Christmas Card 2012

So I drew a Christmas card for my secret santa this year. After drawing it out I just needed to colour it. So here's the process from start to finish!

Original drawing.

Then I re-did the lines on photoshop.

Colour.

And the finals with a bit of texture added! I made two for whichever someone prefers.

So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you! 

I also changed my url into: artofmarcorivera.blogspot.com because my original one was just something I made up since everything with my name was taken already. But I didn't like the one I had so I resorted to the typical "art of" url. Damn my somewhat common name.

Misc. Life Drawing

This was when we were drawing with ink. Unfortunately ink doesn't like me (although I have been getting along with it lately), so none of those drawings will be posted. But this was the first one I did in conte on manila paper to nail down the model's pose, angles, shapes, and proportions before diving into  ink.

And now for a bunch of life drawings:

1

2

5

10

Unfinished but I really like the solution I came up with on her left shoulder. The light was in my face, so she was mostly dark from my perspective except for rim highlights. Her arm leaned towards the light so it was the only bright spot on her body and drawing it as a thin outline didn't look right. So I blocked it in instead with black and create a negative shape and the result turned out better than I expected. 

Played around by making this drawing into basic shapes.

Workshop

We did pentimento for workshop and class one day. It was really fun to do but really difficult, it was an interesting challenge! This first one was a wonderful set of poses, of course it's Ed. 

Then we did manipulation/distortion for workshop and class (again!). We had to come up with some sort of narrative in our head which helped manipulating the figure.

This first one was in workshop and someone thought it looked like he was dipping his foot in water and it was freezing cold, so we focused on the leg and the expression.

Then we had to think of our own for this one, I thought he looked passed out drunk so I made sure the hunched back was as hunched as it can be.

This was one in class. It was the same pose as the first one in workshop but the other way. This time (our teacher told us not to tell what we thought it looked like since we already gave an idea before) it was a pose being disgusted/repulsed or a "get away from me" pose as he's being asked out. So this time I focused on the shoulders and the downward direction of the head.

Not so serious drawing. The set up was him holding out something like cards and we all had to do our own thing without telling anyone until after. I made it into a tea party.

Watercolours

Unfortunately I am not in the possession of the decent paintings I did for the final batch of 10 small paintings, so here is my outdoor painting and tableau vivant. 

We had to go out and paint en plein air for this one. I started one but it was pretty bad so I redid it at home while referencing what I already had. I really need to get darker with my watercolours for some much needed contrast.

We had to (in groups) set up our own tableau vivant for everyone to paint. It also had to tackle a world issue. My group decided to do it on garbage/pollution/landfills, so we had a well dressed couple having a picnic in a landfill staring beyond the horizon (interpret it any way you wish, I actually don't mind landfills after reading on stuff about recycling just yesterday). I should have taken a photo of the actual set up we had because it was much more interesting. We had covered what they were lying on with newspaper, cardboard and anything you could imagine. We had actual garbage, cat litter, plastic utensils, crumpled plastic bottles and more scattered around the stage.

The other tableau vivants were pretty odd, sometimes difficult to actually see the message. But the one on censorship was a pretty neat and minimal set up. But my paintings for those other 3 tableaus weren't that good, but bits of the censorship one had some pretty neat brush work so I was pretty proud of that.

VCA Web Design

Web design, you're an entire different beast when it comes to designing. You proved to be very difficult (HTML and CSS nonsense aside) due to mostly size relationships of the content found on a page. Buttons are a little too big, headers may be too small, too much negative space etc. 

So rather than posting the horrid web pages I designed, I'm posting the small aspects of it instead. The first web page didn't really have much of personally designed content, so most of this is from the final assignment.

VCA Web Page

For our final assignment we had to design a web page dedicated to VCA (with content already provided) but in the style of one of the art movements given:

• Pop Art
• Cubism
• Art Deco
• Impressionism
• Abstract Expressionism
• De Stijl
• Arts and Crafts
• Bauhaus

Of course I would pick Art Deco, that would silly of me not to.

First thing I did was design a logo for VCA. I went overboard with it by spending a ton of time and creating a number of them...

I started out with this one first. I thought it would be interesting by making a somewhat symmetrical design by getting rid of the crossbar of the A to mimic the V. Then after looking at it for a while it just didn't look right, it wasn't being read the way I wanted it to.

Brought back the crossbar, placed it in a typical art deco frame. The space surrounding the "VCA" did not work as well as I thought it would within a half-circle. But I still wanted to integrate the thin lines into my design somehow.

So I used a font I came across that was entirely lines! I liked it for a while so I worked with it alongside what I originally had for a bit. Eventually I decided against it because of how busy it looked.

I put them within a boxed frame with repeated shapes to allude to art deco architecture and I found that it worked really well compared to the circular design I had before.

The bottom design is what I ended up choosing as my final. 

I attempted to expand on the repeated shapes at the side by bringing it to the bottom to actually mimic art deco architecture and bring back some of the thin lines that I wanted. I didn't like the result and it didn't scale well.

At one point I attempted to create a monogram...it was bad.

I wanted to create a header of the entire name of the program as well as design a button. I unfortunately didn't use any of these designs but I liked the border design a lot that I used it for a sidebar on my webpage. This also showcases the secondary colour scheme I adopted for my web page.

These are my final button designs. I found that separating the buttons through the use of individual gradients was a clever solution.

I also experimented more with different logos to see if I could come up with anything better and play around with angles. 

After my teacher saw the countless logos I made, he asked for a copy of the file to show his Digital Media class (2nd year VCA) since there aren't much examples of logo experimentation/logo design progress anywhere and he would give me credit. Sweet.

I also needed to create some header and footer banner to place my logo within.

And finally this was a mock-up slideshow design (because I have no idea how to actually implement one), I made it have that retro theatre look.

Photography Compilation

Seeing as how there were a ton of photos taken for photography every week, I just picked out a handful of the ones that I particularly loved.

Fast and Slow Shutter Speed

The slow and fast shutter speed assignment was one that I enjoyed but it was also tedious having to take photos of every specific shutter setting that was needed.

I avoided any people in this post, but I absolutely love this photo so I couldn't not post it. Sorry Nate.

Design & Composition

I enjoyed this one since it was pretty open to what kind of photos that were required. We had to take photos that depicted the elements of design. I went for a minimal approach to most of them.

Panoramas

I enjoyed this one the most and did the final portfolio as panoramas. Unfortunately I am having trouble uploading others because they're "too big", although I did upload another in my previous post where I used it a reference for my Narrative Self-Portrait assignment. I will find a solution though, so that I can post my Photography Portfolio which I took more interesting panoramas.

Advanced Drawing 1 - Complete!

Alright! It's Christmas Break! You know what that means? Portfolio An end of the semester update! Instead of posting them all in one day I'll try to spread them out a bit. I'll also try to split some up into two posts so that they're not one massive post.

Unfortunately there are some projects that I do not have copies/photos of such as my last batch of small paintings (one of which I absolutely love) and my final wood sculpture (although I asked for the photos my teacher took, which I think she'll be sending soon based on her reply I just received).

Anyway to begin I'll start off with life drawing assignments. My narrative self portrait one that I haven't posted yet and our final triptych:

Narrative Self-Portrait

After being exhausted with the countless self-portraits we had to draw, this one didn't seem that bad since we had to work from a photograph and incorporate the background somehow into our piece. Having just done self-portraits in photography, I used one my partner took of me and also took a section of one of the panoramas we did for photography as well for my background.

Credit to Jesse C. for the photograph.

I used the rooftop of the school as a background along with a bit of the funky windows.

Rough sketch I did on newsprint.

Final ink and watercolour on watercolour paper (18 x 24). I attempted to create a vibrant nightlife in the background in contrast to my dull colour and confused look since I don't see the interest in any of that...stuff.

Triptych

For the triptych we needed 3 divided pieces that conveyed movement, manipulation and memory in any manner the artist wanted. So you didn't have to have each section of the triptych as one of the topics, it could be in each one as long as it works together since, well, it's a triptych.

For mine I decided to depict the three through mainly the line work and the pose (mainly sport poses). So for line work, who else would I look towards for inspiration? The Line King, Al Hirschfeld of course. After watching videos of how he worked I noticed, contrary to the look of his swooping lines, he works in a very meticulous manner. He sketches in the line bit by bit, almost like an amateur drawer, going over the lines again and again. So I proceeded to imitate the way he works to create my pieces.

For movement I went with rounded and curly lines; it drags your eye up and down the figure. I did a running pose for obvious reasons.

For manipulation the first thing I thought was to elongate the arm of a throwing pose (either javelin, discus or shot put). I decided to go with wavy lines to mimic Dali's work since it was chock full of manipulation. 

For memory I decided to draw the way I would normally draw but since that is far from Hirschfeld's look, I needed to pull some of his style in the third one so that they all looked cohesive. I chose the tennis pose for memory since it's the only sport I enjoyed playing.

This was the set up during critique, all are on a 10 x 15 illustration board. I added the shapes last and forgot to take a photo of them. The above photos have a faint sketch of them if you look closely. I did triangles to show more movement and contrast the round lines, quadrilaterals and red to show strength, and a circle as a reference to most of Leyendecker's covers having a red circle or a circular frame surrounding the head.