Bones

After a week in California without internet I am anxious to finish posting all the pieces from my figure drawing class. This was done on the first and second class periods and took somewhere around 4 or 5 hours. The background was shaded at a later date and probably added another hour or two, I have been liking the use of small straight lines going in different directions to create not only the tone, but also some texture. I think it turned out well, and gave me confidence in my drawing ability, of which I was worried about not being able to compete with the rest of the intermediate drawing students. I think I held my own.

19x24 graphite on bristol

Two more paintings

Today was my last finale, and I picked up all my portfolios. Yay for spring break!

Here are my two finale paintings.

The first painting was a study for the finale project and was finished in two hours. I learned a lot by doing this project. I am usually a pretty slow painter, mostly because I don't feel entirely confident in my abilities. This helped me to make decisions quickly and mix colors quickly.

16x20 oil
  

And here is the finale 18x24

Attrocities of Art

I don't post everything I do. Some things are just too boring or horrid to put up on the internet for anyone to see. So I have some restraint... (but not much)

There are three pieces in particular that I did this term that are not very good, and I cringe when I look at them. I had no intention of publishing them, until I realized that all of these failures had actually taught me a lot, and in each case it improved my drawing ability, or my understanding about different media.

Against my better judgment here they are.


This term I found using pencils to be too time consuming to get everything down, so I mostly used charcoal for in class models. This allowed me to quickly lay down a mid town, put in some darks and erase to pull out some highlights.

I was really liking charcoal and I felt I should experiment more with different types to see what I liked or disliked. On this particular day I pulled out a white piece of charcoal and went to town. What resulted was a muddy gray mess of confusion. I learned that just because you have all these different kinds and colors of charcoal doesn't mean you have to jam them all into one piece.

In this second piece came from the same day as the one above. It was a very off day, but informative! In this piece I am using that horrible white charcoal, and toned paper. Which this was my first time using toned paper. The papers tone is suppose to be your mid tone. This time I didn't blend the white and black together, but left them seperate. The only problem is that the white is just out of control, and the black is like midnight. I lost all control of gradation and tone... and once again it just becomes a mess...

 

On this day I left the white charcoal and toned paper behind, and just opted for the standard old charcoal. It was during this drawing session that I realized my use of charcoal was just too elementary. From this piece I learned that I need to try to figure out how to have better gradations of tone. This drawing I think has actually made me better. After this I really tried to figure out how to get more out of my charcoal drawings.

Gestures

I had posted a while back some of my gesture drawings. I am not usually into posting my gestures because I think for the most part I seem to fail at capturing anything that resembles human in the short 1-5 minute sketches.

But since my last set of gestures I seem to have latched onto something and my gestures are looking more like they should. Unfortunately just when I was starting to get comfortable with my sketches we stopped doing them, and I don't think I will be taking another drawing class till next fall. I was going to take a drawing class in Spring, but I have been convinced to take two art history courses instead. Otherwise my fall term could kill me... but really we dont need to go into any of it.

 

 

White Objects

Ever tried to paint a still life filled with nothing but white objects, and a white sheet as a background?

It is... to say the least, a challenge. Especially for someone who has little to no experience painting. I must say that doing this exercise taught me a ton about value and color mixing. The subtle shades of white eggs, sea shells, animal skulls, and cups are hard to capture.

I think I was successful in my rendering of the scene.

The Dark Tower Theme Park (Revisited)

By far the most popular pages on this blog are the Blaine the Mono drawing, and the Dark Tower Theme park. I get 5 - 10 hits a day just for those drawings. Not that people are searching out these drawings in particular but rather they are searching certain key phrases for the dark tower and they eventually stumble onto these in google image search. I am not complaining Ill take traffic however I can get it.

So I did a Google search of the key phrases used to find my drawings to see how far back people had to dig, and I was pleasantly surprised.

When searching:
 - "Blaine the Mono" - The first two pages have my drawings on them
 - "Dark Tower Theme Park" - The first thing that comes up is my drawings (yay!)
 - "Stephen King Blaine the Mono" - Images in the first row
 - " Dark Tower Park" - First row or two
 - "The Dark Tower" - I have yet to find my drawings, I think I got bored after page sixteen thousand. How anyone finds my stuff from this search is beyond me... I mean they must have a ton of time to blow.

So, since I do get so many wandering dark tower fans, and since I changed the drawing to be closer to what I had originally envisioned. I feel an overwhelming urge to make sure people are seeing the better more complete version. There are a few things that still bug me, but I am never going to change them, so I am putting it behind glass and I am calling it done. Perhaps sometime in the future I'll revisit this idea, but it will have to be a completely new drawing. This version is done.

Finished Dark Tower Theme Park Drawing:

 

Old Version:

The Calla was finally added with the rivers off to the left

and the front gate was spiffed up a little bit