notes from underground

On sunday night I was browsing through NoForSeriously.com and found this picture, apparently fanart for something called Popbot. I loved the drawing, and even though the link to the Popbot website was down I used it as an excuse to begin a side project and brush up my Maya skills a bit. By the end of the night I had rendered this:

and just tonight I finished rigging him for basing animation. There are a lot of things I need to work out, and I need to change his head, make the eyes light up, add eye controls and clean up the controls I already have. Here’s the quicktime movie I rendered from Maya, sorry for the low quality but I was having trouble compressing it properly (it’s about 450 kilobytes):

“Dudebot” Animation Sequence 1: Standing Up

Our first assigment for VA131 (Painting 1) was to complete 40 paintings over the past seven days. I technically have three left, but I will have more than enough time before class today to finish those up. I thought I’d post one or two of them, they’re all very small format, only 5 by 7 inches, but I actually ended up liking a few of them more than I’d expected.

The 40 paintings were broken down into eight required categories of 5 paintings each, including copies of [sections of] 20th century portraits, pre-20th century portraits, landscapes from the art building terraces, clouds, shadows, photographs from newspapers, and more. Now, without further ado:

This first one is from a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill by Graham Vivian Sutherland. I think this is my favorite of the whole lot, I really like how it came out!

This next one is a copy of a Giacometti painting of David Sylvester… I “painted’ this one entirely with palette knives, just smearing the paint around. VERY fun technique, although I lost a lot of detail on the figure… I love the background, though!

I don’t like the next one as much, I overworked it… her neck and mouth looked a LOT better about ten minutes before I finally put down my paintbrush. I wish I didn’t overwork stuff so much, so often I’m just sitting there and think, “oh, ok, one last change…”, then I look again and decide I ruined it. Oh well. The source is a detail of Delacroix’ “Massacre at Chios”.

My teacher, Wendy Edwards, told me at one point I should use more paint… this detail of Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait for Gauguin” is what happened next.

Last one up I don’t like as much as the others, but it turned out fairly well and it was the last detail I got before my camera ran out of power. The source material is Sylvia Gosse’s portrait of Walter Richard Sickert.

There are only maybe seven or eight of the forty I’d actually admit to liking, but as painful as the process has been, it’s kind of nice to have done that much work in a week. Kind of affirming to be doing so much art, since art’s the primary reason I’m in Providence this summer! (On that note, later this week I’ll post an update about a side project I’m doing). G’night, world.