I first began using a digital pen tablet back when I originally made this site with my family’s Macintosh. Almost 99% of the Little Yellow Guy’s art was done in Dabbler, using my old school Wacom pad. I think it was almost 5 x 4 inches if I remember correctly. Tiny, but quite useful.

Shortly after getting my own Windows PC, I bought another cheap Wacom pad to replace the Macintosh one I could no longer use. The Graphire 2 tablet I currently own works admirably, but it doesn’t seem anywhere near as smooth or accurate as my old serial pad. It’s imperfections are a big reason why I don’t do much digital art anymore.

I’ve always liked the thought of using a tablet type system, and on several occasions I debated as to whether I should break down an buy a Tablet PC. For one reason or another, I’ve put the thought into the back of my mind.

And now comes along the tablet above all other tablets: the Wacom Cintiq. I had seen advertisements for these before, but the sticker shock has always scared me away. I thought owning one, let alone using one, was a pipe dream.

But recently I saw a live video of one of them in action, and now I’m in complete and utter awe. The video must really be seen. The tablet is so much larger than what I thought it was going to be. It must be amazing to even be within it’s gigantic presence.

Of course, it’s still like a million dollars (about $3000 to be exact). But hey, I could always lease one right?

We started using non-charcoal materials this week. We briefly used graphite pencils on Tuesday, and today we used white pencils on black canson paper. The images from this post are from today’s excercises.

It has been a nice change of pace, and I like the results. The “She Hulk” one is interesting with the green pastels as a base, but I’m not a fan of the blending I used. But it is definitely something to look at. My favorite is the close-up below.

The drawings I’ve continue to crank out are pleasing me more and more as time goes on. I think I’ve found a sketching style that I’m satisfied with. I’m also trying to change up my line style with more variance in my lines. Often I don’t outline the lighter edges in pieces like the ones to the right.

In addition I’m not worrying about drawing the whole figure. I’ve been focusing on muscle groups and more detailed shading.

Tonight’s class contained the return of Kenny Rogers. I had an easier time with his more “squarish” features, and I even completed my favorite sketch to date for the class.

Behold, Kenny Roger’s Knee!

For most of last Thursday’s Life Drawing class, I was unhappy about being there and it showed in my work. The drawings were out of proportion, shading was horrible, and the outlines were crude. Overall I was disappointed with the work.

So towards the very end of the class, I decided to switch things up. I chose to focus on only a portion of the model’s body and not the entire figure.

With this change, my drawing skills u-turned. I was able to better capture the model’s proportions and the smaller details. I was also able to add more distinct shading and the sketches turned out better than anything else from that evening.

In fact as it turned out, these last two pieces ended up being some of my favorites from the past few weeks.

Looks like I might actually be able to start working with other sketching medium other than charcoal. Charcoal is great, but I cannot place down clean or thin lines for the life of me.

Supposedly next week we are going to be using regular graphic pencils, white chalk, and other non-charcoal medium. Honestly, it will be a nice change.

In other news, apparently a recent auto update for Internet Explorer for Windows causes an odd “error” when a web page tries to load a flash movie using the old embed and object tags. Users get a message stating “click to activate and use this control”.

Now after the patch, unless you are using a different way of placing it on your page, users will have to click inside of the flash window (actually an ActiveX control) in order for the movie to start playing, or even do anything for that matter. The first frame appears and simply stays there until the flash is clicked or focused. Quite annoying and it’s all due to a plug-in patent lawsuit that Microsoft lost.

My bits of flash should not have this problem as I use a javascript file called FlashObject in order to include any flash movies in my page. You can learn more about the freely available code by visiting the script’s website.

Well my short “break” from going to class comes to an abrupt end tomorrow evening. Much to my disdain, I’ll be going back to my life drawing class.

I have already gotten back into doing the homework, as seen in the picture below. I’m happy with how this portion of the assignment turned out (mostly due to the shading), but I hate how the first awkward sketch got put down. I pretty much gave up trying to fix it to my liking and just finished what I had.

Kinda sad how I’m already tired of this class (mostly due to the homework), and I’m arguing with myself as to whether I should take another class next semester in the Fall.

If I do decide to take another course, it will probably be another art related class like painting or some other physical form of art.

Work continues in my art class. It is really starting to become tedious and annoying. When I registered for this semester, I didn’t quite put 2 and 2 together. At that time I didn’t quite realize this was an actual college course. And since it’s an actual college course, that meant there was homework. It wasn’t going to be a simple “crafts” class like I mistakingly assumed. *Sigh*

So all these late nights spent completing homework are starting to become a bother. The class has been slightly tainted from all this evening effort, and it’s beginning to lose its appeal.

Images listed in this post are from March 7, and I’ve just now got around to publishing them. There are a few other images I haven’t catalogued since the ones above were done, and I don’t quite feel in the mood to photograph them right now. Looking back at them, I’m rather unimpressed with the work to boot.

The only thing that might help reinvigorate this blog (which is turning into an art/sketch blog), is my possible attempts at Illustration Friday projects. Just like Photo Friday, and the photograph project Jessica and I spent over year on, this is a similar concept but deals with topical illustrations.

We’ll have to see if I actually gather the will to try my hand at them.

So tonight I actually made it to class on-time and awake, quite a surprise. Maybe it was the smoothie from Jamba Juice perhaps?

Anyway, I think my results from tonight’s class are much better than the ones from previous weeks. I conciously tried to limit what detail I was working on, so that I could focus more on the shading. In addition, I tried to kick the contrast of the shading up a notch just to see if the results looked any better. Even if it was slightly more unnatural than normal. In the final example below I think that going for darker blacks really helped to make the depth pop out a bit more, which is something I will try to do more of in the future.

Is it odd that for 2006, 99% the posts on this have had nude people in them? Perhaps, I should post more family friendly fare…

Well we did in fact have the opportunity to draw from a model for this Tuesday’s class. However, with the long period without drawing the full body, coupled with the lack of homework for the weekend, my skills were quite rusty.

Each sketch I did for the night failed to meet my standards. I struggled to get the proportions, lines, and shading right on each one. The pic to the right was the best of the bunch, especially with the shading, and hopefully from Thursday on my work will be better.

Well this is the second class in a row of my figure drawing class, where the model failed to show up. In fact, it was the same model who was late for her first session.

So we ended up doing ten minute sketches of the heads and faces of our fellow classmates for both days exercises. I of course couldn’t draw my own head when I was asked to volunteer, so unfortunately that wonderful picture will be forever lost to the winds…

On Thursday’s class we did however have a more detailed tutorial using projected photographs. The image below is the first one I did and I’m quite proud of it. As much as I like it though, I hope that a model shows up for the next class.