed to understand them so that we can focus on the different kinds of type contrast.
Marco River A Contrasts

Second page here ^

3D

For 3D we take something from nature and use aspects of its features to create a container. I brainstormed ideas from turtle shell patterns to create a bowl, to galaxies and comets as another bowl and ashtray. I settled for a tornado-vase-ish thing. My initial ideas had very elegant curves, as I started to go for something geometric my teacher helped improve my idea. Here's what I ended up with:

Made out of foamcore, it consists of 28 squares. A lot of people liked it when we did critique my teacher loved the design choices I made along the way like beating up the edges and crumpling them up to give it a rough look which conveyed the destructive nature of tornadoes. It was meant to be taller and the sides originally went out more. But balance was an issue so the direction it points out aren't as exaggerated. Overall, I'm satisfied with it and I'm glad it turned out better than I thought it would. Here are some WIP pics.

Digital Media

For digital media we started Illustrator and had to either create a map of our school but put a unique twist on it, or a cross section diagram of anything. Most people had regular maps but for different situations. One person had a map about perfect places to go during a zombie apocalypse, another had the best places to sleep in Sheridan. For mine, I decided to go for an old style, Middle-Earth-esque map.

Kingdom of Sheridan

Let's just say I outdid myself and exceeded expectations. It turned out better than I had imagined. Each tree was individually drawn, unfortunately with a mouse. I wish I had a tablet, it hurt my hand afterwards. Once again, during critique, people were amazed and so was my awesome nerd of a teacher. The only issue was some words overlapped some lines (A wing & AA wing) which made it slightly difficult to read, but that was just a minor problem. My map contradicted most of the advice he gave to others, but because of my design it was acceptable (ex. Angled words). I got a ton of compliments and at the end my teacher said, "Other than that I have nothing else to say on how you can improve." Apparently I was the first person to do a map like this. I loved how it turned out so well, I printed two copies. One to hand in, the other for myself.

Sketchbook 

A friend of mine had a cartoon tiger he showed me that was in a frontal view, I told him it was flat looking. Without telling him, I started to draw his character in 3/4 view with my own style. Hilarity ensued. The drawing turned out pretty awesome though.

My attempt at a head rotation for my character. Still early, and the front needs a fixing. The back is currently uninteresting, hence why I didn't draw it. I just need to add something more to his head. Maybe hair?

Bored the other night and had the idea of a bird with features that vaguely resembled tribal headgear. The wing area gets a little flat looking, but I had fun drawing entirely from my imagination. It was also to play around with some shapes I found interesting.

Well, that was a lot to go through. I'll try to update soon to avoid another "SUPER AWESOME MEGA POST".

Digital Media

The biggest project to hand in this past week was an interpretive self-portrait created on photoshop for Digital Media.

We took photos of ourselves any way we wanted and we had to photoshop it into an image that told something about ourselves. Here's my original photo:

The requirements were only to mask it and photoshop at least 3 different things. Me being bored and wanted to go over-the-top with this assignment created this:

It was very difficult to find a good background that allowed me to place my cut-at-the-waist image, yeah the worst place to cut a person off in a picture. This project was actually difficult to do, finding resources were a lot harder than I thought. Not to mention the disturbing images I had to get past when searching terms such as "headshot", "blood spray", and "shot soldier". 

My portrait is is supposed to convey my love of videogames. I never though my Team Fortress 2 screenshots would have came in handy for the combat log. Other videogame related assets are the medic call bubble also from TF2, Nintendo light gun I'm holding, the headshot blood splatter is from a Fallout 3 V.A.T.S screenshot and the nametags are reminiscent of WoW's nametags. I also threw in my "internet persona" name "Bluko" in there as an easter egg for the guy being shot.

Life Drawing

We handed in 3 drawings this week, but I do not have photos of those. When I get them back (probably tomorrow) I shall post them. It was an awesome activity, so I enjoyed doing that project. Here are some extra life stuff.

I really like the face for this one. The proportions are slightly off, but I like how I got the slight twist in her body.

This is an example of one of the things we had to hand in. Using a darker colour we had to create a blocked out version of the figure, then draw in the rest very quickly. I absolutely love this kind of gesture, and this one turned out very well. Unfortunately I didn't hand this one in because I thought the teacher would prefer a picture with a face instead. I had a ton done like this, and it was very hard to choose two to hand in.

Some gestures that I like.

1 minute drawings that turned out well. I absolutely love the bottom three on the above photo.

I like how this has an unfinished look to it.

I'm pretty sure this was near the end of extra life so I started to get tired and only draw parts of the body. This one turned out pretty good.

Sketchbook

Doodled a bit yesterday and I created this awesome face that I'm very proud of so I thought I'd share. 

This view needs a little tweaking, the eyebrow needs to be a little lower but overall I like it. Character perhaps? We'll see, I've been making faces since the beginning of October and 3 turned out pretty well, this one being an altered version of the second one.