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.

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.

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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.

A few different mediums. Pastel for the first, and chalks (B&W).

The objective is to train your eye to see shapes; the overall shape and masses of light and dark.

These were probably about 10 minutes each from a photo reference.

Following on from my original sketch I did some thumbnails of the girl on the bus, sticking to 3 values to make sure everything reads.

After my critique the decision was between the top left and bottom right thumbnails.

I chose the bottom right, and didn’t completely stick to the value structure (which I should’ve), but kept in mind the principles of composition. Most importantly, putting a light shape on a dark shape or vice versa. This assures the silhouette of everything reads and will help direct your focus.

Today I took some time off from homework to do a few studies with another TAD student, Jarkko. We both spent about 2 hours replicating a few paintings he’d collected that were awesome examples of aerial perspective (using atmosphere to give depth), and just great pictures.

So I have some things to post. Just note I did not design these pictures, it was a copying exercise to learn from other artists.

Week 1 of TAD has just concluded and assignments have been flooding in! They’re given in the lectures but not all of the details are posted online which makes it difficult to track.

One of the more confusing assignments was to do a master copy of a drawing by Fechin. A master copy being where you find a master’s work and try to replicate it yourself.

I’ve never done a master copy before so I just lunged into it, which I shouldn’t have. So now, for the artistic viewing public I’ll elaborate on how and why you should go about doing a master copy, as explained by Carl Dobsky.

Carl told us that before doing a master copy you must have a goal in mind before commencing. My goal was to do the homework, and I just expected to have some revelation while doing so but it doesn’t quite work like that. I didn’t really connect the dots. My goal should’ve been ‘learn to use graphite’. Or more specifically, ‘learn how Fechin would’ve used graphite/charcoal.’ It all seems so obvious in retrospect.

Doing a master copy is supposed to make you figure out how another artist would’ve gone about doing something. To try and extrapolate how they produced the picture, assuming you can’t research and find out about their process. By thinking about it from this perspective it becomes more personal and invested. You chose this artwork because you want to figure out its secrets.

Here’s my master copy of Fechin’s Mexican Woman drawing using pencil. It’s not a perfect replication, and I have a lot to learn about working with graphite, but still I learnt a lot. Click to enlarge!

The first semester of TAD started this week!

It’s pretty full on, just like the workshop. Plus, since all work will be posted on the forums I need to digitalise and resize (transform and rolllll out) everything, which will be incredibly convenient for blogging.

One of the things due tomorrow is something for the sketchbook class run by Sterling Hundley. We had to find something blue outside of the studio and draw it, then take notes about our ~emotions~ and other whimsical stuff on the next page.

I did a few pages of drawings but here is my favourite.

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