Bday card 2016

totoros with balloons

Barb's Bday Card

another birthday card

Fantasy Self Portrait - 1993 - Watercolor & Charcoal Pencil

jade plant

Getting back into regular sketching in my sketchbook – this one features a small branch of my sprawling jade plant. Perched on the windowsill, Jade was glowing in the afternoon sunlight, poised for praise. I used a Staedtler, Mars Lumograph B pencil; then a mechanical one for added definition. Staedtler makes very consistent high quality drafting/drawing pencils. I like using the HB, B, 2B for sketching. Some of the softer ones (4B and up) smudge too easily, since I’m inclined to rest my hand on my artwork.

Jade plant

bday card 2014

Birthday card sketch

Assignment 2 - Abstraction and Process Art - Day 1

Here is my underpainting for the abstract painting of my garlic. In this assignment we are researching techniques of notable abstract expressionist artists such as Diebenkorn and Frankenthaler, and applying their techniques and ideas to our paintings. I am working with water-soluble oil paints by Windsor-Newton, Daniel Smith, and Gamblin. These paints take quite a while to dry. I am not mixing with any medium except water. My process involves layering paint, dry-brushing, and transparencies. Canvas size is 20 x 24 inches. Class is Painting II at Cabrillo College with Prof. Tobin Keller.

Assignment 1 - Painting Study

I wanted to create a painting that could be seen from across the room. This work achieved that goal. Many times when I paint and draw, I stand back from my work and realize there is not enough contrast. In this quick study, I painted directly from observation, with the garlic placed outside in the full sun. The intense light allowed me to clearly see the form, and deliniate areas of shadow. This time I used thick oil paint, and painted wet into wet, allowing the colors to mix on the canvas. I think I used zinc white here, as well as french ultramine for the blue, magenta and/or permanent rose, and yellow light hue. The texture of the gessoed paper shows through to give a nice textured feel to the ground. This painting was inspired by the mostly monochromatic Diebenkorn still life paintings I saw at the Palm Springs Art Museum in January 2014. Medium: Water soluble oil paint on watercolor paper prepped with gesso.

Here are some thumbnail sketches of garlic for my first assignment in my painting class with Tobin Keller at Cabrillo College. These preliminary drawings help inform my compositional decisions for a larger abstract painting. Can't wait for the next steps!

Palm Springs -- color sketch

Palm Springs 2014

New Year's Day sketch

Barn at Flume

Trees at Cabrillo College - Part 2

English country vegetable garden -- from photograph

perspective

Trees at Cabrillo College

Trees at Cabrillo College - Twin Cypress and Baby Oak by the bridge - July 2013. Pencil and Charcoal Pencil

Still Life

Vintage toys and a wooden mannequin

various sketches from May

Visual cues and animation

Humans rely on visual cues (form, scale, color, value, etc.) when interpreting sensory visual data from the environment. Our environment is regular and predictable enough for us (through 'survival-of-fittest' we adapted specifically to this environment and not some other one) that over time we have become accustomed to successfully attributing certain meanings/outcomes to certain cues. When viewing a distant object moving in space, for example, (person, ball, airplane, lion charging, etc.) we use visual cues, such as change in size (scale), change in silhouette/negative space (shape or form), change in reflected light (value), to interpret what we are seeing. Through these cues we gain an accurate sense of depth perception and 3D space.

We are so well adapted and consistent in our response to certain universal cues, that we can 'fall prey' to illusion, if the same response (perceptual event) to the visual information can be triggered in the absence of the genuine real-world stimulus. As animator-artists, we can exploit this tendency when attempting to create the "illusion of life". Animation involves the careful study of life in action (reference), then the interpretation/processing of  that careful study into a series of 2D drawings (drawings that convey shape transformation over time as each new drawing in the series is changed slightly from the previous). As animators attempt to replicate what is experienced in reality, when drawing an animation, they exaggerate these observations. Through exaggerating the observations, the action will be more clearly conveyed  to an audience.

Walk Cycle Animation

I really enjoyed animating this little walker.