HAND-IN PAGE: LIFE DRAWING
Year Collection
Throught the year I have developed many skills during Life Drawing sessions. We started drawing one, two and three point perspective environments and went to body and human form. I think the thing that impressed me the most was how quickly I can actually draw. The 30 second, 1 minute and 5 minutes drawings were so helpful for me to realize how far I can go in a short spawn of time. Other than that, I have never had life drawing sessions with real models and that was spectacular. I wish we had different types of bodies to draw and different models with different poses, but Zilla was an amazing model and I have learned so much with her! Of course I still have a hell lot to learn. Life drawing was the subject of which I could have put more effort on. I admit it; I didn't practice as much as I could or should, and I have my particular reasons for that, but I really want to change this and start doing my own studies daily and start carrying my sketchbook around to draw things from my daily basis.
Unfortunately these are not all the drawings I have from this year. Most of the drawings from the first months of lectures couldn't be scanned because I made them with a way too light pencil and I couldn't make them pop up for nothing in this world, not even photoshop saved me. Other than that, some charcoal studies were lost because they got too messed up when I was carrying them around or even in the scanner. I was very frustrated.
Leicester Guildhall
Life Drawing lectures were the fondation for my second big project at University. The Village Building Project could only be fully conceived because we had a previous knowledge of medieval buildings and architecture: we were taken to the Leicester Guildhall, one one the most preserved timber framed halls in the country, dating back 600 years, to study the construction and sketch a little. I also took some photos because I didn't know if I would have the time to come back there on another day, and It was very, very interesting to enter in a building like that. We were asked to make four sketches and one final piece with value range. I had many sketches but unfortunately I couldn't scan them properly, my lines were too light and not even color correction in photoshop would show them properly, thus I chose not to put the others here.
The biggest room is also one of my favorites, and I had two sketches focused on its interior. The bent timbers all over the roof and the walls were just fascinating! What I loved the most was the fact that the whole structure is slowly bending, nothing is straight anymore (if It once was). Chris told us they used to grow trees specially to make the curved timbers, and that was brillant.
Going up the stais in the big room, there was a little bedroom with a bed, chair and some wardrobes, I took a picture of it because I couldn't stand there for long without getting in the way of people, and It was so tiny, but looked so cozy.
In the outside, there was this particualr building that caught my attention: it was so curved. Everything was so tight together, looked so, so medieval, these things allure me so much because It is an architecture style I have never seen before, and It doesn't exist where I come from. Everything is new to me, even tough the
the people who live here are completely used to medieval buildings around corners. The city I live in Brazil has 150 years. Leicester is more than 2 thousand years old. This is absolutely mental to think about.
I also had a very quick sketch of the clock on the outside hall. It was beautiful! I didn't add any details and just had the primary shapes drawn, but I just wanted to remember the shapes themselves for future reference.
My final piece was actually the first sketch I made from the Guildhall. I stood on the top of the stairs and took a picture (again, too many students walking around). I am aware It's not the most accurate drawing of the room, I didn't draw all the stair's details and I pretty much messed up all the left side of the drawing, but at the end I was pretty happy with the result, mainly because I am not an envinronment artist at all. Drawing scenes in perspective completely terrifies me, and I never know where to start or what directions should I go for next. It took me hours to finally get all the primary lines done so I could start the value range, and the value range? several hours too. I'm aware that I am a very slow artist. Life Drawing has helped me to improve that with all the 30 seconds and 1 minute drawings, and I was happily surprised with what I could do with those short drawing spawns, but still, to get a final piece It takes ages. I honestly think that's because I wonder too much and I am really afraid of messing everything up and not being able to go further with the drawing I am making. Again, I not only lack confidence with speaking in another language, I also lack confidence in myself when I am trying to make something I have been doing my whole life.
I think some of the black timbers could have been more detailed as well, and the fact I made them so dark was first because I wanted this dramatic feel to the final piece, but while I was going further with the drawing, making the timbers pitch black became just a way of getting everything done as soon as I could, because I couldn't stand looking at it anymore (to be honest, I hated how everything was turning out until the very last moment, and I just started to find it acceptable when Iwas about to finish; that made the process of painting everything even worse, because painting something you think is not good is the worst feeling for me). But hey! It's not bad at all. Lots of things could be improved, but again I'm surprised by how it ended up.
Value range perspective studies
Although staying inside of a classroom drawing small cubes placed on top of a table was not my first idea of Life Drawing, I must confess those stupid primitives actually taught me a lot. I think more than teaching me about drawing, It taught me how I know absolutely nothing about technical drawing itself. I have had several lectures on observation drawing and technical tools, but all of them were just not as effective; you see, I had one year of observation drawing but not even once we left the class to actually draw what we were seeing outside, all of my projects could be sumed up by taking a picture from the internet and reproducing it using a painting technique like charcoal, gouache or aquarela pencils. I did learn those painting techniques, but I didn't quite learn how to draw properly. On my technical drawing lectures, I have learned how to slice segments in x, w, z equal parts and build perfect shapes, but we never actually applied what we learned outside of the paper or AutoCAD. This is the first time ever that I'm actually looking at the world around me and drawing what I see, even if what I see is a bunch of white cubes on top of each other.
Now, I'm actually lying; there were not only cubes, but also prisms, cones and some bridge-shaped forms, and they were all connected some way creating a composition, and we had to draw it giving the final piece a value range from 0 to 10. My first attempt, which I also showed my tutors at a feedback session, was really fine to my eyes, but when they told me It looked a little isometric, I realised that I actually drew it like that, with isometric lines, instead of using two vanishing points to create a perspective. I didn't think It would look bad, and in fact It didn't, but what's the point of studying 2-point perspective if you're just going to be lazy and make everything isometric? Although I did so because when looking at the scene, the table below all the objects was really giving me the idea of isometrical perspective, and the whole scene was very small and I thought that if I made it two point, It would look distorted somehow. They also told me to go further with the value range, because everything was in the middle of the value range we were trying to achieve.
On the left you can see my first drawing, and notice how I also drew the lines for the table, with made everything even easier to confuse with an isometric view.
By this drawing I could say how hard It is for someone that doesn't master perspective - like me - to draw shapes that are rotated, facing other sides. I must even confess I wasn't in total control of what was going on while I was drawing, sometimes I would get quite lost trying to figure it out how to rotate the shapes, even though we had learned at Visual Studies how to do so in Photoshop, using a pencil on paper is a lot more difficult to me.
Another thing I noticed was how I get lost while trying to fit each element in the scene. I frequenty draw them a lot more separated or a
lot closer to each other than It should actually be, even thought I tend to draw the big shapes before I start to detail anything, sometimes I just don't know where to place the base of a cube for It to look lke It's in a specific range of distance.
They told me to give it another shot and try drawing the shapes again, so I went to the studio and spent some time there, and I even sat exactly at the same place as before so I could compare both drawings later, although the prism behind the cylinder had been slightly moved. I started with the horizon line and the two vanishing points, and made sure they were very distant from each other to avoid any distortion, and started drawing the shapes again. I faced the same problem with placing the elements in space, mostly those not in perfect alignment with the perspective lines, but at the end I was far happier with the second attempt. I tried to contrast everything as much as possible, but truth is, I'm not confident enough with my touch to use the 6B pencil like crazy and just go darkening everything - as I should probably have done - so, despite the fact that It looks much better than the previous drawing, there is still a lot I could improve. Maybe if I had a set of five or six drawings I could experiment more, but It was already so difficult to rotate all those elements that I couldn't stand making another drawing of these stupid objects.
You can notice both my drawings are not quite polished AT ALL. I try to make them as quick as I can, so I don't really try to refine the faces, also because they're studies, too, but I really want to spend more time on the following projects, even if I have to do it after the classes or something, to make they look more presentable.
But you see, not everything are primitive shapes in Games Art Design. No no no, in the following week, things started to get a little hairy. We were still inside drawing things on a table, but this time there were some really complicated shapes to draw. In fact, that day started all wrong already. We have a chat group with all first years, and at 10 a.m. someone said we would have a test in Life Drawing, and everyone just started freaking out because no one knew anything about a test. At the end of the morning lecture It was just me and other two people and Chris came in to talk to Mike K. and he was just laughing saying students were desperate about a test but It was just a drawing like all the others, but this one would be marked. But because only a few people were there to listen, everyone was tense and shaking when I entered the studio for the afternoon classes.
We had a female bust, a male fale, a hand, a tea-cup and a jar to draw in 1h30 hours, and we were not allowed to work on the piecelater, we had to post it on our blogs in exactly the same way that It left the lecture on that day. For me, everything was going just fine and I thought I would have plenty of time to work with the values, when I looked at my drawing and saw that all the elements were TOO FAR FROM EACH OTHER. Then I stopped for a moment and I had to decide between leaving it all the way It was, mainly because everything was already drawn and I didin't know If I would have time to draw everything from scratch again, or erasing everything and hope for the best.
I obviously went for risking everything and start it all over again. Not to say I erased EVERYTHING, I did leave the jar to have a reference to position every other element. After I had everything in place, I was still not happy with the way It turned out, but I couldn't go back anymore, and at least It looked a lot better than before.
It doesn't need to be said that my choice ended up consuming a time I didn't have, and at the last ten minutes I saw myself rushing to try to increase the value ranges because I had everything scribbled and nothing solid yet.
I managed to have the jar in a way I liked, but all the other elements were lacking contrast because time was up when I was moving from the jar to the male head. At the end I had a much smaller composition with an arrangement I didn't like and lacking value, so you might say I was not happy with it at all. But I think what makes me more angry is the female face. It looks terrible and nothing like the original model, I just made it so quick that It turned out like this. The male head at least look like the original. I am not going to mention that hideous hand laying dead on the table.
Because I had this counterpoint during the one and
a half hour drawing, I'm not sure if I can evaluate myself on the final drawing - or actually I can, and I'm pretty disappointed that I didn't measure things in my head before putting them down on paper and my miscarriage and lazyness resulted at me having to start it all over again and this is not an excuse. Altough most of the scales are right, the bust is a little smaller than It should be, and I always have problems drawing the plate under the tea-cup.
At the end It was a fun task even though I messed up completely. It's really overwhealming to have someone timing your work but that was SO GOOD to my development, because I'm usually really, really slow and never could imagine I could draw something in less than five minutes, like we have been doing for the last weeks. Life Drawing is being really, really positive to me, even though I still can't measure my time properly to give it the attention It needs. I need to sort out my week better to fit everything I have to do (because I really try to rest my mind on weekends).