Session 5 - 23/10/12

Second Life Drawing Session

Our second life drawing session got off to an odd start when our life model didn't turn up. Eventually he was tracked down, but the delay meant that our first subject was our lecturer. You can see my drawing of him below:

 

The general concensus among my friends was that clothing presented a higher level of difficulty in the drawing stage, but given our focus was on highlighting the lighter and darker parts of our model, we agreed that clothing made for a more interesting final piece.

After completing the first segment our model arrived. I decided to make my first drawing using charcoal and chalk to create highlights. I also decided to do the entire thing using the blind contour method, i think it shows in the final result!

 

If you look hard enough you can find a human shape in this mess! Still, i thought i ended up with an interesting result. Very artsy. 

Our final task was to create a drawing using an unfamiliar medium, i chose to use a pen. The black lines show how that went, i decided that using mark making techniques was the best way to tackle it.

It turned out that this was only the first stage of our drawing, as we were then told to gran another unfamiliar medium and add it to our drawings, i chose to use chalk pastels, and was very pleased with the results, especially given the frustration using a pen had caused me!

I felt that our life drawing experience ended on a high, for all of us, everyone seemed to have attained a very unique style in their final piece, and i personally felt i had improved a lot just in the space of two sessions.

I left with some useful experience and knowledge that i believe will be very useful in my future work.

Session 4 - 16/10/12

Last week we were informed that our next two sessions would be focussed on life drawing, and we would be off to one of the art studios to draw a nude model. Not having done this before, i was intrigued by the prospect and after the first session i can say it's a very interesting experience.

This session focussed on using different techniques to draw the model such as Contour drawing, using charcoal sticks to draw, using visual measurements to make sure the proportions of our drawings were correct.

You can see all my work below.

Above you can see the results from my first two drawing. On the left is a drawing created using the contour lines, as you can see the result is a tad vertically disproportioned. I am under the impression that i failed to follow the proper technique in this drawing as i spent a fair amount of time looking at the paper and moving the pencil around freely.

The second drawing here was created with paticular attention to the shading, using the mark-making to show form and shadow, i think this can out far better than the first drawing.

Next we drew the model stood in 3 different poses, but were asked to over lay them, in addition to this we were only given five minutes to draw each posed, which should explain the very barebones look of this drawing.

After this we were introduced to charcoal drawing and given a chance to use it ourselves. Above you can see the result of my effort, what i found to be kind of a double-edged sword for using charcoal was the very fragile nature of the lines you drew, on the one hand this meant that you could make any corrections fairly easily. On the other, it meant shading became quite difficult, i found it quite difficult to make any kind of transition from a darker black to a lighter shade without erasing the original line. Either way i was fairly pleased with how my charcoal drawing came out, though i would quite like another attempt to use it and hopefully do better.

Above you can see my final drawing from this session. We were introduced to using a pencil to measure the height of your subject matter in a way that meant you can transfer it to paper and retain the correct proportions. After this we were given 50 minutes to make one final drawing of the model and to use our new technique to do it.
As you can see, that proportioning is not really evident in this piece, at least with the arm and leg in the background. Despite this, i was very pleased with the outcome, or part of it at least. I believe i captured the head and facial expression fairly accurately.


I did quite enjoy this session, mostly because my skills were noticeably improved even in the space of a few hours. I'm now quite looking forward to the next in which i hope to keep improving.

Session 3 - 08/10/12

Our third session took us away from pencil drawing and introduced us to the world of digital art.

At the beginning of the session we were each given a graphics tablet and shown how to set it up properly. After this we were asked to boot up Adobe Photoshop CS6.

Once the program had loaded and we were introduced to the most basic concepts of the software, we were given some time to mess around and get a feel for using a graphics tablet which from my experience does take a while to get used to if it's not something you've done before. Luckily i have been using Photoshop for the past year or so and have a tablet of my own at home, so i simply took the time to make a few doodles which you can see above.

As a warm up exercise we were asked to dive straight in and draw a picture of someone sitting on a bench, unfortunately i dont have the image for this exercise.

Perspective 

We then recapped one, two and three point linear perspective, as well as being shown a very useful technique to create perspective lines using photoshop.

Once we had done this ourselves we were asked to use photoshop again to improve the pictures of the bench, you can see the final result of my work below:

I think for the most part my perspective looks fine, with the only exception being the cobblestone slab foor which takes up half the image, had we been given more time i believe i could have corrected this error.

Finally, we were given 45 minutes to take an object and draw it, i chose to use the same bunch of flowers i drew previously. Sadly, i didn't manage to get much of it done, but i believe my technique was sound, starting with simple rough shapes and adding layers with ever increasing detail should lead to a very nice looking final piece.

 

Session 2 - 01/10/12

Our second drawing for games session focused on Line, Space and Tone.

Here you can see part of my work from said lesson:

On this page you can see five different ways tone can be represented in drawing, Pressure, Layers, Erasers, Fingers, Paper Stumps or Tortillions (each achieve the same effect) and Pencil Softness. Each one is accompanied by an example drawing. Below that is a chart showing the Tonal Range, this is a guide to the lightest and darkest values that tone can suggest.

And below THAT is  a written definition for Tone that i will re-write here in case my handwriting is completely illegible:

"Tone is the degree of lightness or darkness in any part of a given picture. In drawing, tone, which can be represented in a number of ways (shown at the top of the page) is used to represent lighter and darker elements; from pure whites to deep blacks."

The drawings at the bottom of the page show some 3-dimensional shaded objects, as you can see the cube is labelled, giving the names of each element as well as various light sources that should be taken in to consideration when shading an object.

For the next part of our session we were asked to answer the following four questions: 

What is an edge? 

An edge is a line segment joining two adjacent vertices. An edge in drawing, is typically referred to as such if it is a line segment that represents the boundary of an object.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_(geometry)

What is a Line? 

A line in geometry is a suggested one dimensional object that is much like an edge, but without a defined start or end point, a line extends infinitely in both directions. In art they are the things we supposedly use to draw an image. However, in most cases i would understand any line to be the boundary of something, and therefore an edge.

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/WhatIs/WhatIsLine.shtml

The “Lost and Found Line” 

As is suggested by the name, lost and found lines are contours that will be sharp and defined at one point only to 'disappear' at another. Images created using this technique often present a strong focus on using colour to suggest form rather than lines.

http://www.noteaccess.com/RELATIONSHIPS/DB.htm

http://www.artistsnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Lost-and-Found-Edges.pdf

“Negative Space”

Negative space is defined as being the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. You can see an example of negative space in the previous session's post. The image of a vase that can also be read as an image of two faces in profile is a classic brain teaser. 

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-negative-space.htm

We were asked to make note of some useful definitions we were taught in our session: 

Tone is the gradation from white to black.

Tint is the opposite of ‘shade’; to make a ‘colour’ lighter. 

Shade is the opposite of ‘tint’, to make a ‘colour’ darker. 

Hue is another word for colour. 

Value can be used in many contexts: shadow, contrast, light, colour saturation etc. often combined with the words ‘deeper’ or ‘lighter’.
The Source is the location or direction of the primary lighting of the object. 

Chiaroscuro is Italian for ‘light-dark’. A technique of using strong light and dark shadows to represent a pictorial image.

Drawing is the process of dealing with line – proportion, parts, areas, light and shadow areas.

Rendering is the process of working (drawing? painting?) tones onto an image after the initial drawing stage has been finished. This secondary drawing process deals with details, contours, tones and values.


After some warming up through contour drawing and sketches of primitive shapes, we were asked to take a bunch of artificial flowers, and given 40 minutes to draw them observing tone and edges. Here's what i managed, and a picture of what i drew for comparison:

As you can see it's another effort that i didn't manage to complete in the time given. Though in this case it's not entirely surprising, trying to make sense of the jumbled mess of false petals is a nightmare! Sadly i'm not really happy with what i did draw in that time, i feel my shading techniques still need a lot of improvement, i believe i tend to use a far heavier touch than is necessary sometimes. Still, i can take from this piece the identification of an area in which i want to improve, and with more practise i believe i will.