Life Drawing - Oct 09

The Beatles (...well half)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney...the main songwriters of The Beatles. I am a fan as well as my mom, hence my name Rita Michelle.

Portraits drawn on my birthday

I had to work on my birthday for the first time ever, but it was actually a good day. I drew some very nice people including this guy who had a natural white spot in his hair and the baby from a photo I took.

Summer portraits

Haven't posted in a while, so here are a few that I liked over the summer along with Micheal Jackson drawn after his death and my parent's first dog Leo. He was a Norwegian elkhound. Any posts after these should be better quality photos because I got a new cell phone with a 3 mega pixel camera. (The 1st one directly below was taken on the new phone.)

Chalk Art

Megan, my friend and fellow portrait artist at Sea World invited me to participate in a chalk art festival at her college. It was so much fun! It took me about 4 hours to draw my seahorse and I went through so much chalk and pastel. Luckily the chalk was provided for us. I haven't drawn on the sidewalk since I was a kid and I've definitely grown as an artist since then. I hope I can do more of this kind of stuff.

Jake

Sterling Hundley was a professor of mine at VCU for about 4 different courses. This was a classwork assignment done in my first class with him, Drawing and Painting. We had to bring in a good photo of an animal to do a pen and ink drawing using a crow quill pen. I did the drawing on grey illustration board and used some white ink for highlights. The weekend before I went home to my parent's house and took pictures of their orange cat Jake. He did an incredible job posing for me! I wish the children at Sea World would do the same...lol.

Painting from Life

Self Portraits

Speaking of self portraits...as any artist, I have a lot of them. Some have already been posted, but here are some more... First was done in charcoal. Fall 2004.
Acrylic. Summer 2007.

Me winning the jackpot. (If only it were true!) Pastel. Spring 2006.Me as an action hero movie star. Colored Pencil. Spring 2006.Me as an impressionist painter. Oil. Spring 2006.

Digital Illustration

To show another side of my work, here are some examples of digital work I created in Photoshop and Illustrator. The first was an assignment to illustrate a portrait of myself as a graffiti artist.
This was my own design for the character Robin Hood.
Here is an Army recruiting ad I made. My boyfriend who is a Black Hawk crew cheif sent me the photo that I used to reference this drawing.
The colors did not translate correctly while uploading this one, but I think it still works monochromatically. This is my depiction of a metaphysical cat.

Life Drawing

I went to a life drawing session with some people from work. The model had different costumes. These were 2 drawings I did where the model posed for 20 minutes. The next 5 are older drawings from life. The male figures were done in a figure drawing classes at VCU and I spent hours on them. The graphite drawing was on such a big piece of paper that I could only scan part of it.

February Portraits

This is a rare black and white portrait that I will only do by special request. I love to draw black and white portraits, but they are not advertised anymore. We do the sepia 2 tone instead and color of course. Luckily there was one sheet of grey paper leftover. A father had 2 sons sleeping together in the stroller and he wanted a portrait of them just like that. I think it was so cute and different. It was a challenge drawing the angled head. I wish parents would let me draw their babies sleeping more often, but they don't.
This was a young coule from the UK who had this picture from new years eve for me to draw. They were really nice and patient.
This was such a cute baby and a great reference to draw from! I love babies with hats!