Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Part I: Concentration

I wrote that my area of concentration was costume design and comic book style art. In my area of concentration I mostly use pencils and sometimes pens and all of the work reflects a comic-book influenced style of art. Half of the drawings are figure drawings with costume designs that I created myself. Four of my pieces are sequential art, to show that comic books are my main style of art and all of those pieces are done in pencil. I didn't want to reupload some pictures that are already on the blog that I used in my AP Portfolio but I did use the 3000 AD picture, the picture of all the teenagers fighting the three beasts and some other drawings of my girlfriend. My style is heavily influenced by the artists I have previously blogged about, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Miller, Dave Mazzuchelli, John Romita and Jim Lee. My area of concentration is definitely in the realm of comic-book style art and is all drawn similarly. These works are from a number of different years but remain a coherent theme that I always use.

Part I: Concentration 11-12


Part I: Concentration 6-10





Part I: Concentration 1-5





Part III: Lesson to the Class


For my lesson to the class I want to teach how to draw a person in a comic-book style way. My reference is a book at my house that I will bring to class on the day I'm teaching called "How to Draw the Marvel Way". It is the book that I use as a reference for drawing people and teaches you a simple way to draw a person. It starts with a stick figure that is anatomically correct. You draw the figure in any position you'd like and then begin to "pipe it up" by creating muscle-less joints with light pencil lines. After creating a pose and giving the figure some underlying structure you begin to add on muscle and smaller details. After adding muscle you use your eraser to get rid of excess lines that were used for your underlying structure. After doing this you can add whatever details you want and your figure should look good because you gave it a sort of scaffolding to draw around. With this "scaffolding" in place, it is easier to draw with correct proportions and anatomy.

Jim Lee

As you can see from the examples, Jim Lee is an extremely good renderer of anatomy and of superheroes. His art is very distinctive in its perfection and high attention to detail. He is very famous and his art is splashed all over merchandising such as the Playstation 2 game, Contra and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure box art. He has drawn many covers and is excellent at both drawing people and drawing backgrounds as evidenced in the Green Lantern and Batman drawings. In both those drawings there are very highly detailed cityscape backgrounds as well as well-drawn figures in the foreground. In my opinion, Jim Lee is the ultimate well-rounded artist. He really does not have any weak points and is excellent at rendering foregrounds, backgrounds and figures in space.



Jim Lee

Jim Lee is a Korean-American comic book artist and is one of the best and most influential of the modern comic book artists. He is 43 years old and has been drawing for Marvel and DC comics since the 1990s. Alot of his art of superheroes is used in marketing and on t-shirts. He draws in a very detailed style with hundreds of fine lines to detail muscles and clothes. He has drawn Superman, Batman, X-Men, and the Punisher. In the 1990s he founded his own comic book company with multiple other artists called Image comics. He was a co-writer on many of the different titles and an artist as well on many titles. He sold his division of Image comics, called Wildstorm to DC in 1998 and has been working on Batman and Superman ever since. Lee is known for redesigning the costumes of many of the X-Men into their current designs and for creating many X-men characters. Lee is one of the most influential modern comic artists and is very popular amoung people who regularly read comics because of his style of art. Many artists mimic him but none are as good as him.

Part II: Letter to Art III

To rising AP Studio Art students,

I wanted to give you some advice based on my experience in AP Studio Art this year. I think that the main focus of the class is the AP portfolio in May and you should centralize your year around this event. You may think at the beginning of the year that you have plenty of time to create your portfolio but it really isn't that long. I was underprepared for it this year and wasn't able to submit my best work. I think that you should focus on creating thirty or more pieces by May and even if they aren't the best in the world its better than submitting sketches. This year also helped me alot with developing a style. I think that if you find your area of concentration early on in the year it makes the rest of the year easy and managable. I found my area of concentration with pen and ink in October and was able to create those types of pieces for the rest of the year. I have one more year of AP Studio Art and I think next year I'll be able to develop my artistic style even more. It is important that you find a type of style that is distinct and separates you from the pack. It is important to be distinctive and unique and that is the advice that I have learned this year that I am giving to you.