aliceclaremay

[aliceclaremay]

Facial Expressions, Week 4 Extras

[aliceclaremay]

Fictional Characters; week 1 and week 9 extras

[aliceclaremay]

Fabrics and Embellishments, Week 8 extras

[aliceclaremay]

Continuous Line Drawings, Week 4 and Week 6 extras

[aliceclaremay]

Blind Contour drawings; Week 3 Extras.

[aliceclaremay]

Week 9: Fantasy illustration. Using everything you have learnt, do an illustration of a fantasy character of your choice.

I wasn’t sure if Mathilda counted as a fantasy character but I had such a fun vision in my head of all her books floating around her that I decided just to go for it. I attempted the oil brush on procreate for the first time and am overall pleased with the execution.

[aliceclaremay]

Weekly task 8: Fabrics and embellishments; select two different fabrics to illustrate and incorporate on a character of your choosing

For this I chose to combine the work I was doing for another module where I am making a Steampunk Dodo costume. I tried to think about lighting and texture to convey both the leather and the denim in my design.

[aliceclaremay]

Weekly task 7: Draw a non-human character from the Alice in Wonderland play script

This was a fun task as we had the choice as to whether we drew an animal, a human dressed as an animal or some visually horrifying in-between like the animation in Cats, 2019. (the 1998 version is an actual masterpiece though and I will hear no arguments otherwise.)

I chose to draw mine as humans dressed as animals as I thought it would be fun to try and translate animal body shapes and features onto the human form.

I envisioned the white rabbit as formal and well dressed, so tried to incorporate the round shape of a rabbit’s body in with the billowy white dress shirt and pantaloons.

With the dormouse I thought it would be cool if one of his legs was his tail as it would give the actor more freedom for movement. I gave him a headpiece for the mouse face and a large oversize bowtie and a matchstick cane for some fun with scale.

I was pleased with both drawings but the dormouse was definitely my favourite.

[aliceclaremay]

Weekly task 6: choose a performance to pause. Draw three gestural drawings, three continuous line drawings and three blind contour. No digital drawing aloud.

Gestural drawings

For the gestural drawings I chose to draw mainly dance performers. It became a sort of study into dancers and whether or not they are actually human. (All research points to no). Their bodies are very fun to draw as they do things with them that I – being someone who groans sitting down in a chair at the mere age of 20 due to poor lifestyle choices – was not aware were possible.

Continuous Line

For my first continuous line drawing I paused a scene from West Side Story where tough guy gang The Jets sing about being tough whilst giving some serious jazz hands. I was pleased with the result and this was the one I uploaded.

Blind contour

None of my blind contour drawing were anything to write home about and I was not keen to upload any of them. Of all the different techniques and challenges, this is one I can firmly say I won’t be keen to try again.

[aliceclaremay]

Weekly task 5: use the random emoji generator and create a character inspired by six emojis that you are given.

🐈🐱🌽⚠️⚰️🚭

This was an incredibly fun task for me, I really enjoyed thinking about how to incorporate all the symbols. 

Firstly, I channelled the Ginger cats that I got into creating a scruffy ginger man I named “Ginger Tom”. The corn emoji I decided would inspire a puffer jacket the character was wearing, as I wanted a yellow and black colour scheme to incorporate the warning sign. I also interpreted the warning sign to mean that my character was quite dangerous, and looking at the coffin I assumed that my character should be someone you would look at and wonder if he had killed anyone. As for the no smoking sign, I of course drew him smoking as by this point it should be clear that my character, Ginger Tom, is a rule breaker.

[aliceclaremay]

Weekly task 4: Facial Expressions; pick a fictional character and draw them showing two different facial expressions.

Fort his task I chose to draw a young Amy from Little Women (not based on Florence Pugh’s portrayal however it was magnificent.) I wanted to draw Amy as she was quite the hot-headed tantrum child with a passion for art, which I definitely related to when I read the book when I was younger. I drew her pouting, her faced screwed up like she was sucking on a lemon, and I drew her in the midst of an almighty tantrum. For these drawings I actually didn’t use any guides except my own face which I looked at in the mirror, imitating the expressions I wanted to capture. It was quite difficult to do I found, as conveying emotion through a one frame, 2d drawing means you have to really focus on the exact positioning and lines created in the face. Overall, I was somewhat pleased with the end result.

[aliceclaremay]

Weekly Task 3: Gestural Drawing, Blind Contour Selfies, and Continuous Line Drawing

Gestural Drawing

Gestural drawing is something I’m quite comfortable with. I was turned onto a website a few years ago called “Line of Action” to help me practice getting proportions right when drawing figures. Line of Action provides you with a time limit (anything between 30 seconds to ten minutes) and pictures of posing models of varying shapes and sizes – also varying stages of undress. (Although there is an option to have them all fully clothed if you have delicate sensibilities like my mother who said she found my art “quite shocking”). Generally, I find the best results to come from five minutes; just enough time for detail, not enough time for overthinking, or ending up with that weird in-between where part of the drawing has detail and the rest doesn’t.

Blind Contour Selfie

I found the blind portrait challenge incredibly hard; firstly, because I am a perfectionist when it comes to art so I don’t like producing work where the nose is above the eyebrow, and secondly because not looking down at my drawing whilst working turned out to be near impossible. We were instructed to draw our own faces whilst sat in front of a mirror; one positive was that looking at my hideous, ill-proportioned sketches then back at my own face actually did wonders for my self-confidence. Due to the fact that I was so bad at averting my eyes from my drawing, all of my attempts looked somewhat unfinished. In lieu of this, for the one I posted, I decided to start by drawing the features of the face first. (Usually I try to get the outline of something first before adding detail.) This resulted in something that does look more complete although I still cannot say I’m overly thrilled with the result.

Continuous Line

I learned two important things doing the continuous line task: 1. Don’t try and do it on procreate on your smart tablet, because when you hold down your pen certain features are enabled and it gets incredibly frustrating. 2. Your hand really hurts after. For the line drawing, I did a few where I did a lot of shading movements back and forth but I wanted to do one that was neat and with less back and forth detail. The one I uploaded was the result of this. Because I wanted to keep it clean looking and didn’t want to go back and forth too much, some of the proportions were not as accurate as I prefer but I surprised myself by quite liking the finished piece.

[aliceclaremay]

Weekly task 2: Create 3 collage character illustration by combining two words from the theme generator

1.       Punk/ Floral

I liked the idea of combining the two aesthetics as punk is very hard and combative whereas floral is very feminine and delicate. (also, because it made me think of that song “I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker with Flowers in My Hair” if anyone remembers that.) For punk I was inspired by the fashion trends such as tartan kilts, spiky dyed hair and piercings. I was also inspired by the Sex pistols album cover which had a very black white and red colour theme, as well as the letter cut outs from newspapers. For this reason, I used newspaper headlines to create the background for my character. To tie in the softer floral aspect, I made my character quite pretty, feminine and wistful. I cut out around the different tartan patterns I had found to create a floral border to frame her. Overall, I was pleased with the result and this was definitely my favourite.

2.       Tribal/ Disco

I was interested to combine these two together although a bit unsure as to how to represent “tribal” in a respectful way. I really enjoyed Ruth E. Carter’s work on Black Panther and how she had been able to fuse the futuristic with the traditional tribal aesthetic to create such an incredible overall look for the film so I hoped to something somewhat along those lines. To incorporate the tribal aspect, I used tribal style patterns I found online and used one for the clothing and for the background to create a pattern clash which I thought looked cool. For disco I stuck to the shapes that were popular at the time; the bell-bottom trousers and a tight wrap top like the one Cher wore. I then cut out a golden disco ball to tie it all in together and thought the outcome was rather cute and embodied the two words well.

3.       Androgynous/ Art Deco

I really love the class and refinement of the art deco aesthetic although it's always struck me as very clean and rigid. Combining it with androgyny was interesting as androgyny is more about blurring the lines. I’ve always thought there was a lot of beauty in androgyny and enjoyed creating a character to celebrate it, and then place them in a backdrop of beauty and decadence where I believe they belong. I drew a simple character sketch and then took two backgrounds - one of a wallpaper pattern and one of architecture in a city - which I fused together then turned down the opacity for a dreamy, blurry look. I then took a frame from online to finish it, keeping it simple and stylish.