2nd assignment and life drawing

Our second assignment was to make a portrait of a fictional character from classic literature. I chose the unnamed character from Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum". I tried some new things with this, and it wasn't what I had hoped it would be, I overworked it, then messed it up again and tried to fix it, and this is where I am right now with it. I'm going to continue working on it until I feel its where I want it.

Heres some figure drawings where we focus on shape and silhouette, keeping all the darks on the figure lighter than the dark background. These area all drawn with Nupastells on "really cool sexy paper"-Brent

sketchbook dump

So heres a few sketchbook pages from the last few weeks. The Academy is great. I'm learning a lot and having fun. Theres some notes from a very inspirational "demo" by Barron Storey. I felt foolish not knowing Barron Storey's work very well before, meeting him once put him on my top of my list of inspiration. He is one of the best draftsman I have met, and I really like the way he thinks about creating images. He handed out his sketchbooks to everyone... they were amazing. every page filled with layers of collage, color, and his "elixir of life"aka mat medium. Lecture week is over and I am really looking forward to these last three weeks of filling my brain with too much information and trying to squeeze it back out onto my pictures.

ill post again soon as my second piece dries, and I will be posting figure drawings also.
till next time
-matt