Drawing II. Spring 2010.

Drawings from the semester of Spring 2010. Drawing II class. In no particular order, but with some explanations as to what they are.

One of three in a narrative series. The best one of three. I drew a bottle throwing a ball into a bowl.

The first exercise of the class. Extended line drawing. Finding the angles and lines of objects and making then go from page edge to page edge.

Obligatory doodles on the side of one of my class pieces.

Using line weight and line direction to lead the viewer through a piece.

Perspective 101. One point.

Two point.

Homework using line weight to lead the eye through a piece.

Homework.

Charcoal - my least favourite media. Additive and subtractive drawing with charcoal and an eraser.

First use of pastel! It was pretty fun.

Second pastel! Also pretty fun. I enjoyed getting the hang of how the pastels lay their colours down.

Another class piece. I was wanting to focus on a couple of objects as opposed to taking the whole thing in.

Interlude.

Graphite still life.

More graphite. More still life.

Experimenting with atmospheric perspective. Essentially making the things that are further away look more faint. And a doodle.

Straight drawing from class.

The first ideas of a piece of work based on a Master copy. I was looking at Degas and his ballet dancer pictures. This was the first sketch I did. He draw on a coloured board, so I grabbed a piece of cardboard to experiment with.

It worked well. I wasn't sure what to think about the texture, but I went with it.

A bigger one.

They just got gradually bigger.

Whilst this one was bigger, I also tried using the grain of the cardboard going vertically instead of horizontally, which is what I had been doing until this point.

My biggest test piece. About 3 feet square. Maybe.

A Master study of the piece. Graphite.

The finished piece. You can see the Master copy on the left. I was pretty happy with it. Very happy with it, in fact.

I haven't pictured the last project because we haven't started it yet, but I am going to to a diptych with a picture of me looking up at the picture and another one of me looking down at the picture.

I have not included one picture here, as I got it mixed in with the Life Drawing work. The last few weeks of the Drawing II class looks at the figure - the head in particular. That is with my other drawings.

One more.

Here are a couple of other pictures of a painting I've done. Considering I've only been learning for two months, I'm pretty happy.

Before:

After:

Go to:

I have got a lot of links to put up on the delicious tags at the top right of my blog page.

http://drawn.ca is one of the best sites I have visited in a long, long time. Do yourself a favour and get there now. Don't wait until I upload different links. Find them yourself. You will not regret it.

Paint

This semester is the first time I've ever seen paint on a palette, let alone used it. That being said, it's pretty fun to mess around with.

It's an odd feeling, trying to do something you can't do. I've been drawing with a pen for years, now and I've forgotten what it was like to make the transition to that from pencil. I've been drawing since I was two, apparently, so sitting down and being told how to make art is something that I'm having to get used to.

Nevertheless, I shall strive to learn as much as I can. ... which means I should probably head back in to my lesson.

Here's an egg. This may be as big a picture as you'll get at the moment, but I don't think you'll mind. It looks better this way, anyway.

Gribblies.

Little bottle cap gribbly. Inspired by a thread I post on over at somethingawful.com - I decided to make a little monster out of two bottle caps and a fair amount of string and thread.

I'll make more. I'll try giving it a mouth sometime, too.

It also looks pretty nice upside-down, too. With the little tongue hanging off the edge of something. I'll get a shot or two of that.

Sock drawer.

It's been a little too long since I made a post here. But here I am. Hopefully this will be a more frequent occurrence. I even updated the Delicious tags! Joy!

A few doodles for ye.

Well. Not all doodles. Here's a basic put-together of a sculpture I did a while back. It was really good fun working with wood and big tools and sharp objects. What could be better? Well. I'm starting a bronze casting project and a welding project. That could be better.

Some drawings of what I was thinking about doing for my current sculpture project.

I went with this. Or something pretty similar. I'm working with a chicken wire armature and covering it with burlap and plaster. It's pretty good fun. But I want to cast bronze.

My first venture into Sculpey. I can only get better.

And here's a frog that I drew a few months ago. It's pretty big. I forget the size. But it is.

I've recently found myself with a penchant for Cream Soda. Because of this I am accumulating a good number of bottle tops. I love them. I'll have a photo next time of one thing that I'm going to be doing with them.

I also have two pieces going up in an exhibition soon. When I get photos of those I'll put them here too.

Hope you like. There's more to come. I just need to photo it. I'd rather keep it in bite-size nuggets. That way you don't have to trawl through masses of pictures every time I post.

[Witty title]

Where to begin? I've always found the start to be a good place.

The poster project went well. I was very happy with what I produced. For my first time making a poster, I enjoyed it and found it challenging. Here be the poster:

I tried to emulate the style of Derek Hess as well as using my own style. I think I mixed the two well, but seeing as my style is pretty similar already, it wasn't as big an effort.

After this we did another poster project. This time we had to copy a poster that we found. I looked through a big book of posters (I thought it would be a good book to look through for a poster) and found a nice gig poster by a man called Jay Ryan.

It was a fun experiment and I found that although his style is a little different, it is still quite loose at times and is something I can learn from when it comes to incorporating other artists' work into my ideas and the little image library in my head.

Here's the original:

And then my copy:

I started by putting a high res. scan of the poster into photoshop, where I then put a new layer over the top and traced round the figure. For the letters I used the magic wand tool to select the shapes. I found a font that was very similar to this but it cost a pretty penny to get. I'm a student. And I'm on an exchange programme. I don't have the luxury of what most people know as an 'income'.

The muscle memory, if you will, that came from copying this figure (thrice, it turned out, thanks to the computer hating me and not saving the image) meant that I could easily draw this over and over without using the reference material. This is how we learn.

The last project the we did (and the one that I am handing in minutes from now) was to make a big character, taken from a selection of typefaces, out of mount board. It was a brilliant project! Although my final piece warped somewhat, I was pretty happy with it. As with all the projects on the course, it was my first time attempting something like this and it is something that is going to prove very useful in the future.

Voila:

In a few parts the sides are coming off the main face of the character. I would put this down to warping of the material. It went swimmingly when I dry-fit the material but after the gluing the things together and leaving it for a few nights, it had pulled apart somewhat. The paint that I used was good but I think I could have used another coat or two. Or at least a solid, non-patchy coat.

All in all it's been a fantastic year for learning things that I wanted to learn prior to getting here but never having the time or motivation to sit down and teach myself.

To finish in my usual style, here is a project that I finished the other week for my Drawing class:

And then two doodles; both emulating - and inspired by - the style of an artist under the username 'tooms' on an art forum I post on.

This style is appealing because it calls for bold lines. You have to know where you want them to go and not worry about getting it wrong. Which I still do...

Exploding head. I enjoy drawing these.