Sketch Project Week 1: Trying

So the first week fo this project came and went. I felt that fear as I was sketching. I came to a point in my first sketch where I gave up on myself and just started doing. Just sketching... sketching. I don't think like it came out like anything good. I was looking at my friend and drawing him at the perspective I was looking at Brandon. In my second sketch with Chanelle, I got a little more comfortable, but then again, the angle to which I was looking at her was slightly skewed. But as I sketched along, I got a bit more comfortable with not being perfect... and just doing. It felt good.

From Left to right, Channelle and Brandon.

I also realized that as I was sketching, I was deciding on starting from different points in the lines I was looking at. With brandon, I started with his left eye, and with Chanelle, I started sketching from her hair. If you look at the sketches and skew them quite a bit... It would probably make for a better portrait.

The last two sketches from that evening, were of Jason and Jessica. I felt slightly comfortable with making the wrong strokes with Jason's lines... it ended up looking disproportionate from reality... and I guess I'm okay with that. Jessica's image was rendered with full line gestures throughout. Letting my pencil lightly touch the paper as I went along with each line.

Her image came out the most accurate of the first four sketches I've done. I'm glad.

The next day, I decided to force myself to sketch again with some color, and also sketch some strangers at a nearby coffee shop that I used to frequent. The results are quite different but the feeling was the same. I started from right to left, the figure in the middle is Jared.

---

The Sketch Project started with this post and the Manifesto is here.

One of my First Shots

I want to start things off with one of the first photos I've ever taken with a 35mm film camera. My first camera was a Canon Canonet QL17 I purchased from a 1hr photo place in Fullerton for around $40. You're probably wondering... "$40, for that?!" Well... at the time (2007), I didn't quite know what I was getting into with photography. I thought of it as a hobby I could just pick up, and my rational for getting this $40 grandapa for a camera was that I wanted to learn how to shoot carefully and learn photography with a more unforgiving device. At the time, to heed myself from spending too much money, I swore off anything digital, and I decided to purely shoot with film. This continued on for another year and a half before I bought my first digital SLR, which I still own and use today. This post is a bit sentimental (as I'm imagining, many of the future post might be this way).

Subject is Alain, my brother. He's in his old room playing a video game. I remember a time when my brother and I would just sit and he would play games as I acted as a spectator player... I would watch him play his games and cheer him on and suggest how to play the games. I'm really glad he was so patient with me. I always remembered that those times were fun, moreover in the conversations I had with him at those times.

Well, as it turns out, photography became something I wasn't just interested in, it was something I breathed. As I was playing around and experimenting with my aperture and shutterspeed, I began to understand what those things meant. I'm really glad that I was priveledged enough to have such an amazing experience with that camera.