Fickle Finger?

Just because it kinda wraps up my last post, here's the final—as in: spent more than a few minutes on it—hand study. Really, it's a finger study, but who's pointing fing…oh, never mind.

Interesting things I learned from this:

1. My hand and finger WILL cramp even in the most relaxed position if it's extended for any amount of time.
2. Applying the appropriate level of tone is irritating in whichever direction I err.
3. I obsess rather a lot at even the smallest assignments.
4. I have more scars on my hand than I recall having lived to make, and…
5. more than nearly all my fellow students (some of whom have a total of NONE), and…
6. that my instructor is young enough that HE'S never conceived of scars innate to hands on a student.

Joy.

Still, a worthwhile exercise. These past two drawings are really the first time I drew myself without hiding behind some barrier or sprawled distorted across a reflective surface as some artsy way of hiding.

I also had to draw an egg…and something. This is what I decided my egg should be doing.

It's because of the multiple lights in the room. Spotlights, yes? coming from different angles, all focussed on you, little egg. Everyone out here in the audience, everyone all over the world, waiting breathless for what you will express when you finally…uh, crack.

Fun With Body Parts

Okay, this wasn't my planned next post, but I tinkered with it tonight and need a justification for the time spent and the blog wins the scapegoat lottery.

For the record, I have never drawn my hand before, or really any other part of my anatomy. While I have taken drawing classes, it just never came up. My fellow Graphics students all have woeful tales of having drawn their digits thirty or forty times (one says a couple of hundred, but really?).

After seeing Escher's "Drawing Hands" in High School, I suffered a secret urge to follow suit, but never considered taking on the task for real until after I had grown a cramp from yesterday's assignment to draw a digit (we weren't supposed to put so much effort into the rest of the hand, but one gets carried away) I felt the need to switch models. It's hard to draw a moving hand—and the drawing is not so good, but the results didn't get crumpled up and tossed. A little post production and viola!

Left Hand Drawing

Okay, so less 3D messing with your perception and more basic "Hey this is my left hand drawing my right!" coyness, but the picture: it is got. Yes?

Mapping the Process

An assignment we had for our seminar class was, by yours truly, translated into this work of…cartoon?:

Follow the red (okay, pink) tape to get from the load of WTF to the load of coin. It's simple, no?

Well, I thought it was funny. I winced and swooned over most of the assignments for this particular course. It was clearly a very helpful class, designed to make graphic design students think about their options…so, naturally, I was unable to comply.

This, though; this was fun. The original had, among the array of "things," a urinal that was shaped like a cartoon head; an example of a truly bad idea—you know, those things that are not supposed to exist in brainstorming sessions.

Somebody always stands up at the start and says, "Let's throw everything out there! There are no bad ideas!" but they inevitably forget to write a few things down…things there maybe, after all, should not be any record of.

Who forgot to forget cartoon head shaped urinals? Fire that guy.