today's sketch and some graphic design finds
Spent the whole day in Tokyo Midtown today. I met up with the people from the art circle for the first time in a month or so. It was raining the whole time, so we went to a nearby Starbucks for our sketching session. This is the sketch I produced:
Considering the time limitation and the tools I used, I'm pretty happy with the result. Should've kept the background simpler though. I ended up a half-baked amount of detail and the background elements don't really make any sense.
I used a photo reference for the drawing. The bird is a Tokara Leaf Warbler (Phylloscopus tokaraensis), a new species that was found just recently on the Tokara Islands halfway between Kagoshima and Okinawa. Well, that makes it sound a lot more exciting than it is. This new species looks almost exactly like a known type of bird in the same general area, it was just declared to be distinct from it based on some DNA testing. Still interesting though.
After parting with the art circle peeps and taking a short walk around Hinokicho Park, I spent the rest of the day in the Design Hub Library leafing through some of these big "Graphic Design in Japan 20XX" books. Below are some of my favourite things I found in there.
Looking at them side-by-side, a common element seems to be strong contrast between design elements. The clean, geometrically perfect octagon with the brush stroke-like things around it, the colorful photo of the lime (3D) with the black-and-white, print-like fish (2D) below it, the simple vector art pumpkin with the charcoal drawing of the ghosts ... I want to incorporate more "designy" elements into my art. I did a semi-realistic drawing today, but I'm not that big into realism.