FINAL (LY)

So we are finally done with this semester and I am glad to say it was a good one…  I learned a lot about how to make my drawings look (at least a little more) professional, and accurate. The main thing to do is to start drawing as light as possible in order to get the proportions correct. Drawing light was hard to do at the start but now I have noticed that I draw much lighter overall. This made taking pictures of my gestural drawings quite a bit harder. I needed to take them into Photoshop and mess with them a bunch, and still you can’t see very much. Drawing light is easy to do when you stand far away from your page and extend your utensil.

                I really, really enjoyed our trip to the natural history museum in St. Paul (I think, I’m from Wisconsin so I can’t really tell the difference between Minneapolis and St. Paul). I wish we would have went there every day of class, that would have been a lot of fun… BUT SCHOOL ISNT SUPPOSED TO BE FUN so… but really I cant wait for Life Drawing 2. At the senior show type thing that happened this past Friday there was a show of all of their giant skeleton drawings, and I really want to do one of those.

                Apparently I kind of messed up my mannequin, but I think I fixed it. My second to last shell drawing was the biggest piece of crap that I have ever seen (I think it was probably the worst one in the class), I am the most disappointed in (myself) that shell drawing than I have ever been in any of my drawings ever. But I think that drawing was kind of practice for our final shell which in my opinion is way way better… I had the exact right amount of charcoal pencil to finish which helped my luck I think…

Well thanks a lot and get the hell off of my blog…

The following is my final portfolio

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudolphalec/

This is probably my favorite drawing from this class. The imaje doesn’t do it much justice, there are a lot of details that aren’t visible in the picture. i wish we would spend another day on the skull just because it is fun to draw. Sorry about the crappy picture... i usually take the pictures for the blog at the art building on some machine that helps you line up the picture and takes it from the direct center. As a result of not using this machine the left hand side of the image is all dark 

I think it is interesting how the skull is so static. The only part of the skull that moves is the jaw. I don’t know it’s just cool to me. It is also interesting how the front portion of the skull is so thin, it is about as wide as your two front teeth. The lecture we had that day helped me draw this picture a lot. Again I wish I had my newsprint here but im snowed in and it really sucks how you cant get into the art building at all times anymore.   But in my pad I have a few drawings of the skull (from the lecture) that turned out kind of cool.

In the above drawing I had to do a lot of measuring because the skull is so big. It is hard to find how the cranium actually sits in space again due to how big and smooth it is. But, in the end I think I grasped it as good as I did (that probably only makes sense to me). I also think I learned a lot about line weight in drawing the teeth. I really like the way that the teeth turned out…

the hand...

This week we had a lecture about the hand. I wish that I had my drawing pad here but my front door is nearly snowed shut… but in my newsprint pad I have some drawings of the finger bones that I really like. But oh well… in this drawing I used a brown pencil at first to draw the bones (you can barely see the pencil marks) after I had the hand drawn I used some of my markers to add value… because I have kind of been getting sick of the whole cross contour thing. I drew my own hand, but we were supposed to draw somebody else hand. I think the hand drawing is ok, but id rather talk about the bone… I was going to draw my hand holding the bone but I just finished the bone by itself… I really like the way that this drawing looks (or at least this part of the drawing). I tried to think about the cross contour process. It is really weird to me how some days you can really see how the planes shift and it is easy to draw something in cross contour. And a lot of other days it seems impossible until you really get into it. I like how the lines on the bone only cross each other a few times… I think im going to do my final drawing like this…

bla bla bla

This week I actually remember what we did… first we went up to room 319 to talk about how to do the ink wash. We definitely talked for way way (way way way) too long about it…  I think everyone already knew what to do but oh well. I always get super restless when we talk (without having to draw anything) for too long. Finally we went back to the room and we drew our shells and practiced the ink wash mine didn’t turn out good at all… I just wasn’t feeling it so I went fishing…

uh oh spaghettios

I haven’t been doing these posts for about a month now so I’m kind of behind here. Due to this I’m probably going to forget a few things that happened this week (and the next week). But anyways…

I don’t remember what we talked about this day but I do remember that I drew this picture… I found that in these long drawings I take a long time to get started drawing the actual figure. I try to figure out where the still life stuff intersects with the model so I can make measurements form there. As you may see in the drawing I figured out the perspective of the box and chairs. Next time I make a long drawing I’m just going to jump into it right away.  I feel that it could make a more interesting drawing… I am getting kind of tired of my drawings and I think I need to start thinking differently to achieve the look that I want.  The models right shoulder looks a little off, but that’s all I can see that doesn’t look right (to me atleast). I had a really hard time with the face and head (now that I look at it more her chin is kind of messed up also) .  I like the background (the pipes and wall) I feel it helps the perspective and shows the space.

Field Trip...

On Tuesday, November 23^rd I did a whole bunch of drawing, despite the fact that the bus for the field trip was really, really late. On the way to the Walker Art Museum I figured that I would practice my cross contour skills by making up (and drawing) some kind of buttress root system (pictured below, Figure 1). There are places in the drawing that represent what I was going for relatively well, and there are places that it doesn’t work so well. A few of the lines “cross” their “contours”, but only a few. 

 Figure 1

Once we arrived at the Walker I drew sketches of two works that I enjoyed, or that caught my eye. The first (pictured below, Figure 2) is a sketch of Alec Soth’s Cadillac Motel. I should mention that I changed the colors. Originally the piece is a photograph, consisting of variations of white, red, grey, and yellow (but I didn’t have any of those markers on me so…). I like the way Alec Soth saw the “beauty” in the rectilinear forms that made up the hotel front. That and the (original) colors are very cool due to the snow on the ground.

 Figure 2

The second sketch (pictured below, Figure 3) was of Nelson Leirner’s Homenagem A Fontana II. This piece is made of cloth, and instead of seams there are zippers holding the different colored cloths together. I just liked the colors and the zippers. 

 Figure 3

Finally we went to the Natural Science Museum and drew from the stuffed animals there. There were so many interesting animals that I wish we would have spent the whole day there. I tried drawing an owl which didn’t work out so well, so I drew a duck in the water, which in my opinion turned out better. Looking back at the duck drawing (pictured below, Figure 4) I could have drawn his “cheek” a convex instead of concave, but I think most of the other choices that I made worked in the end.

 Figure 4

I also drew a Morel mushroom (pictured below, Figure 5).

Figure 5

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So… this is my “reflection” on this, the first half, of the first semester, of the 2010, 2011 school year. I have been enjoying this life drawing class, and I have certainly learned a lot. Both, drawing techniques, and anatomical lectures, have helped me render the human form much more accurately than before this semester. A definitely appreciated the technique tips like “try to draw as light as possible”, and “stand farther away from your paper”. Drawing lightly allows you to rework lines over and over again without leaving deep, dark lines on the paper.  The result is usually a cleaner line and, in the end a more craftsman like piece.  Standing far away from the paper, drawing with an outstretched arm, allows you to see the whole piece of paper, and move with the lines you lay. In class we were instructed to tape our charcoal to some sort of a stick in order to move our stance even further from the paper. I feel that this “extended instrument” thing will stick with me for a long time. The anatomical aspect of the class also helps. Now when my back or arm or whatever hurts, I will understand where to tell my girlfriend to rub… the shapes of bones have always been interesting to me, but knowing how and where the muscles are attached to them takes that interest and informs it to help my “drawing skills”. Something I would like to work on is making more accurate directional marks that (attempt to) show forms. I feel like I don’t know many, or any rules for how to show how an organic form relates to the space it occupies. I just wish that more than one single person would be willing to model for our class. We have been drawing the same naked person for eight or nine weeks…