Still life?

Our fourth annual district art show was Monday, which with getting ready along with my regular classes and EFA meant a 14 hour day. 

One of the more fun aspects of it was that the middle school art teacher set up her still life for people to try out, so after a few hours of set up I sat down to try it out. 

Not the best thing I've ever drawn by a long shot, but it was a fun way to wind down and when I left it behind it managed to impress a few middle schoolers. 

The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again

Another apple still life for class, this one on illustration board.

Keep The Doctor Away

Another apple.
This one was a quickie.

You got the Mott's?

A quick example done for class.

200

This is another version of that shoe drawing from the other day, this one using stippling instead of cross hatching. I probably should have picked something more special for my 200th blog post, but whatever. I guess it's a pretty cool pair of shoes, right?

Hey now, you're an All Star

This is an old drawing I dug out recently as an example for class because we were doing hatching and cross hatching, and because most of the students are obsessed with shoes. Granted, they're obsessed with the latest limited edition Jordans rather than my beat up Chuck Taylors, but they're both technically basketball shoes, right?

Philip Glass

This is another drawing I made as an example for class. It's an empty glass.

An optimist might say it's a full glass I suppose, but brother, they're wrong.

How do you like them apples (again)

Here's another example from class, though this time from the more traditional intro to art class. It's a value drawing of apples (again) on gray paper.
Man, do high school students hate drawing apples...

They agreed to draw them though when I let them eat them when they were done, which surprised me because I don't think I would do work in exchange for fruit.

I'm Eggstatic for the Eggcellent Eggs!

They're eggs! I drew these for class as an example for my unit on value because eggs are easy to draw but hard to capture in light and shadow. Or at least that's the idea, because I think I totally boffed drawing the one in the center. Oh well.

Vector Pepper

Yet another Illustrator experiment, this one using the Gradient Mesh tool. It's a pepper. Wouldn't you like to be a pepper too? It looks kind of cool and is infinitely scalable, but vector stuff is hard while Photoshop is easy.

Green Candlebox

Example four of four! The Green one was to represent elnightenment. It's a combination of techniques.

White Candlebox

This is example three of four out of the series. The White one was to represent truth and so it's based on observation.

Blue Candlebox

This is the second of four drawings in a series I did with students of monochromatic symbolsim relating to levels of truth and perception. This is the blue one and being the color to symbolize perception of truth it is based on a photograph. It depicts something we cannot actually see long enough to accurately capture with the naked eye - the flickering lighting of a candle- and so we must rely on the how the camera sees the world, which of course is fundamentally different from our own perception.

Red Candlebox

This is part one in a four part series I did with students. The idea was to create four drawings using different techniques with specific monochromatic color schemes each representing a different level of understanding of truth with red being imagination, blue being perception, white being truth, and green being enlightenment. This is the red one meaning imagination where we drew from memory and invention.

More Apples!

More apples! This one was another example for art class. I think apples are great for teaching students to really focus in on variations in tone because they're sorta easy to draw, as in if you can draw a circle you're most of the way to drawing an apple, and then you can concentrate on tonal detail. Plus, if you happen to be kind of a jerk, you can stab your pencil into the fresh apples the teacher bought and ruin things for everybody.

Apples Dos and Don'ts

This drawing was made as an example for students for what to do and not do. I was seeing a lot of weirdo X-Ray negative apples before I drew this to show the difference between using tone as a subtractive rather than as an additive. Okay, so I still saw a lot of them afterward too. At least I drew a pretty okay apple.