On to 2012...

Happy New Year! My first semester of grad school is done, and I finally have forced myself to post an update. As I should have expected, I didn't have much time to do a lot of artwork during the semester beyond the occasional doodle, or overly elaborate drawings/plots for homework assignments. One fun craft project I did do was to make two little models of OSIRIS-REx, which is an upcoming mission to a near-Earth asteroid (dryly named 1999 RQ36), run out of my department. The first model was a quick little model that I made out of an old Oatmeal box, a coffee-stirring stick, lots of hot glue, and my colored pencils (or as my Canadian office-mate insists they be called: pencil crayons):

I made it to go along with an asteroid-like candy-filled piñata for LPL's annual Bratfest. Here's a photo of me, at Braftest, wearing a Bratfest t-shirt, next to the piñata and little O-REx.

(don't worry, I removed it from the piñata prior to its destruction.)

Since I had so much fun making this little OSIRIS-REx, and I was in need of a birthday gift for my office-mate Kelly (who works for the principle investigator of this mission), I decided to do a much more detailed version of O-REx. This was harder to do since there are not that many images of the spacecraft out, so I was working predominantly from their mission patch, and their press-release videos...

Once the semester actually ended, and I wound up back in Presidential-primary-ad-laiden Iowa, I finally had some actual time to do some drawing. Using my brand new sketchbook (which I got as a birthday gift from a certain baker), along with some new pens from my parents, I got going on some sketches...

Some of my notable earlier works were very detailed 'technical' drawings of either spacecraft or just random industrial scenes. A lot of these (both then and now) were inspired by a lot of science fiction movies that I have seen, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, Alien, etc. I decided that I'd give these technical drawings another shot...

This is just of some (brightly colored) futuristic corridor.

A landing spacecraft, very much inspired by the Nostromo.

A rotating spacecraft (to generate artificial gravity), with the crew-capsule on the near-side, and the fuel tanks and power supply on the far-side.

With these above images, I'm usually making them up as I go along. I may have some general ideas (e.g., I want a rotating spacecraft, or I want a floating catwalk, etc.), but I really am just improvising as I go along. I also do not use a ruler (although I did for some lines in the rotating spacecraft, since I wanted my perspectives to be decent). Since I have my nice prismacolors, I can't help using them to either give background color or just flat-out coloring everything, with my usual over-saturated colors.

After doing these sort of cold technical drawings, I decided to change it up, and draw something from life. I wanted to do something I haven't done before, and that was a bit more challenging... so I took out my ink pens and did two fairly quick gesture drawings of very large closeups of two necklaces I've had. The first one is has a shark's tooth (from Florida), and the second a cowrie shell (from Cameroon, where I once studied abroad), which I gave as a gift to my best friend. Doing quicker/messier sketches of more natural items was a pretty big change from the stark industrial look of the above drawings.

I actually am more proud of these last two drawings than the previous three technical drawings. They're more outside of my comfort zone, but I think they look good (I'm a fan of the gesture pen strokes I did them in), and more relatable to others. I'll probably do a few more of these quick drawings (they take maybe 30 minutes max) before I get swamped up with work and school again...