George's Workshop

These are all 4-7 minute drawings from my good friend George's workshop. The one with clothes on is George, the most intimidating artist to sit behind while drawing. He makes everything look effortless!

Sculpture

I'm a big fan of Sculpture and good wildlife art. Anyone interested in that should definitely look to the work of Rembrandt Bugatti, Antoine Barye,Fremiet (sp?), Ken Bunn, Bart Walters, Jonathan Kenworthy, David Derrick, etc. There are a lot of badasses out there! I wish I had time for more sculpture, it's particularly fun to drag the materials out to the zoo and work from life. I started this piece at the zoo and then worked on it from home based on drawings and photos. It is sculpted out of an oil based clay so I don't have to worry about it drying out while I'm working. It was just practice to improve my big cat drawings but I'd love to do a finished full figure in bronze some day.

By the way, I'm sure I don't have to mention how endangered Tigers are in the wild. Go check out the WWF page on tigers to find out more about their plight and efforts to save them from extinction! See, even Leonardo DiCaprio thinks conservation is cool! :)

Other artists that think conservation is cool-

Joe Weatherly
Andrew Shek
David Derrick

New Stuff.

Well I've been guilty of posting only posting old stuff on this blog for a while now, so I thought I would finally bite the bullet and post something new. These are 20 minute poses from Bill Sanchez's Clothed Figure class. Pastel and Charcoal. The class is supposed to be about color and composition so we are starting off with some limited palette drawings with black, white, orange and grey. Obviously I still need a lot of work in the composition department :)

Joe Weatherly's Class

I was lucky enough to study with the amazing Joe Weatherly for a semester and I couldn't have asked for a better animal drawing instructor. I've had a passion for studying and drawing animals all my life and I hope one day and can use my art to give back to zoos and animal conservation organizations around the world. These are a sampling of old drawings from my semester studying with Joe from the location drawing sketchbook he had us keep. The elephants are from the Oakland Zoo and everything else is from the San Francisco Zoo. If you're ever visiting I highly recommend stopping by and saying hi to the anteater, he is awesome!

Gestures from Character Design Class

More 5 minute drawings from the model in my character design class last semester. We were required to compile the best 5 from each class for part of the final.

More Old Zoo Stuff

African Elephants from the Oakland Zoo and the same Black Rhinos from the SF Zoo. Charcoal on 18x24 newsprint. Also one messed up looking Tiger, they can't all be winners. Or any of them...

A few Rhinos!

These are some charcoal drawings from the SF zoo for my Advanced Animal Drawing class with the great Joe Weatherly. Joe had us primarily drawing in pen and sketchbooks for the class so it was great to try out the big pad and some different media. I'll admit it was a pain to haul the pad around though. Joe is one of the best teachers I've ever had and I highly recommend anyone take his class or workshop if they get a chance.
Oh and by the way the top and bottom are highly endangered female East African Black Rhinos and the middle is a male Indian Rhino.

Sorolla Master Copy

Character Design Again

I love drawing animals and I also happened to have a Kley book with me one day so thats where the elephant came from. It's pretty fun to see how far you can stray from the model and still retain the gesture of the pose.

Clothed Figure 3

Drawing from last semester in clothed figure class with Chuck Pyle. Very inspiring teacher!

Character Design Quick Studies

Here are the midterm drawings from weeks 3 and 4 from my character design class. It's supposed to be all about gesture and story, taking what the model inspires and running with it. Since the Academy is in the habit of re-using the same models forever it's a breath of fresh air to be able to draw them as whatever you feel like when you're tired of them. These weeks were so-so depending on the costume and model. It seems like I have the most trouble in class when a model goes to great lengths to pick out a costume and then doesn't take poses that correspond to the character.

Back and posting!

It's been a long, long time so I guess I should start posting again. These are from the midterm for my character design class. We had to select the five best drawings from each week in class. These are from the first two weeks and are all very short poses usually around five minutes.