Location, Layout, and Sketch Crawling!

(Ok, so the little gauche painting above was made a week later, but it was at the same location, and I feel it is an extension of my sketch crawling experience! ^^ )

Thursday marked my first even on location drawing, especially using only markers. Our layout class took a field trip outside and drew the opposite side of the street. I really liked it! I love using markers and drawing from life like this wasnt as daunting as I always supposed.

Which gave me much more confidence this past Saturday when I attended my first Sketchcrawl! It was so much fun! Sketch crawl is a really amazing event that happens world wide! The San Francisco division met up in Dolores Park in the Mission here in and wandered around. I stayed in the park, and decided to keep practicing that marker technique! Im really glad I went, and I plan to keep going for sure! It was so great to meet all the other artists who come out to participate, too. :}

So I guess I should update about the Layout class. Here goes-

Im taking a layout design class this semester with Oliver Sin. Im hoping that it will help me develop my backgrounds and settings more clearly. Im learning a lot, even though I still struggle the most with this aspect. I feel like I can see it so clearly in my head but it doesnt quite translate yet to the page. Still working on it, Im sure I'll get it when the semester is over and it clicks haha.

This was the first assignment, I designed a little girls room based around dance and ballet.

Then we learned the valuable many uses of tracing paper!

Our second assignment was to design a store in a cable car, and I chose to do a Fancy Hat and Feather shop! It was an interesting experience using brush pens, creating it all on different layers of tracing paper, and using the photo copier to enlarge and reduce. Its like real life photoshop!

Then we took our cable car and turned it into a cartoony style, or "wonky" as they say. At first you would think its just drawing poorly, but its actually carefully planned chaos! I really enjoyed the design aspect of wonky.

I went through a bunch of thumbnails designing a saloon. I tried to combine a few things from home into one. A gambling hall because well lets face it, its a saloon, and thats pretty much where I grew up! And I wanted to add a dance hall because I absolutely love Stoneys and line dancing! I was getting pretty frustrated with the results, so I just focused on making it more of a bordello, like Moulin Rouge-ish for the warped perspective version.

Heres the work in progress for half of my warped saloon. Im going through cleaning up the lines in pencil, and then I'll scan it and rework a few things in photoshop for the final. I think my favorite part right now are the mermaids. I used the entrance mermaids from the Mirage in Las Vegas as my muses. Even growing up it was just common knowledge that cupping certain bits of their anatomy on the way in was good luck in all of your adventures! ^_~