A lot of what I said in my last sketchbook post also applies to this one: I wasn't drawing enough, and most of what I was drawing was bizarre cartoons. This time period overlaps with my color and composition class and my first experience with oil painting.
These are some concept sketches from my oil painting class. If you've read that post you may recognize the design for the final product at the bottom right. To be honest I think it turned out to be a pretty terrible painting and the concept was pretty lame, but this sort of illustrates how my planning evolved. At least the final product was less lame than the stuff leading up to it. I was supposed to make something really conceptual, and I had this idea to explore the relationship between the symbols we use to represent things and the actual things themselves. Partly because of my experience with this painting, I really hate conceptual art--as exemplified by the famous One and Three Chairs. I guess that kind of thing can be cool sometimes, but it's just not what I have a gift for. Although I do actually think the sketch I did of a palm tree growing out of the vena cava of a heart is kind of cool. Seems like the kind of thing I could put on a t-shirt and sell at a grungy local art show.
Here are some of those bizarre cartoons I promised. (Click on this one to enlarge it so you can see the detail.) These ones are pretty self-explanatory, although even I had a tough time remembering what the visual pun was in the bottom right: it's a bull in a bowl with a bowler hat bowling.
A few of them are based on experiences I had or things people around me said. That top one is a depiction of someone giving me a death glare. There were lots more of these, but most of them are inside jokes with people I haven't seen or heard from in years, so they seemed kind of irrelevant. The "jelly beans" guy is one of those, but I thought it was kind of funny out of context too.
A few of them are pop culture references. (That top one is a reference to The Office. Get it?)
I had a couple "educational" ones too, based on things I saw on the Discovery Channel.
Of course there are the obligatory dinosaur drawings, this time accompanied by pun names. I really don't know why "velociflapper" actually looks more like a dominatrix and isn't even wearing a flapper dress. Whoops.
I also did a little vignette featuring pieces of fruit murdering each other. Because of course.
Also a nice little assortment of hats and moustaches. I don't know if I did this before or after I saw the great moustaches t-shirt. I'm hoping before because that would make me cool and original, but I kind of doubt it.
And then there's this little spread.
I didn't have nearly as many life drawings this time around, for some reason. This was really the only good one I could find, aside from drawings of people.
There's really nothing interesting to say about this. Moving on...
I did do a lot more people that year than I had previously. I guess it's hard to tell without knowing the people, but my likenesses got a lot better, as you'd expect. (You'll want to enlarge this one, too.)
As you can see, there wasn't a whole lot of change in my style, subject matter, or even really ability during 2011. I had established a habit of drawing in my sketchbook, but I wasn't really challenging myself; I was just drawing cartoons that I could have done in seventh grade. The next year, which I'll post in a while, was when things really started to take off, largely due to my figure drawing class and the fact that I'd finished the core classes for my art minor. But more about that later.