Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

Slightly shorter post for this one as we did longer timeframe sketches, this time using the charcoal in different ways; by using the side instead of the point we got several new effects from drawing, alongside that we also had to do pieces (pictured below) where our focus was more on the tone on the body and not the outlines and clear lines of the body which produced some interesting results.

Another Batch of Life drawing images, this time for the Halloween week. after doing some traditional sketches we got to do some zombie style poses which was alot of fun because we got to explore some really interesting shapes as opposed to the usual still poses. The poses we did using a grid to establish perspective was really hard for me, and it ended up with me going back and forth drawing the grid around the drawing to make it look right, i probably need more work in perspective drawing. I managed to get better near the end because i didn't commit so much to any of my lines and rubbed them out or adjusted them more freely if they didn't match well to what i could see.

For the first post of me uploading my life drawing sketches, ill start with this weeks and then upload the ones following this from then on (2 more to upload then they will be current), as this was one of the ones i could remember the week we did the class on. for this week as well ill be a little indulgent and show almost all of the sketches i did in the class since i was enjoying the drawing that day, ill be more selective in the future.  All in all it was refreshing to have a female model, after a few weeks of male models it was nice to switch to a more different attitude when it comes to angles and shapes within the human body, less rigid edge to draw which is nicer to draw, also it helped that i am gaining more confidence in drawing with charcoal as well as utilising both my left and right hands for drawing (i'm left handed)

For this weeks work we were tasked with creating a Halloween monster to fit the Halloween time of year. as usual we have to produce a moodboard and sketches along with a final design for the monster of our choosing. To start of with i created a moodboard to show the various kinds of monsters i was interested in looking at and creating for myself; (to be input later) to give a start i made sure to do some quick sketches for some poses sort of inherant to the monster genre, alot of human shapes because many monster are based on human shapes and irregular or unnerving posing which compliments the often gross or disturbing shapes they have. the first thing that drew me in was the general theme of skeletons and graveyards so i wanted to get alot of images of bone structures not just from humans for a bigger range of structures to work with, this spawned my first idea of a ooze (like you'd see in a game of d&d) which had played gravedigger and composed a body for itself...

Just a quick update to the blog, and on time i might add; this week we covered an introduction to perspective drawing, with us being tasked to do some tutorials to produce 1 point perspective drawings, which means the origin point of all of the parallel lines all converge on a single point to show a "depth" in an image, with the examples showing a room in a house and a underpass of a abandoned highway. It was really interesting to cover these, and a change of pace for my usual style of drawing due to how technical they were to set up the objects in the image, though that meant it was overall more well put together (though a little rigid) the second piece i coloured a little giving subtle colours to help capture the bleakness of this apocalyptic style setting.

For this weeks theme we have futuristic weapons, once again we are asked to look at example of future weaponry and have to come up with some ideas for the creation of our own futuristic gun; one of the requirements however is that we retain it being a projectile gun. To start i constructed another moodboard looking at both present day weaponry, a selection of imagined weaponry from games and media which both have present day and futuristic themes, i mainly focused on some of my favourite styles of guns, namely rifles and pistols (more specifically the hand cannons). Rifles have always been a favourite of my due to their complex structures and satisfying reload mechanisms, while pistols are great because of their presence and variety in various media that i like; the pistol is a favourite of characters in action games e.g. devil may cry or bayonetta so i wanted to work with guns that i liked the designs of as a basis. To start similarly to last week i decided to do some p...

A bit of a late update; The theme we've been given for this week is tentacles, we have been asked to study real life examples of them and to take influences from media that uses them as well in looking at how different artists approach and design similar things. Below is a composite of some of the things I found when searching tentacles, as well as things I have thought of when thinking of the theme; I've used some images of both squids and octopus's as they represent tentacles in nature, alongside some game usage of tentacle like shapes from the game "the darkness" which uses the tentacle itself as a monster. then some additional images from the kraken from pirates of the Caribbean for some movie influences, as well as the very tentacle-esque shapes used in the "Alien" films. To top it all of i also included an image of the imagining of H.P.Lovecraft's Elder god Cthulhu as an inspiration due to the aquatic and tentacle themes it represent...