FACEPOCALYPSE

Our model today was an interesting lady. She was into numerology and various name-related offshoots.

She seemed pretty spiritual, like a lot of people here in SF, and has changed her name quite a few times. I don’t recall an exact number, except she said at intervals of 7 years she’d change her name and start a new chapter of her life. She said she’s analysed strengths and weaknesses of past names and had synchronicity that led her to each new name.

I thought it was pretty interesting because I’ve never really felt like a Simon. Her belief was that her name affected the direction of her life, but under her grounds for getting a name change I don’t see any reason to change mine. I have no problems with how my life’s going. In fact, I like the amount of responsiveness I have to everything happening!

This all came up in relation to a sequence of events that caused her to be late for our life drawing session. Turns out she’d changed her name again this morning, to Ishta if I recall correctly.

And now some Nu Pastel drawings. Dark green and pale yellow on halftone paper.

Thinking about edge quality for this one. Edges are either hard, soft or lost, and I’m using different types of edges to render form and create a focal point.

Look at how sharp the area around its shoulder is. I went in and painted the forms with textural brushes, then to get it so sharp I used the hard round brush to just clean up the areas where surfaces meet. But it’s such a subtle cleanup that I can retain most of the texture.

I felt like I was summoning all these things I’d observed in Nic Klein‘s work back when I started digital painting. I love the way he paints robots, same with people like Jon Foster, Ashley Wood, Phil Hale and other classics that have a similar graphic style.

Messed a lot with the value structure of this piece. It’s still very graphic, but more readable than the ink version.

We’ve moved onto using ink in Media class, and our first assignment is to do a master copy of one of the artists shortlisted. While Tsutomu Nihei wasn’t one of those artists he’s a manga artist I only heard about today. I saw this piece of his and thought I’d do my own version with some adjustments.

I didn’t even attempt the smoke but he handled that very well. I may go back into the background and pick out some shapes, but otherwise I’m very happy with this! Haven’t indulged in inking before but it sure makes rendering clothing easy, and it’s so much faster than trying to ink on Photoshop… Unless you make a mistake.

Also, I tried a compositional ‘trick’ called counterchange. Where you have a dark shape on a light shape switching to a light shape on a dark shape.

Sometimes I feel compelled to do stupid stuff. And by some times I mean all the time. Having already accumulated 10+ hours of life drawing this week I thought I’d use my mouth to draw during a 20 minute pose.

Slow and steady. Well, maybe just slow. The charcoal pencil had a mind of its own, wiggling its way across the page. Not to mention whenever I drew a line I was too close to look at the model, or even the rest of the drawing. For each line placed the distance was estimated. Plus, when mouth drawing different directions achieved different extents of wiggle, and drawing down sometimes caused a machinegun stippling effect.
Here’s a closeup of the area I screwed up next to his arm, and more stippling on the hip.

After the first one I’d come to terms with how the charcoal behaves and did this mouth drawing in about 10 minutes during the next pose.

I really like how these drawings turned out, I think they have a lot of charm. The lines just flow without careful deliberation. The wiggly lines and distorted proportions remind me of Egon Schiele‘s work. All I needed to do was compromise my motor skills. I could see where the lines needed to be, and had all the knowledge to place them, I just needed to coerce the charcoal pencil to place them in the right vicinity.

We’re doing vignettes in Composition class at the moment, and today I felt compelled to draw a zombie. Or anything dark, for that matter.

I’ve also been studying torso anatomy lately (outside of TAD) as this has always been a weakness. So, to encorporate more skin to render my zombie became a trashy consumer zombie.

Read the rest of this entry →

I really like how this drawing turned out. I thought I’d share.

Nu pastel on smooth, halftone paper.

We’ve also been doing some block-ins lately for our Light and Form class. They’re also known as constructs, with the purpose of getting your eye in. Thankfully in San Fran we get to do this under the guidance of Dorian Iten, the current resident instructor at our studio. Observational drawing is his specialty so it’s great to have him around while doing these.

The aim of a block-in is to map out the shape of the cast and then break it into light and dark masses.

It’s all about seeing shapes over ‘things’ – things being what they are in real life. When you start thinking of the cast as a cast (with a torso, some legs and so on) you fall into the trap of drawing what you think a torso or leg looks like instead of seeing the shapes they’re actually made from. You’re not really observing, you’re making bits up. By seeing the object as a collection of (2-dimensional/flat) shapes you can draw it more easily, and one trick in doing this it to squint and/or picture the shapes as something else.

Here’s one of my block-ins, along with a shape visualisation example:

To help draw the shape I highlighted in red, aside from squinting and just matching the angles I could’ve imagined that shape as the bottom of a crocodile’s jaw. It could be anything, there’s no significance in choosing a crocodile. The purpose is to psychologically trick you into looking at it in a different way, like an optical illusion. After this I just need to match that shape on my drawing.

Doing block-ins/constructs is a great way to train your eye, and at traditional ateliers art students will keep doing block-ins until they’re good enough to move onto the next phase, which involves rendering the form.

Another portrait for Media class; one of my housemates this time. I’m trying to push my mark making and explore other stylistic approaches. It’s kind of based on one of Nicolai Fechin’s techniques, with a bit of improvised scratchy pencil over the top.

Tools used: graphite block, smudge stick, kneadable eraser, 2H and 4B pencils.

I also found that if I use a sharp 2H pencil to draw it digs the line into the page so when you go over with the graphite block those lines remain light. This could be useful! I must experiment further.

I did this caricature of Jon Foster for my Media unit at TAD. It’s actually my first finished charcoal piece. I’d always avoided charcoal because I never liked holding grainy media; it used to give me shivers. Anyway, if you don’t know Jon’s work you really need to check it out. Now. His work is incredible.

A picture of the man himself beside the portrait.

Jon does a few demo oil paintings at the San Fran POD.

Jarkko the crazy Finnish viking and myself display our enthusiasm while Jon paints.