Open drawing

I went to an open drawing session tonight and as I need as much scheduled drawing time as I can get.

 

Angles

Our focus on Wednesday was to be able to draw the skull from any angle.  The idea was that if you start with the skull as a basic form of a box and build off of this box in the required perspective, it is a lot easier to draw at any angle, below you see an attempt of mine at this.  The last drawing in the series I did turned out really well and surprised myself with how I was able to describe the randomly placed skulls.  Sometimes after a three hour drawing session my drawings regress but this was clearly not the case.  

Memory

This week we drew the skull from memory to practice drawing without a physical object in front of us but rather having to draw on memory of the last weeks of drawing the skull.  I couldn't believe how much I did not remember from all the time I spent observing the skull.  We around at other peoples drawings and  could see a huge difference around the room.  Aimee mentioned that this really was a function of where your mind was when you where drawing.  I suppose that I was in the room observing and drawing physically but mentally thinking about anything but drawing.  So perhaps for me the most important aspect of drawing right now will be to work on my mental discipline to focus my mental energy on the drawing process instead of what I have to do later.

  

 

Well worn path

We finished our detailed cranium drawings on Wednesday.  I was inspired by what everyone else was able to pull out of the limited structure in the cranium and realistically depict it in their drawings.  Improvement was minimal in this assignment, if anything I digressed because I thought it was going to be easy and obviously didn't put in the time I needed too, my drawings explain this.  To me after seeing how everyone else described the cranium the key was really minimalism of line.  One student in particular demonstrated how well she knew the cranium with really beautiful line variations and was able to describe the cranium very efficiently.

Keepin on

We have a new assignment this week to focus on the cranium, leaving out the details of the main face (eyes, nose, mouth, etc.)  I am excited to push my understanding of contour line drawings with this and will try my best to not rely on shading for two of these studies.  The first class of this week I was out at a speaking session for artists of various disciplines who showed there work and spoke within their area of expertise.  The change in mindset from discipline to discipline was interesting to see, along with its inherent required skill set.  Industrial design gave instruction on putting enough time into the final product of your work in order to make it really shine and stand out, along with keeping in mind when you don't need things top notch in order to save time and invest it in the places where it needs to be, and playing with illusions to your advantage.  During the graphic design part of the program we where assaulted with image after image of design examples that this company did.  It was inspiring, humbling, maddening, and in the end a visual overload of impressive concepts and design.  For Thursday everyone buckled down and cranked out some drawings for the assignment or messaged areas that needed improvement.  I received a critique of my previous drawings from Amy which helped me see the direction I need to take my drawings.