This week was another still life and took all evening (so three hours) to complete. I’m pleased with how it turned out.
I did notice how everything is stretched out (even though we did an underdrawing); I think this has to do with the fact that I had arranged the pastel paper on the donkey such that I foreshortened the image as I did the underdrawing; when the paper was held up, the foreshortened image suddenly “grew.”
This week was time to do some more life-drawing. A new model and new way of drawing: out is the gesture approach and in is creating depth and form through shading. This meant that we were drawing with the side of the conte, which was a challenge and meant that I wasn’t as precise with the media as I would have liked.
You’re looking at the last pose of the night, where were supposed to pay special attention to proportion and scale so that our work ends up being steeped in realism.
So much for realism: I chopped off the model’s head and a hand. :)
This was my personal favourite of the night; I like the stylized and graphical elements of it.
Today, at approximately 12:00 pm EST I successfully defended my last comprehensive (which is titled Confluences in the streams of birding, technology and animal studies and which I’ll need to upload & add to my academic writings). This is BIG news for a couple of reasons. The first is that I’ve struggled through the whole comprehensive stage. I understand their importance and without doubt my thinking has changed thanks to this stage in my PhD work BUT they act like such a psychological barrier between the beginning and ending portion of your PhD. Second, because I’ve forded this barrier (hmm…mixed metaphor there), I get to focus exclusively on my own work. From this point out, all the work that I undertake moves me closer to a dissertation and graduation.
It’s like I’ve crested a hill and can finally see my goal (waaay down there) at the bottom. And there’s no mixed metaphor there.
Flickr has just launched its Places feature (which is very cool), and so I decided to have a poke around. Looking up the Yukon Territory, much to my surprise, up pops me as one of the “Featured Photographers.” Too Cool.
If you haven’t seen my Yukon & Alaska photos yet, they’re worth a stop. I’m pretty pleased with all of ‘em.
And I would be remiss to fail to take the opportunity to plug the Quest Tours trip that I lead where all the photos were taken!
An unfortunate typo has us making beer to the letter of the recipe.
I just installed a plugin1 that allows me to create footnotes in posts. Just testing the thing out here.
OK, so I’ve got a number of pieces from this week. Let me just start by saying that I loved this week’s work. Loved it. As you can tell, we had a model and we were doing life drawing.
It was a real additive class. Starting with the gesture pieces (the triptych you can see later) we slowly added contours (see the other single charcoal piece for an example of that) and finally, we added scale, measurement and shadow.
Interestingly, the last two pieces, which were supposed to be better proportioned seemed a bit more askew then some of my earlier work. Always something to work on!
A progression from my first gesture work to one of the last. These poses were about 3 min in length. I just love the freedom of gesture drawing!
This week was all about texture.
The bottom piece of work was closest to what we were supposed to be doing, but its the one that I like the least.
The top piece is actually where I was drying my brush before working, with an india ink gesture still life drawing on top of it. I like it the most.
The middle is a happy medium between what we were supposed to be doing (creating texture with colour and technique) and what I liked, which was, in this case, contour drawing with the india ink.
