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Final homework assignment: Expressive self portrait
08/06/2020
Lillian linked us a few artists to take reference from and inspiration for our own portraits. The artist that stood out to me was David Hockney who was significant in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. His portraits were extremely vibrant and had a consistency in the feature of a blue background. I resonated with the vibrancy in the creative expression of these portraits. I felt like his body of work was a perfect reference to explore colour and use my own creative licence to express my own personality. I wanted to abstract my basic outfit by enhancing my pants to become a pair of bold flare pants, thus pushing the accurate representation of what I was viewing as I drew myself in the mirror. I had fun with building up the various shades of certain colours especially in the facial features because it was something that I was unsure about at the start but turned out to be quite explorative. The lessons I was able to take on throughout this final exercise was the ability to take conventional techniques of representation and drawing and test them through the framework of your own creative licence. I learnt that while accurate representation may become the intention, it is important to note that accurate representation can still be conveyed through a depiction that may not be perfectly realistic. It is an important venture to question your complacency with drawing features in a particular way that has been taught throughout your life and instead take on the task of life drawing with a fresh set of eyes.
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Week 10: Nature Drawing
25/05/2020
Nature drawing was quite interesting because often there is quite a lot of intricacy in natural forms, such as the detail in dog fur or the texture on a leaf. I found it challenging to replicate this detail in a simplified way without literally drawing every individual line and curve that I saw. I would like to develop this skill a little bit more in the future and acquire a language of drawing that speaks to the intricacies of natural elements.
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Week 8: Still life and negative space
11/05/2020
Composition Tonal studies and negative space
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Week 7: Still life
04/05/2020
I really enjoyed the task of still life drawing this week. By starting with a foundational shading light and form exercise that Lillian showed us from Proko, we were able to understand the composition of tone and how it is built up in particular areas to give an accurate representation of light and shadow. We were asked to draw an egg, which was a simple enough object to understand, and then gained practice in mapping out the areas of light and shadow. Whilst this improved our skills in realistic tonal drawings, we also adopted the lesson of challenging our creative licence by ‘learning the rules, and then learning how to break the rules to suit you’. In my drawings of fruit and vegetables I enjoyed having the time to carefully build up the layers of tone, and I am pleased with the final result!
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Week 6: Drawing a person from direct observation
27/04/2020
This was an interesting task because I was quite unfamiliar with drawing people in motion. During our class session I was able to practice gaining a general sense of form as I drew my sister who was just sitting in her room and eating so I was not challenged by too much movement. She was quite slouched which was an interesting posture to try and depict in my drawings. As these were only very quick 5-minute drawings my drawings came out quite sketchy and messy as I was overlaying shapes as quick as I could capture the full gesture of the human form during the particular activity. I also drew my Dad as he was doing some work at his desk and in our garden. Again, the drawings turned out quite sketchy, but I felt like I could use these practices to improve my perception of movement and ability to reflect that in my drawings of people.
The homework task was to draw a particular muscle system in the human anatomy, and I chose to draw the trapezius which is located at the top of the spine and lower part of the neck. It was helpful to understand the direction of the muscle fibres and how they wrapped around the form of the muscle. I feel like this gave me a better understanding of how the curvature in certain areas of the human body work.
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Week 5: Facial features studies
eyes, nose, mouth and hair - 10 minute sketches
20/04/2020
It’s vital to study the facial features you are drawing as if you have never seen them before and not rely on the images and shapes of facial features that we are so accustomed to. This is why, after drawing my own eye and my sister’s eye, I attempted drawing my baby brother’s face while he was watching TV. I noticed babies’ faces are structured quite differently the fully formed adult face, so this taught me to treat the face as an entirely unfamiliar form. I think the experience turned out to be quite positive and I was really able to gravitate towards shadows rather than line to make up the face, leading it to become slightly more realistic than my other drawings.
The tendency to draw lines in order to represent facial features was something I tried to conquer when drawing the mouth and nose. Whilst I started with very faint outlines for the lips and sometimes the nostrils and edges of the nose, I made sure to switch to more shading around the form of the lips and nose because that’s how they look like in real life. Whilst the lack of linework deviates from a traditional shape of a nose, the end result turned out to be more realistic.
In my hair studies I found it difficult to not draw every strand and avoid it becoming ‘cartoonish’. I tried to block out some darker sections of the hair that were either out of direct light or were deeper behind the head with a bit more shading. I think this is an area I would like to work on further, and really get an understanding of how hair wraps around the head; as well as grasping a sense of depth and highlight.
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Week 4: Hands and Feet Drawing
6/04/2020
Drew my Dad’s hands and feet. Discovered the importance of grasping the perspective I was looking from and not just draw fingers at the same length as they would be in real life. This also requires utilising shadow to show the depth of perspective and that lesson reminded me of what we learnt in the first class, which was to shade the areas that are further away from you darker, and the areas that are closest to you lighter.
Using a ‘line of action’ was also an important focus of hand and foot drawings, especially as I got my Dad to pose his hands in different positions. By drawing a focal line/s and working the form of the body part around that, it enabled me to preserve the movement of the hand and avoid just drawing the fingers or toes etc as I imagined them.
I found drawing the feet in shoes a bit difficult because I had an idea of what the shoe looks like from seeing so many shoes in my life, its difficult to sense the movement and positioning of the foot and the way the shoe material wraps around the foot without retreating to my preconceived ideas about what a generic shoe looks like. In the future, it would probably be wiser to use a sandal or something where part of the foot is revealed.
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Week 3: Homework
30/03/2020
1. People drawing (45 mins each) drew my younger sister
Was challenged by the baggy clothes she was wearing, learnt to structure the body by navigating the folds in the clothes around the shape of the human form
2. Drapery study (1.5hrs) - white sheet draped over a stool
Learning to not draw physical lines where the shadows on the drapery form, rather building shading and tone to show depth, shadow and volume in the sheet.
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Class 3: 30/03/2020
Drawing People: Discovering the risk of getting too caught up in the minute details of each feature as it is likely you will lose your sense of the full size of the body and accurate proportions. In this case, as I began to draw the hands I think I spent too much time on them, then drawing them much smaller in proportion to the rest of the body.
1. First drawing of my sister
2. Drawing of the model from my computer screen
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Week 2 - Homework: Head Studies
1-2: Drawing of my little sister
3: Drawing of Steve (in class)
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Homework - Week 1: Tonal Studies
This weeks homework allowed us to gain an understanding of the pressure and density of pencil shading in order to develop tone in a drawing. We had to first do a tonal scale with two different pencil grades and then use that understanding to develop a still life image. I tried my best to replicate my tea set as it exists as a 3D form on the page, focusing on how the tone can wrap around the object and create more depth to the drawing.
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Class 2: 16/03/2020
In this class we really got to understand how to bring a sense of life into our drawings through a balanced study between ‘observable’ and ‘felt’ qualities of the human form. Lillian explained the duality of measured qualities such as the proportions and anatomy of a body, as well as the subjective expression that is evoked through volume, weight, balance, and gesture, and how these work together to create a more life like drawing.
By conducting a series of one minute sketches we were forced to quickly gain a sense of gesture, as it was often the most important indication of the form possible to jot down in a limited time frame. This lead us to learn about the importance of establishing a ‘line of action’ in the foundations to a movement pose. I noticed immediately by initiating my drawing with a line of action - the line I thought best suited the pose that was being shown - I was able to create a better sense of rhythm as I wrapped forms around the body. By departing from my old technique of just simply blocking out volumes and shapes, I was able to create more feeling to the subject in my drawings.
We also worked further on developing surface contour as a way to delineate the form on the page, rather than using fixed linework. In addition, a blind contour drawing allowed us to feel the movement of the lines in the body rather than treating them as measured anatomical volumes and shapes. Whilst my drawing turned out quite inaccurate, it was an effective way to really explore how the edges of the body work to create a sense of action and life to the body.
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Class 1: 9/03/2020
First attempt at drawing the model
Lessons I learnt this lesson:
- In my first attempts I didn't pay close attention to matching up parts of the body as they would naturally sit and discovered a natural tendency to draw from a higher ‘overlooking’ perspective rather than the accurate perspective from where I was sitting. The brain deceives us when trying to reflect true perspective in our drawings, and this is something to constantly keep in mind before starting a drawing. It helps to slightly contextualise the subject before embarking on the sketch, as it will provide a guide throughout the duration of the drawing.
- Quick 5 minute sketches taught me to round out the body parts quickly as a preliminary sketch to then develop the form from there.
- We learnt how to sense the volume of the human form through a different approach; rather than using line work we imagined the form as a vessel we were ‘filling up’ with shadow or ‘wrapping around’ with coils. I found this a really helpful exercise to gain a sense of the three-dimensional form and how to convey it as a 2D form on paper. We began to introduce denser areas in order to indicate what parts of the body were closer versus further away. I felt like in my last attempts I began to achieve a higher level of depth and volume with my focus on the density of line-work. These exercises were about 3.5-5 mins long.
- Learning how to deviate from drawing fixed outlines of the body with shadow and tone allowed us to distinguish the body on the page more realistically. Light preliminary lines should be used to guide but not define the final drawing, and ultimately they become subordinate to the tone.
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