Sketchbook: Classical Art Studies

This assortment is from a range of books from different years, but are pretty good examples of when I would try to focus on classical art through line drawing. The first page was done in 2002 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The top figures are from Cezanne's The Bathers, Hopper's Nighthawks is cropped on the left side (I believe it was temporarily at the Art Institute at the time), and the bottom right quarter is a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh:

Speaking of Van Gogh, I drew a sliced mango in the way I imagined he would in the top right of this page (circa1998). The left side is a line-by-line recration of a drawing by Picasso (whose title and internet link escape me) that I did in 1999. The woman's profile in the bottom right was taken from an art school flyer I had handy at the time (2000).

Rounding out this post are two more artist's portraits. On the is a portrait of the young artist prodigy Amedeo Modigliani (2000). On the right is a quickly-drafted Wasily Kandinsky below a recreation of his signature, both done by brush pen in 2000. I take Kandinsky's philosophies on painting to heart each time I try to work on something abstract.

Unfinished Blue Line Pro pages

This pair of unfinished drawings were done on Blue Line Pro pages. I had high hopes for this rendition of the Drew Struzan poster for The Phantom Menace, but never finished inking it.

This comic book splash cover was done a year earlier, if memory serves. It's of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon comic, which my friend Sean got me hooked on when I was a teenager.

Lady in the Water

Lady in the Water. 1998. Oil Pastel. 22"x28".

This piece was done on black paper with white oil pastel, and is a copy of a photograph from National Geographic magazine. It was of a statue that was just excavated, and it was bundled and lowered in a pool of water. This pastel drawing won a ribbon in a county fair art show.

Scratchboard: The Frisk

The Frisk. 1998. Scratchboard. 9"x11".

In high school we often had assignments of taking different mediums and creating a piece with them. Back then I was mainly interested in honing a realistic style, and so my projects would rarely be surreal or memory-based. For this piece, a National Geographic was used to show a police officer frisking a man against a university wall (it was a bank in the original picture). I used an X-acto knife to scrape off the thin layer of black plastic that covered the white scratchboard, and the texture that resulted somewhat resembled grass. The reference image's stark shadows helped the final scratchboard piece pop more, I think.

Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke. 1998. Graphite on vellum. 7"x11".

This portrait of musician Thom Yorke (of Radiohead) was done a year before my previously-posted Stanley Kubrick piece. I was still trying to improve on the realistic style and fell short in areas like the coat texture/depth, the smoothness and value of the skin, and the "pop" the eyes lack.