Coming back from the Art Store

Feels good to blog again.. but I need to stop making typos ;_;

Came back home just in time before the snow storm started lol. Man what good timing. On Monday I spent my day after class buying $150+ worth of art supplies. The professor gave us this massive list of stuff to buy, even after my little shopping spree there was still about a third of the list left to buy =_=. After spending so much money on books it really sucked to watch so much more go into the art supplies. It was pretty cool buying my own portfolio and everything but jeez the stuff can get pretty damn expensive. At least it's a "one time" buy sort of thing.

I'm so glad I finally got a digital camera, I've been taking pics of everything...

I bought the more old fashioned looking portfolio. I think the measurements were like 23 x 33 or something, so it was just the right size for me. Honestly I wish I had gotten the portfolio with the strap-on so I could carry on my shoulder rather than lugging it around all the time. But oh well, its just another way to work on my manly muscles.

Bristol paper pad and a Sketchbook so far. And yeah, 1st project is all about dots lol

It's kinda neat carrying around for the first time. Because people really do look at you and think "oh hey this guy must be a real artist" and whatnot haha. But I'm pretty sure I'll grow to hate carrying the thing as time goes on since it'll probably get pretty heavy as the semester drags on. We apparently have 12-14 fat ass projects to do this semester. Which is pretty nuts considering that is what you would typically do during a regular high school year in an art class. So basically imagine all that work and probably a lot more being squeezed into like what? 4 months or something X.X.

So I bought the big important "one time" purchases on Monday, unfortunately I didn't really want to carry an Art Bin along with the portfolio with my school bag hanging from my shoulder all at once so I neglected to buy it until today.

I feel more like a construction worker carrying it around

So today I went to buy all the other dispensable sort of stuff. I bought my brushes, sumi ink, pencils, pens, painter's tape, ruler, knife, triangle.... I bought a lot of stuff. The list was pretty long but when I put it altogether into my box it felt juuuuuust right lol.

I felt like such a baller when I threw it all together

One thing that is going to haunt me forever is the price of paint. Paint is soooo expensive. I bought a decent tube of it for like I think $13.99 or maybe $15.99. I'm not sure how long the tube will last me for, but it doesn't look like it'll be too long seeing how big our projects need to be. I could only afford to buy 2 tubes, Mars Black and Titanium White. If I went and followed my professor's orders, I'd be buying those $30 jars =_=. Plus this is just black and white, there's still other colors to buy >.<. 

Well aside from all that stuff, I was also required to have a digital camera. Never in my life have I ever had a camera, and shit it's pretty damn fun taking pictures. I think taking pictures from an art perspective is by far one of the most exciting things I've done in a while when it came to art. I'm quite positive now that taking photos of scenery you want to illustrate is a really really good way of practicing. Some of the pictures I've seen of like a full blown out scene really made me question whether or not an artist drew everything off the top of their head. In the case of George Seurat, that guy and other like-minded guys spent a lot of their time visiting different places and sketching them out so that they would have ideas to put out on canvas when it was time. So it's certainly a good thing to take photos and use em as reference. One of these days I'm going to take a pic of my desk and computer and draw my own little "anime girl in your room" sort of thing LOL. There's sooo many pieces that people have made with that, it's not only awesome for the artist (lawl) but it's also a ton of fun to look at. To be honest I'll probably have to set my anime illustrating passions aside and focus on doing the usual realism sort of work. It'd be a little embarrassing to bring in projects loaded with people with big eyes and ridiculous long hair lol. 

Here's an example

I really really loved how this room was illustrated. It's exactly what I want to try to draw at some point. Although it could've been done straight off from the top of the artist's head, I highly doubt it, unless their that amazing- that's always a possibility. There's just soooo much attention to detail. One of the problems of trying to imagine what a room would really look like is the fact that the things that naturally accumulate and clutter up in a room are extremely difficult to process into your head. I'm also suspicious of this artist simply just uploading the photograph and simply recoloring it over while keeping all the perfect lines. Whenever I've done a "room" type of drawing, it always comes out really uncivilized. Human homes aren't natural because of all the perfectly straight lines there are that exist. In this pic, the artist did such a good job of making every detail look perfect that it makes you say "wow, it feels like a real room."

Another Example

Yeah yeah more Hatsune Miku lol... This is one of the pics out there that I believe to have been made from scratch. There's nothing in particular in the pic that stands out as something you would recognize right away in reality. Sure there's a rubik's cube and a goddamn old school Mac but those are two objects you'd rarely see in a common household. If anything I'm quite sure that whoever did this, probably took the foundations of some room and added to it. Because seriously who the hell would still have an old Mac like that lol. In the future I'm pretty sure that this is probably what I'm going to come up with when I give it an attempt, and hopefully I'll make that attempt in the summer during my Computer Applications class, where I'll finally learn how to use Illustrator, Photoshop, and w/e else there is.

But for now... just gotta keep drilling those basics. I should probably pick up other foundation courses too..