Gotta gear up for my first art class in 3 weeks, so here’s a little practice “seeing” my pencil sharpener. Tomorrow I’ll do my latest self-portrait, aka the homework on which I procrastinated (for nostalgic purposes?).

I know it seems chintzy to offer a hastily-drawn and slightly disturbing skecth of an old man wearing M.C. Hammer-style genie pants held up by suspenders, but I’ve been trying to finish editing a wedding video.  Hate it when paid work gets in the way of my unpaid hobbies!

Because I’m a giant nerd, I wanted to use my computer to see how close I was with yesterday’s shadow. Using Photoshop’s 3D function (which I’d never actually touched before), I placed a cutout of my character in a 3D scene and put up a light in roughly the same location I’d envisioned yesterday.

So I think I wasn’t too far off, but I was probably silly to try to show any curves in the long shadow; as this example shows, a shadow like that is just sort of compressed into straight lines.

Toying with a possible comic strip character. Don’t get too smitten; this is the very first rendering of her. By the time I figure everything out, she’s liable to be an old lady, or Chinese, or a talking horse.

I also did this drawing to try out a principle from Andrew Loomis’ “Fun With a Pencil” (a nearly 80-year old book available for free here), which is why she has that big `ol ugly shadow behind her.

In the book, Loomis diagrams how to determine the shadow position by triangulating the direction of light and angle of light.

I decided she’d be standing with a street lamp in front of her; as you can see I even drew the lamp it on a separate sheet of paper!

I’m not entirely certain I got it right; it looks weird. But maybe I just put my light source where no sane artist would.

Today my Aunt Susie sent me a great photo of Nana, age 24, around the time she moved to California from Mexico. Click the gallery below to see the before and after.