Academy Thumbs

A few years ago I was able to take a drawing class at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. It was a great experience for me. Even though my undergrad studies were in Graphic Design, I never got to do as much drawing as I would have liked. Taking a 10-hour-per-week, five-week course was a shot in my creative arm.

I was cleaning out some closets and found these marker exercises. I think the idea was to play with layering the marker grays and think of different scenes, perspectives and camer angles.

Green Ghost Classic

Looking through old sketchbooks I ran across several 1-page Green Ghost stories I drew 4 or 5 years ago. I wrote out the script and then did some thumbnails before doing the full-sized pages. All the inking was done with sharpie markers. Not archival I know. I was going for clear storytelling and speed rather than perfection of line. Usually it’s the idea of a story that is most appealing and too much artistic pressure can kill some of the joy of drawing.

It was a good decision. I was able to crank the pages fairly quickly for a self-imposed deadline. There are a few things that I notice construction-wise that are a little nutty, some odd tangents, but the gags are pretty straightforward (except for the last one, the punchline of which is mysteriously absent—where’s the ON button?).

Which one do you like best (or hate the least)?

Action Sketch 1

A few years ago I shot a few rolls of film depicting some of my relatives in customized action poses. It was fun sketching thumbs and having them act out scenes for my future reference. They prints  have been in a photo album, largely unused… until now! Enter the new category “Action Sketches”. Here’s the first one done in Photoshop in under 5 minutes.