First Post - Drawings from Summer 2010

Hello all,

The main reason I created this blog was so that I could have a place online to display my artwork.  Facebook is not that great of a medium for this, and I'm sure by now my friends are getting tired of seeing random airplanes and spacecraft flooding their News-feeds.  I also plan to use this blog as a way to document my final semester here at the University of Maryland, my coming geology summer field camp, and eventually my adventures through graduate school (at a location yet to be determined).  (And honestly, I've been inspired by my friend Meghan's blog, where she is doing something similar, albeit slightly more delicious...)

Over the course of the last year, I have made it a goal of mine to do more artwork.  Back in high school, my life seemed to be dominated by drawing and painting.  I took art courses every semester, and never seemed to stop doodling.  I painted murals in the school, I designed t-shirts, etc. etc.  However, once I came to the University of Maryland, my life got swamped with school.  As my geology advisor once told me in an advising meeting, I am a "glutton for punishment."  I am a triple major student, who takes way too many classes, and does way too many things.  While I always did little sketches in my notebooks when I got bored, or draw overly elaborate diagrams or PowerPoints for classes, I never really spent that much time sitting down and doing actual art, for art's sake.  This past summer, I stayed in College Park and worked as a teaching assistant through the astronomy department.  (This differed from past summers, where I traveled or worked elsewhere.)  This gave me a good amount of free-time, and I decided to make an active effort to start drawing more.  I went out and bought a pack of 64 Crayola pencils, and dug out an old sketch book, and went at it...

One of my first drawings of that summer: The Spirit of St. Louis.  This was based off a photo I took at the National Air and Space Museum.  Airplanes and spacecraft have always been my bread and butter of art subjects.  I've always loved studying them and so they are things that I feel very comfortable drawing.  That's why almost all of my quick drawings are of this, or similar nature.

The above is Space Ship One, the first ever commercial spacecraft to reach space.  The drawing was based off of a photo I took of the craft, at the National Air and Space Museum, where it is currently on display.

 This is based off a photo I took at Kitt Peak National Observatory in the summer of 2009, when I worked with the National Solar Observatory as a research assistant.  As you can start to see, I really like color, and try to really bring out and saturate colors when I can.

This is the Buran space shuttle, a top its Antonov carrier aircraft.  This was based off a black and white color photograph I found on Google.  Most people don't realize it, but the Russian space program actually did develop their own space shuttle, to compete against NASA's fleet.  Unfortunately, this program was cut short due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they only did one test flight of the vehicle.  I actually wasn't that thrilled with this drawing, as it got a little sloppy and muddy.

Whenever I have a bad drawing (like the Buran/Antonov earlier), I tend to take a break and come back with a more ambitious drawing, that I take more time on.  Above is a drawing based off of a NASA image of the Apollo 17 landing site.  Apollo 17 is unique amongst the moon missions for being the only mission that brought a trained scientist to the Moon (Jack Schmitt, a geologist).  While the lunar module is still part of my spacecraft/aircraft-repertoire, landscapes and figures (albeit hidden, and suited astronauts in this case) are not.  So this represents a progression in difficulty for me.

Now this one took some time.  This drawing is of the NASA probe Cassini, which is currently in orbit of the planet Saturn.  Here I have drawn it as it approaches the moon Titan, with Saturn in the background.  Saturn's rings are shown edge-on, so we only see them as a thin line, but we do see their shadows on Saturn.  Unlike the other sketches above, I did not base this drawing off a photograph or stock image.  Rather, what I did is I used a solar system and planetarium simulator called Celestia (which is free!) to arrange Cassini and Saturn as I wanted.  I find this a fun way to compose images, since it lets me play around a lot with the setup, and does not limit me to published images of these astronomical objects (although I often refer to Google/NASA images to check on colors and more detailed images of the spacecraft).

The above is a drawing based on a photo I took from when I studied abroad in Cameroon.  In Cameroon, we were given the opportunity to hike up Mt. Cameroon, and while it was extremely painful, it was a very memorable event.  While I liked my drawing of it (I was pleased with how the people came out), it still can't compare to the original photo I took:

As the summer started to run down, I ran out of the time and energy to do big drawings, so I instead went back to my mainstay.  The above is an F-104 Starfighter - which I think is one of the coolest looking planes of all time.  It just makes me want to read The Right Stuff again!

Lastly, this is a drawing (based upon a NASA image) of the Titan II rocket that was used for NASA's Gemini missions, back in the 1960's.

Well that's all the drawings I did (and photographed) during that summer.  In the next post(s), I'll share some of my more recent works.