The Karu Blog

For Digital Design Foundations, our latest project was to do a portrait of a famous person with interesting looking hair. We were supposed to do these in Illustrator with black, white, and two colors of our choosing (the two colors allowed us to use as many opacity settings as we wanted for each color).

Here’s an attempt to draw something shiny. I discovered that shiny things are really really really hard to draw… figuring out how to do highlights took me a long time. Haha.

At Ana’s suggestion, I gave drawing mountains a try. She warned me that mountains are harder to do than you might think. She’s right. HAHA.

Over winter break, my friends and I did a Secret Santa gift exchange, and my assignment was Harry. I found this crazy book for him called The Man’s Manual. But of course just giving him the book straight up isn’t much fun, so I decided to disguise the book as a thoroughly dull sounding Biology or Chemistry book. The disguise would also have the added bonus of allowing the Man’s Manual to blend in with Harry’s textbooks. Here’s what I cooked up:

I don’t even know what Organic Spectroscopy is, but I figured it sounds very important and difficult. I’m kind of proud of the fake publisher I made up: “Dewie Cheetem and Howie”. Also, the one author “Larking” is from “Liniy Larking”, a pseudonym created by scrambling the letters in “Yining Karl Li”.

Some pictures of the assembled book and dust jacket before delivery to Harry:

Ana, Sarah, Dian and I are starting a new thing- every month we pick a theme and draw something according to that theme! The theme for February is, fittingly enough, “Love”. So here’s my entry:

After finishing the Sooyoung sketch, I figured the next logical thing to attempt would be a drawing of a complete person:

For our Digital Design Foundations class’s first project, we’ve been doing some basic things with shapes and patterns in Illustrator so that students new to Illustrator can get the hang of things. Easy stuff, but kinda fun.

The first thing we had to do was make a shape and use three of that shape to make a bigger shape. I made my little shape interlock with itself:

Then we had to cut out a little square or piece from the shapes and use that square or piece to make some black and white patterns. Here’s a whole bunch:

The final step of the project was to take some of the patterns we made, add a color, and make a gigantic pattern thing:

We got to print our final pattern things on gigantic HP Designjet plotters. So now I have a gigantic 6 foot by 6 foot poster of this pattern. Sweet!

Our next project involves drawing celebrities with interesting hair, hence all those random people studies I’ve been doing. I think this next project is going to be fun. :)

In keeping with the theme of K-Pop singers, today I sketched Sooyoung from SNSD.

I’m going to try to draw a face or two each day for the next few days for practice. On Thursday I tried drawing Ga-In. Yesterday (Friday), in keeping with the theme of K-Pop singers, I drew Younha.

Her hair was mad hard to do, and I’m still having trouble doing mouths. Still, this one turned out a lot better than I expected.

Some shots from various stages of completion (or incompletion):

In Digital Design Foundations, we’re getting ready to do a project involving drawing celebrities with notable hair. To prep for this assignment, we did fast sketches of each other to figure out how to draw human faces- needless to say, that ended in disaster for me. I’m not posting that (and I doubt Mindy would want me to post that either… LOL).