I’ve been absolutely loving Paul Missal’s drawing class at PNCA. Paul has that great Midwestern character — he just oozes relaxed professionalism — that reminds me of some of the teachers I had in high school. Why not? He actually lived in my hometown of Chardon, OH for a couple of years back in the 1970s.

When we’re not talking maple syrup, Paul has his class approach drawing in a painterly way. We’ve done lots of experiments to learn to draw with expression, which has not always been easy for me. But tonight he landed on something I could really get into: drawing with scribbles.

We started by holding three pencils in each hand and blocking out the volume of our model simultaneously with our left and right hands in a mess of lines. Then, we would scribble back through with an eraser to break them up. We slowly built up lights and darks, losing pencils along the way.

Paul said it was a good method for “breaking the preciousness of the paper.” See, he’s my kind of artist.

While at an illustrators meet-up group, I was introduced to the idea of using markers for quick sketches. I haven’t used markers since the second grade, but I was intrigued by how quick and simple it was to put down a few colors and then draw back over them in pen. Using markers really helps me see volume rather than line — and markers are so much simpler to carry on-the-go than watercolors!

I hope to do a nice series of figures clothed in lots of pattern.

I went to my first Sunday life drawing session at PNCA this weekend. Rather than a series of one, two, five, ten or 25 minute poses, the life model posed for a longer two hour session. It gave me time to work on shape, proportion, volume and rendering. A long pose means I have time to allow my paint to dry and build the image in layers so I used gouache, my current medium of choice. I like the soft way it can be built up, like watercolor, but with the added benefit of being able to be used opaquely when needed.

The 2012 Obama campaign called for submissions for poster designs that promoted the creation of American jobs and the support of local businesses. Inspired by British WWII posters and the difficulty of the recession, I submitted this design.

That’s it! It only took me six months, but I’ve finally made an illustration for Illustration Friday. What a great way to be inspired, weekly. This week’s prompt: Shadows.

I bought myself a Canson 10×14″ sketchbook back in January, and it has literally been collecting dust on my bottom shelf (which is where all the dust bunnies roll when I open the door to my apartment.) Now that I’ve taken the plunge into my new large format sketchbook, I don’t want to get too precious with it, even as I try to make each entry a finished piece. I want to let it breathe.

I love a good critique — advice for improving my work is always welcome. For this piece I used an opaque gouache technique. I had a little inspiration from Molly Bang, an illustrator whose books I read while visiting with my friend’s daughter, Nico, last week.

Thanks for looking!

I assumed since he would like to sell his product, my client didn’t mean he wanted the butler to have the typical R Crumb character’s manic psychoses. And, of course, no one can replicate the style of another artist, because that takes years to develop and comes from within.

However, I was able to produce an inked drawing using hatching and cross-hatching to approximate the style. Fingers crossed it will fly with my client!

In Lori Damiano’s class at PNCA, each student drew one frame twice. We then kept a copy for ourselves and handed one over to the person sitting to our right while receiving a new frame from the person to our left. We then animated the new frame into the frame we drew ourselves. These short animations will be pieced together to form one continuous loop from frame to frame.

Below is my six-second segment.

We worked with stencils this evening: we drew our designs, traced them to mylar sheeting, and cut them with exacto knives. Nicole helped us prepare our screens and we were able to have a few goes!