Pasta Dinner still life - post critique changes

As the title says, these are post-critique edits! I can't recall if I made a post for pre-critique (50% and before turn-in), but I think for this painting , I completely forgot to take photos after the step, or before I began working on the next. I tend to do that for my digital work too...

Final edit was to include the shadow of the fork under, in the bowl. (That was some confusing wording.) I missed it originally since I was too overwhelmed by the pasta, and thought critique meant there was a shadow over the pasta from the fork, which, with this lighting, wasn't possible. It didn't help that my photo reference nearly lost that shadow! (Or perhaps the shadow was so close in value to the value of the bowl in shadow, that it got lost.)

Bit inspired to do daily thumbs

 I think I got inspired to do daily sketches from Claire Wendling's presentation, and decided to try to paint out quick environment thumbs and play with color combinations at the same time.

 

Some colors turned out better than others but I got some interesting shapes with today's approach. 

Guest Speaker Claire Wendling and illustrations since last big post

I'll be honest, I didn't know much about Claire Wendling's work until recently but I must say her animals (or half human animals) anatomy are amazing! I got a couple of takeaways from her presentation as well, which is always a bonus from guest speakers' presentation in my book.

I'm paraphrasing a bit but 'Add water to everything, see what happens' and her method of using references. Instead of the way I've been using my references, by having them side by side, something I've made a habit of since making reference sheets for drawings, Claire Wendling looks at the references first, gets whatever she can into her visual library , with graphic notes if need be, and then draw from what she recalls from the visual library. Then she goes back to those reference images if things look off in her drawing. I feel like her method really does sound like something I should try out, though as she mentioned, figure drawing would need live models it seems like.

High Key painting! And next week's is low key, which I personally want to see how I do with low key.

Short Film project - "Second Chances"

 I still don't know how we're going to finish this short film before summer break, given so far we've only gotten to the story (with turning points), script, logline, character design, environment ideas and opening credits. The animatic has yet to be drawn out!

 The main character, anti -hero 

This week, bird's eye view, blog questions and guest speaker Pascal Champion

 

Truth be told, that's not the actual color of the plate. I was feeling sleepy in the beginning of the class, and I completely forgot about using orange to mix with the cerulean blue to create the gray blue I was trying to accomplish, for realism sake. In the  end it worked out though, as the green-blue of the plate popped the red of the apple. 

In other news, aside from my work, I was told to treat my blog less like a diary (or art diary in this sense) and more of sharing other people's work and/or blog post. To other artists using blogger, is this true? From the  people I follow, most, if not all, the blog look to be their work or related to their work, rather than 30% their work, 70% other people I was told to follow. But the person brought a point, with a blog dating from 2012, why haven't there been comments?

I'm at a loss of how much to take of this person's advice. I suppose it varies for person to person but still, what is an art blog then? How much of your blog is suppose to be your stuff? I know for other social media, like Facebook pages, it's a good idea to share other pages' posts to share audience. And I believe this holds true to Tumblr as well, though sharing is, as far as I know, pretty common in the Tumblr community. But Blogger? 

#whatisblogging 

In a weird connection to this, Pascal Champion came as a guest speaker at my university tonight, and for him, he just shares his work and companies/work comes to him. Most professionals I follow seem to just share their work, without the sharing of other peoples' posts, which I believe sounds to be a method of networking on social media. On another note, I was able to takeaway a few things from his presentation, such as you don't necessarily need to be good at every foundation (possibly) such as color, but if for example your lighting or values is good, you've got a chance. 

I suppose for me personally, I know I need to get better at my drawing skills but I'm always improving each semester so this is a start for me.