N - Natural Lines

Today I got really bored and wanted to draw some graffiti but I was completely out of idea, everything I did just looked so samey so instead today I started with a pencil and just did some natural flowing lines and kept putting pencil to paper until the page was fairly covered in lines but still readable. After this I starting looking for letters within the natural lines and found two so I outlined them with a darker pencil, I didnt think two letters was enough so I started looking for lots of other ones in the background so it just looks like a mismatch of letters I thought this could look cool. I then coloured them in with permanent markers.

G - Gym

Keeping healthy is meant to go hand in hand with a healthy mind set and i believe this is true. I used to try and go to the gym as often as I could when I first signed up for it. It definetely helped with self confidence aswell as keepng myself in shape. Everything was good until a few months back when I lost all motivation and basically gave up. I have fallen off massively in the past few months but i hope to get back into it at hit the aims that i want to achieve. I find it hard to keep myself motivated over anything.

P - Portrait Edit

I dont draw people much and I think it is actually a big part of art so I could do with practicing this. I took a photo of myself on my laptop through the webcamera and then got out my pad and paper and started sketching. I actually thought it wasnt too bad of an effort but I could still do with some improvement. I thought it looked a little plain so I sat down and had a think about how I could improve this but to be honest I was stuck for ideas until I looked through my music and the cover art from one album (Squeeks - Presidential Music) really inspired me and made me want to design my portrait in the same sort of pattern and colours. The face of the artist on the cover already looked pencil sketched so I left it as it was and then went to think about what colours would work best and what media. I ended up deciding with red colouring pencil, for the added colourful touch, and a graphite stick to add some darker lines to the drawing.

R - Rose

I dont understand why people always draw flowers I have never seen anything breathtaking about petals but then again I have never sat down at drawn them so I cant really say much until I try it for myself. I was sitting in my garden, while we had people looking round the house from a renting agency, and I ended up staring at leaves for so long i was focusing on the curves and the veins that flow through the leaves, it made me think it was worth drawing a flower or atleast giving it a try. I think im going to try and draw a rose because it has such symbolism behind it such as love, faith, beauty, honor, balance, sense and so many others. It is mostly used as a sign of love given to a partner or girlfriend as a token of love or maybe even part of a plead or forgiveness. I ended up drawing a rose in pencil and shading it but I didnt really like it so I added some colour and added a few more flowers such as bluebells lavender and others.

C - Cars

Over the last few months I have grown an interest in cars, mostly prestige cars and super cars, I dont even know where this came from but now wherever I am they always seem to catch my eye and make me think i would love to be driving a car like that! Even though I am yet to start my driving lessons i hope to really soon and then not too long after passing hopefully buy my own car. My dream car is the TVR Sagaris because of the pure amazingness of the vehicle! The way the front headlights are stretched upwards smoothly up the bonnet of the car, the low exhaust coming out either side of the car at the rear, this is honestly the car for me. I have started to draw/sketch cars that I really like in my spare time i think personally there is something nice about drawing things that you dream of having one day its like being one step closer to actually having it. I decided to get out a sketchpad, some marker pens and a good picture of the car and start drawing. I like the final outcome because it resembles the car completely and I like the look of the hood with a black top to it, it really works in my opinion.

E - Experience in Disneyland

Since a young age I have always had a massive fear of crocodiles and alligators, the way they move, the look in their eyes and their large almost unreal looking jaws. Everything scares me about them especially when I see them in water, its terrifying. I think this all began when I went to Disneyland Paris for my grandparents anniversairy, I remember going to a zoo one day excited to see all kinds of new animals from all different countries. I was loving everything about it until i came into the reptile section and there was a large tank at one side of the room looming over me without even being close to it, the water looked completely clear which made me even more cautious of it. I went closer and saw something swim past and i thought it was just a fish so i walked slightly close but then saw a long crocodile swim back on itself as if it wanted to see me. I looked into its eyes and it struck terror inside me, it was awful! I remember running out at 100 miles per hour as if it was chasing me and ever since I have been teriyfied of them.

L - Lips

Whenever drawing lips I have always drawn them the same for every person that I draw because i have seen them as the same without realising, this has made me think that I really need to work on how I draw lips and mouths so lately I have been practicing by drawing many different mouths from different angles and looking at different shapes within lips. I have that a lot of the time people like to focus on drawing eyes and lips are not as focused on but they are just as involved in the human form as everything else. Hopefully after practicing this I will improve my skills in portraiture as well as my general sketching skills. Ive realised there are differences between the size of the top and bottom when before I just saw them as two of the same thing. I have also realised some people have over bite and under bite which changes the size of whats showing on the top and bottom lip.

S - Sketching

Today I went on a car drive with my family and while driving down the motorway i saw lots of good looking cars, this really made me want to look up some of the latest supercars. I found two that i really really liked and one that i have always loved and set my own goal in life to actually own one. The three cars were Yamaha OX99-11 a very futuristic car with antannae headlights, mclaren p1 and almost alien looking car with a smooth arched front and a more harsh sticking out back and finally my favourite the Lotus Elise. I really enjoyed sketching these cars, darkening the main shapes and curves to create a good feel for how the cars looks, using just lines to show the the design of the cars, it felt good. In a future post i hope to add another media to these, the reason i have not yet is because i am yet to decide which medium will suit which car.

A - Austin

I thought I would use this post to explain what I am doing on this blog, basically I have been set a homework by my college tutors to create one post for each letter of the alphabet, but there is a twist it has to be something art related. I feel like im going to enjoy this homework quite a lot because there are very wide options on what I can do for each letter. Personally I am very into street art so there might be a lot of that in this blog but i hope to atleast keep this exciting and interesting throughout. I hope you enjoy my blog!

D - Development (Graffiti)

I was looking through my old work and realised that a lot of my letters looked nothing like letters, it made me think that i have been coming up with my ideas for letters in the wrong way so i came up with a new technique. I started by drawing the basic outline of an 'A' then i thickened the sides to make it 3-D. After that I added a few curves onto the corners, i started now thinking that the letter looked really stretched  so decreased the gap under the arch of the 'A'. I started added parts like squares semi circles and some other stretched out blocks. I was now looking at this thinking it actually looked pretty good like a futuristic style graffiti with a twist. I added more detail and then afterwards shaded the inside of the letter and outside to make it pop and stand out from the paper. I did like the idea of developing a letter slowly and shaping it in the way you want it, this technique felt very controlled which i liked, but it did take a long time to do this because of the adding onto the original letter instead of a sketched outline of the letter. I did like the final outcome overall but im not too sure if i will stick with this because i have created much better work just putting my ideas for letters straight to the paper. This technique also limited in the way that you couldnt morph the original line that much because of the guidline underneath.

B - Baseball

I have always been into a lot of american sports but lately, im not sure why, i have been looking into the design of the team logos.  I like the design of most teams logo but my favourites are arizona cardinals, cleveland indians, the former team florida marlins and the mexican team the naranjeros. I tried drawing the arizona cardinals logo myself in marker pen and I actually really liked it, i tried to make the lines crisp and smooth. I found getting the eye in the correct place fairly hard because its not straight it is slightly angled and a small space away from the top of the beak. I also tried infusing the miami hurricanes, a hockey team, with some graffiti style lettering, i think it worked pretty well. I was unsure if the two would work because they are very different styles of art.

L - Lettering (Graffiti)

Over the past few weeks i have been trying to get into graffiti lettering again, mostly focussing on creating my own unique style. I have drawn a few pieces and thought about some different ways of colouring the letters mostly because i stick with the same safe block colour. I liked the way of colouring a letter with vertical coloured stripes most because it looked really good, i found it hard to keep the lines straight so i would use a ruler if i was to use this again, which i will. I try to focus on words starting with R, its one of my favourite letters to use because of how easy it is to manipulate and shape how you want it but still resemble the letter it is. This was one example of what i have been doing.

S - Smug One Street Artist

When in Blackpool with my family I was surprised by how much street art was actually there it was scattered throughout the city in all sorts of different styles fonts and located in some very interesting places. One piece of work that took my breath away was on an extreme scale artwork covering one side of a building. I researched into this artist, named Smug One, and found out he was originally from Glasgow, Scotland and is recognised as one of the most talented photo-realistic street artists. His work was extremely detailed and i found it hard to understand how he could get such intricate detail using a spray can as well as his way of making it look so realistically three-dimensional, the way the tophat looks like it is leaving a shadow on the wall and how the wand is coming out at the viewer. Smug One's work reminds me of Chuck Close in the way that he creates breathtaking hyper realist portraits.