Last Drawing Project

This is the last drawing project we did... this blog posting is actually late, because I thought it was due at 11:30pm tonight, but it was 11:30am this morning. Better late than never.

The parameters were that we had to choose an object, any object that wasn't trite.

Then we had to draw it three different ways: using only line, using only value, and an interpretation of the object. All three of mine were interpretations of the object I chose, which was a pocket watch of my grandfathers.

The first one I did was line. It is a little morbid, but it gets the point across. I left a little distortion in the hand so it would be easier to embrace the slice across the wrist. It wouldn't be as morbid and intimidating if it didn't look like a realistic hand. I also added the drops to the fingertips to make it look like the hand was dripping and wasting away. If I were to revise this piece, I would turn the statement into a question, like "Does time heal all wounds?" That would make it more postmodern.



I did this first just to play with the drip.

I did a little bit of playing in how to add the quote. Jason Whitman writes little titles at the bottom of his work and I wanted to see if it would work for me. I wasn't sure it worked. 

This was trying to work out how I wanted the words to look. I did it on vellum and put it over the drawing so I wouldn't have to keep drawing the hand. 

This is the sketch of the band-aid that I put over the slice on the wrist. That's where the watch came in. 

I added red on the fingers in one trial... I didn't really like it, it looked like nail polish, instead of adding the unity with the red blood that I wanted. So I kept the red off in the final piece. 

TA-DAAAA! This is the final piece. You can really see the distortion on the hand that I was talking about earlier. 

The next piece I did was Wasting Time piece. It was a appropriation of Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory. 

I couldn't find much of my process for this one for some reason, but I began by sketching different ways the watch could drip: down the arm, through the fingers, many different ways. This is what I ended up with. I also played around with the drops. I had them dripping to a puddle, and also dripping off the page. I liked them dripping off the page the best because as many people ask themselves "where does the time go?", I wanted my viewers to ask the same question, "where does the drop go?" That represents time, and I hope they make the connection between wasting the time and how it just disappears. 

The last piece was my favorite. It was called "Time Flies". It all began with this sketch.

I love it because its such a tiny and playful sketch, only about three inches tall. But my entire idea was sparked by this sketch. One of my classmates told me the numbers looked like bats, so I worked on the wings to make them more whimsical. 

This is the wing stencil that I used to trace all the wings onto the numbers. I found a few online and  just sketched a combination of all of them to suit my personality and needs of the drawing. 

Then I had to move on to the lovely hands... oh how I used to hate drawing hands... now its easier and easier. This is the first sketch that I used and tweaked it a little to make it look nice in the final piece. 

This is the final piece. As you can see, I took the top off of the watch. I felt like it really took away from the hands and the hands feel more free without it there. I decided to cut everything out and collage it on gray paper to make the numbers pop more and add a nice contrast. 

Well, this was the last project for my drawing class, it was a great class and I'm sad its over! 

Peace!

Illustration, Final (Maybe)

This is the beginning of my Illustration! This is the one with the social justice theme, and I chose to to do domestic violence. The back sheet of paper is Pastel/Charcoal Paper, steel gray colored. It is acid free and has a tooth (which means little holes in the page) to allow the charcoal or pastel to sink in. However, I didn't use and charcoal or pastels. I used cut bristol board. 

This is the final product... I hope. It is due Tuesday. Creepy huh? Yeah it kinda freaks me out looking at it too.

What I've Been Up To in Drawing Class! Social Justice Illustration and Paper Bags

If it is possible to despise a project as much as you love it, I'm sure I do. I am so excited to see the end of this Social Justice Illustration because I HATE working through the process and coming up with ideas and fighting for the parts of the picture to work together, but because I've been working on it with such frustration, I am looking forward to see what the end product looks like. I think it will be pretty amazing. Here is a bit of my process. WARNING: its been a long one.

A horribly drawn version of the "general idea" of the illustration. A frightened woman with an abusive man's hand over her mouth. The triangle type shapes represent glass, which represents the fact that she is a fragile human being. The glass is punched out around her eye, and he is covering her mouth above the glass, representative of the fact that he is breaking her down. 

I did some pretty interesting sketches of women and different types of eyes on vellum. Vellum is like tracing paper but more velvety.

More interesting but pointless sketches of eyes and glass. I was floundering around for a few days because I was having difficulty gathering my thoughts. I play with my kneaded eraser a lot in class. 

I found some broken glass that I really liked so I spent an entire class period (almost three hours) drawing this glass bigger.

Then I took a picture of my hand, and made it look like a creepy man's hand. That was an interesting process. Plenty of erasing. 

This is where it starts to get a little creepy. I had a really hard tim breaking up the glass and drawing the difference between the figure and the ground. The hand is my favorite though :-)

This is the last update I have. The grey background was done in chalk. I'm probably going to end up cutting out the glass and the hand, etc, and gluing it on gray paper. I think it will turn out cleaner that way. The chalk tends to smudge.

NEXT IS THE PAPER BAGS.

I really don't like those things.

So I started out on white paper using regular charcoal, because I am afraid of commitment and starting cold on the final gray paper was a really scary thing for me.

For an entire class period, I worked out the shapes of the bags, the shadows and their placement. Finally it was finished on the white paper and I forced myself to go on to the final paper.

This is a good picture of the blocking in process. The point of a picture with this much value is to see the whole picture before each of the parts, or each bag. Therefore when I started with the picture, I did the lines, but then I blocked in all of the white, then all of the gray, then the dark gray, etc. Its nowhere near done, but I'll be sure to post when it is!

This is what I've been up to...

This is what we worked on in class last week. It was a huge pain. 

We started out familiarizing ourselves with the object by doing a contour line drawing, and then went from there. 

This is one finished drawing from the first angle, and an unfinished one from the second angle.

And this lovely thing is this weeks project on shading. I have a better one of a man that has a really sad expression, but for some reason it refuses to upload from my mom's camera. I want my camera back.

Blind and Observed Continuous line Contour Drawings!

The two above pictures are blind, continuous line, contour drawings of my hand. We aren't supposed to name the object we draw, but for the posting's sake I will call the form my "hand". To do a blind contour drawing, I put a barrier between my eyes and my paper, and my hand in my lap. I had to pretend like my pencil point on the page were like my eyes following the lines of my hand. This was a particularly difficult assignment for me because of the continuous line part. I was not allowed to pick up my pencil until the form was complete. I was also not allowed to use my eraser to erase the lines and start over. In addition, I wasn't allowed to start and stop the pencil line. If I did, it would have looked like a severed body part instead of part of a whole. The "contour" part means that I drew all of the little details from the lines in my fingers to the fingernails. I realize that these drawings are distorted, but the distortion is half the beauty of the blind contour drawings. They are simply images of what your hand thinks your mind is seeing. For example, the little indentions on the sides of the fingers are supposed to be the bend lines in my fingers.  

 

These two pages are examples of observed, continuous line, contour line drawings. Observed drawings are similar to blind drawings but I was able to look back and forth at my hand and what I was drawing. However, I was still not allowed to pick up my pencil, and I had to be sure to incorporate all of the detail of the contour lines into the drawings. Observed continuous line contour drawings still look somewhat distorted because I wasn't able to pick up my pencil. Overall, I'm very glad we did this assignment, because I got comfortable using my pencil and not being afraid to mess up.