Drawing 2 (Spring 2015)

 First Assignment

Self Portrait
9x12 or 11x14 (I don't remember and I am too lazy to get up to check right now...I'll edit it later)
Graphite

Hogle Zoo gesture drawings
24x30
Charcoal

For one of our assignments we were to draw animals from life and were given extra credit if we went to the zoo. My friend, Chelsey, and I took a trip to Salt Lake City and had a blast. I honestly loved drawing in public and seeing and hearing people compliment and discuss my drawings. (It is something that I'd love to do again for fun).

Story time. We went to the Gorilla exhibit and the silverback male gorilla was sitting against the wall with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. It was so incredibly funny and human-like. As we were drawing Tino (the gorilla) he came over to the glass and was right in our faces. He looked at me and I showed him my drawing. He glanced at the paper, then back to me, then back to the paper. Can I just say that he was ridiculously huge. His head was the size of a tire and I felt so tiny. He eventually walked around in front of the glass, got angry and pounded on the glass and scared the crap out of all the visitors (there were a bunch). A few months later I saw in the paper that Tino had cancer and had died, so this quick gesture drawing is now a tribute to him.

Theme: Charity and Compassion

9x24 (2 pieces)

Charcoal pencil

I wanted to do something a little bit different than the theme, but still portray charity and compassion. I have many sketches of different idea that I thought could work, but the idea of loving, manipulation, and vulnerability kept coming back to me. When we love someone, we would do anything for that person, and sometimes that includes things that we normally would not do. We can be manipulated by love and we can manipulate for love. When we see someone who is less privileged than us, it pulls at our heart strings, we want to help them. When we give our heart to someone, we are giving them the ability to hurt us, to control us in a sense. All of these ideas were thoughts that pushed this piece. I leaned towards two separate planes because we are in fact separate individuals connected and tied together through experiences; through our compassion, and our love for one another.

Axial Modeling

This is something that I struggled with and spend two or three days trying to master because it difficult for me to comprehend. It is a technique that only uses lines to create shape and value. I had to think about every line, whether it could bulge, dive, curve, or define. One wrong angle or direction and it would change the shape of the figure. It was fun to really look and problem-solve between what my brain was seeing and what my hand was drawing.

In class model drawings

24x30

Graphite

*Due to the fact that many times our models were nude, I will not posting very many of my in class drawings. I want to keep this blog post 'G'-rated. I will have a post dedicated to figure drawing later, to spare those of you who are sensitive to nudity in art.

  

Master study

15x24

Mixed media: chalk pastel, colored pencil, acrylic paint, pen

Original: The Great Wave off Kangawa

Katsushika Hokusai

Woodblock print

My drawing is on the left while the original is on the right

Final Project

24x30

Charcoal

I had seen some of the inverted drawings online and thought I'd give it a try for part of my final project. I wanted to create a dichotomy of childhood/adulthood, purity/impure, dark/light. I had a very difficult time with this project and I am still not quite pleased with it. Proportions are off and it just doesn't quite hit the threshold of awesomeness that the original idea deserves. I spent hours upon hours drawing, erasing, and redrawing, then shading and more erasing, and I am sure there was blood, sweat, and tears in there as well. I don't think I pulled it off as well as I wanted to, but the inverting was fun to manipulate and play with. There were a few things that I was proud of when I drew it, but they are small details that very few people would catch onto (like how when the image is inverted, I created a light source on the left that lights up the adult on the right), but those small details don't add up to pull off the effect that I wanted the whole piece to have.

Overall, I learned a lot in this drawing class. I learned how to not become attached to work and how to let go and be free in my drawing instead of just strict and detailed like I used to be. It was very freeing and exciting!