Tram

It's been awhile since I've been to a life drawing session for a variety of reasons. This bunch is from a few months ago, an older model who I've drawn before named Tram. Hopefully this week I'll be able to make it back to the studio.

Cars Parked On East 3rd St. Between Avenues A and B

I've spent the past couple of weeks on a project at a theater on 3rd Street in the East Village. I had a lot of free time in the afternoons, and I noticed a lot of nice cars around, so they became my sketching subject for several days. This was somewhat amusing to me because, although I missed out on the darkest days of New York during the 1970s and 80s, when I moved here, Alphabet City was still not a place to park nice cars.


1960 Plymouth Valiant

Scion FRS

Later I went to draw the front view, but it moved after I started it. Thanks a lot, Scion FRS.

BMW Z4 301

Old VW bugs are the funnest cars to draw, as seen here, but the modern ones are cool, too.

North Hempstead Beach

Last Sunday I was out at North Hempstead Beach Park on Long Island. It's a little beach next to a power plant and across from an industrial dock. So it's a good beach to go to if you like going to beach but don't care about the view. Or if, like me, you enjoy sketching industrial stuff. And geese.

Roadwork

Some drawings from recent days of construction vehicles and equipment. I love drawing this stuff, because A) What do these things do? Some are obvious, like a bulldozer, but even they have all these pipes and tubes and hoses and attachments that make you wonder how it all works. B) They are a really complex arrangement of lines and shapes and a fun challenge to decipher and depict it all. You may think all these construction devices are just blocks, like a Tonka toy, but in fact they are full of graceful curves and complex shapes intersecting in oblique tangents.


I drew this in DUMBO. I'm not precisely sure what it does, but a contractor at the site said it was "for drilling. Like for water." Are they drilling for aquifers in Brooklyn?

A manual steamroller, I guess.

Naptime in a bulldozer. South Street Seaport. Lots of construction there, still rebuilding from Sandy.

Bulldozer with some sort of attachment in front, for lifting heavy stuff, I guess.

Ballerina

I wasn't at the ballet, but the model this particular day was trained in ballet. Unfortunately, I didn't catch her name. She was a pretty great model, especially for this session, which was an anatomy class. Like many dancers, she was muscular but very lean and, of course, very flexible, which made observing her musculature very clear and easy.

May The Fourth Be With You

It's Star Wars Day!

   

IRON MAN

The new Iron Man movie opens today. I probably won't get a chance to see it until next week, but I'm pretty excited for it. I never cared much about Iron Man in the comics, but I've liked the movies a lot, mostly due to Robert Downey Jr.'s performance.

One thing I did always like about Iron Man was the way his armor was drawn back in the sixties by Don Heck and Jack Kirby. Later renditions of the suit featured sculpted musculature, which often made him look like he was just wearing painted-on spandex like the rest of the superheroes. The original versions were bulky and barrel-chested. They were also covered with bolts and rivets. It really looked like a guy in a suit made of metal cans. More recent versions really play up the tech that would be involved with such a suit, and have lots of parts and joints. It looks cool, but it's hard to draw.


The Iron Man suit was in constant flux in the early years, before settling on a streamlined version that lasted from the late 1960's through the 1980's. I'm partial to this version, with the face-plate with the pointy ends sticking up and the grill over his mouth. I also liked the little transitor-radio-like antenna he had on his shoulder. Who needs wi-fi?

Another thing I liked about the older depiction was the way you could see his eyeballs behind his mask. I just discovered that there was in fact a rationale for it . . .

Watch out, Mr. Doll!

I also liked how lo-fi his armor was. I'm sure at the time this seemed space-age, but today it's amusing to see how proud Tony Stark was of his armor that ran on magnets, transistor radios,  gyroscopes, and batteries.

Also note how much storage he's built into his suit, including a first aid kid into his boot. That Tony Stark thinks of everything!

I started my Iron Man sketch in pencil, and then inked and colored it in Photoshop. Here's the earlier stages: