Into the Heart of Darkness...

Here are some development sketches for the main beats of the story:

Marlow receives his assignment in France, and is soon under way to Africa.

He arrives at the first post, where he sees the depolorable conditions for the black prisoners, in comparison to the spit and polish of the white, such as the accountant.

After Marlow has repaired his steamboat, he travels upriver to retrieve the infamous Kurtz. After navigating the treacherous waters and surviving and attack by natives, they arrive at Kurtz's post, where Marlow meets a colorfully clothed Russian, who informs him of Kurtz's unorthodox methods of collecting ivory.

Finally Marlow and Kurtz come face-to-face. Kurtz, feaverish and near death, does not want to leave "his tribe," and makes an attempt to crawl back to them. Marlow intercepts him, and Kurtz is taken back down the river. He dies aboard ship.

Blonde No More...Self Portrait

I have to come to terms with no longer being blonde, and one of the ways I thought to accomplish this was to draw myself. I also just wanted to draw :-).
For some reason, I am unsure about digital painting only when it comes to self portraits. It's a great mystery, for I never feel so novice doing any other digital painting, any other subject, cave trolls or pirate ships or whathaveyou. Perhaps it's because I am most critical of my own face...it just always looks like such a photoshop painting when I do this...I can't seem to keep those nice, rough strokes that are always so appealing in, say, the work of Craig Mullins. I suppose this is just something I'll resolve the more I work with photoshop and the wacom. For now, here's tonight's self portrait. --L

Cave Troll Final Drawing

Here's my final for the cave troll drawing. I like to compare half-done drawings with their final incarnations...I think it improved much, and I'm happy with it.
--L

Cave Troll, Work in Progress

Here's what I've been doing the last couple hours...
For my advance Maya class (129A), we are creating the cave troll from "Lord of the Rings" start to finish according to the industry-standard pipeline for creating characters. Our first assignment is to do a little visdev piece of the troll in Balin's tomb (or somewhere in Moria). What Courtney calls "the juice," Dave calls a "glory shot." This is what I've come up with so far. I'll finish the thing off tomorrow, and hopefully it'll be some kind of awesome... --L

Heart of Darkness Initial Sketches

DISCLAIMER: These images are exporations and developmental sketches for The Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. They are in no way meant to be racist or prejudiced. These particular sketches are uninformed drawings from my head, based on descriptions from the book.

I did these few doodles in class on the first day of BFA (senior seminar, for those who don't know our SHM slang), just to explore some images in my head left from reading The Heart of Darkness. We're spending a bit of time on this novel, so I thought some pre-predevelopment would be fun. I haven't yet begun my research, but I expect I'll find some pretty interesting things to incorporate into future sketches. --L

Back From the Ranch...

So let's see if Blogger will let me post anything now. I haven't been able to in the last few days. I had a whole little schpiel worked out for you guys, and everything, but I keep getting booted, so hopefully this time, this ONE TIME, I will be successful.

So I spent a week out at the Box R Ranch, in Wyoming, riding horses and drawing (what's new, save the location?). I have to apologize for the not-so-great scans of these sketches: they're all in a wee book that doesn't lay flatly when I scan, so as a result I've had to crop and clean up and sharpen here and there, and frankly it doesn't thrill me, but it gives me SOMETHING to show. So here are a few this and thats, horse rears and whatnots...hope you enjoy :-) --L

Some Self-Portraits

I was inspired by Erin to do some Photoshop work...on myself. I usually resort to self-portraits when I need to kick myself into gear and get drawing again. This is just a little three-tone sketch, a la John Clapp/Glen Vilppu.