Author: Robin

I'm Robin (he/they), a third year enrolled as a User Experience Design student. I'm especially interested in eventually professionally creating artwork for entertainment such as animated films, books, and video games. I want to share my artwork with a wider audience using this blog, and I also want to open up a conversation about what goes into making illustrations and artwork both on the creative and business sides..

Industrious Illustrating #2: Life Drawings 1

Robin 2 Comments

Hey all! I hope everyone has had a good and restful spring break so far! This week, I’d like to share some examples of life drawings from a sketchbook I maintained during the November of last year.

Below, I used watercolor and inks at a live nude model drawing session held by MDraw to study the model’s skin texture and gesture. I’m looking forward to MDraw hosting more life drawing sessions after spring break, as the entry free is pretty affordable (less than a cup of boba!) and I always feel like my skills have improved after a session.

Meanwhile, these life studies are far more loose and fluid. I looked at my classmates during a lecture and tried to capture the gesture and contour of their bodies first, leaving details and exact proportions second. The result is a study of motion in stationary subjects.

I don’t just draw human subjects, either. These three sketchbook pages are from an ink drawing project I did for Drawing: Observation class during that month. Professor Guilmet brought her fascinating collection of dried, pickled, and taxidermied animals to class for us to draw from. Once the weather warms up a little more, I might go to a zoo or a wildlife sanctuary so that I can draw some animals that are still kicking and breathing! Maybe they’ll find their way into one of my drawings.

If any of you guys are also visual artists, I highly recommend drawing anything you find interesting from live observation. No two people find the exact same images and objects interesting, so you’ll gradually develop a visual library in your brain that is completely unique to who you are as a person. And who knows, maybe your drawings could spark an interest in someone else toward something they previously didn’t see the value in. 🙂

Industrious Illustrating #1: References

Robin 2 Comments

Hello, and welcome to Industrious Illustrating! This is a new weekly column updating on Fridays which will show process pictures, sketches, and sometimes finished works that show what goes into making character designs, illustrations, and the like.

This week we will look at two different pieces I created based on photographs I took on a 2019 summer trip to England.

Last night, I digitally painted this piece of two girls hanging out in an alcove on the University of Cambridge campus. I directly painted over my photograph for the background, but I took liberties in the exact details and drew two figures who weren’t present in the original picture. I had to construct the lighting and proportions on the two characters based on my own understanding of how lighting and scale would work in that environment.

I traditionally painted this piece with watercolors and alcohol-based markers in the fall of 2020 based on a photograph I took at the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford. I had to eyeball all the proportions and perspective and then draw the environment by hand, albeit while referencing a photograph. In retrospect, I think some of the details and perspective look a little off. But that was the best I could do at the time without the ability to directly paint over the original photograph.

For both paintings, I had to rely on my own understanding of lighting and perspective to construct the scene. The original photographs were also unquestionably my work. Since I wanted to depict real places in the United Kingdom, I couldn’t just rely on my own imagination to recreate existing scenery, and it wasn’t practical for me to return to the UK in person every time I wanted to paint a real-life scene. So my best option was to use photographs as a tool for inspiring interesting illustrations.

Digital art programs make image adjustments such as brightness, contrast, and saturation much easier, and they also have the blessing known as the undo function (ctrl-z). They also have the ability to directly integrate photographs into paintings for textures and references, which professional concept artists and illustrators often use so that they can finish detailed paintings on a timely basis for their clients. Using these tools isn’t cheating, as no amount of fancy tools can compensate for a lack of artistic skill. Rather, digital art programs enable artists to speed up their workflow and create finished works faster for both professional and hobbyist purposes.

I’m still proud of both pieces, and I think they both have their own merits. But this comparison should hopefully show that while digital art programs didn’t teach me the fundamentals or my current skills, they do help smooth out the process as a tool akin to a paintbrush or a pen.