So. It's August 20th, and summer is almost at an end. It's amazing how fast it goes, and how things pop up to get in the way of plans. For me, it was summer semester classes with AAU - taking both Perspective and Clothed Figure Drawing online.
One of the big things about taking classes online is scheduling. Because you're not actually *going* to class and sitting there for an hour or two doing work, you have to schedule that time in yourself. The online classes make it somewhat easy by giving a nice 15-week outline, with a module full of content and assignments for each week. In a normal semester, it's not difficult to schedule in what day to read the material, what day to do the exercises, what day to watch the videos, what day(s) to work on assignments, etc. There are 7 days in a week, after all. In the summer semester though, each module only spans 3.5 days. With two classes, one of them involving projects that take a minimum of 10-20 hours, this becomes a little more stressful.
Okay, it was very stressful. It took up all my time. Pretty much every day between June 21st and August 11th, I was working on schoolwork. I did take a day off for my birthday. And the classes were extremely worthwhile and really overall wonderful. But wow, was it intense and stressful.
The drawing at the top is from my clothed figure drawing class, and I'll get to that in a moment. I want to talk about Perspective first. I've taken perspective classes before and had it covered in other classes, so I knew the gist of it, of one-point, two-point, three-point, atmospheric, etc. I could draw cubes in space. The beauty of this class was the depth and application of those familiar theories. For one thing, on almost every project, we applied light and shadow in perspective. For another, we were able to choose our own subject matter. This made me challenge myself much more than any "draw seven boxes" assignment ever could.
I wanted to draw my WoW characters and stories, mostly. It was great to be able to use them and get some fan art out of it. The first big assignment using isometric perspective (which I'd never used before!) I got to recreate the residence of my blood elf. We've been dreaming up this living space in game for three years now. Finally, we could *see* it.
Most of the work in this class was drawn in pencil, then inked with Micron pens and shaded with Prismacolor markers in a range of cool gray. I quickly wore out my markers, mostly because I was terrible with them. I fell in love with the Micron pens though, which brought out some lovely linework I had never known I could do. I've always been one to fully render, but using the pens finally allowed me to just work in line, and be more expressive in line, and free myself from shading for a while.
I also found myself able to fully realize a space, which for someone who has always been a "I'll draw the subject and forget about the background" person, was really amazing. Even in atmospheric perspective, not having to worry about vanishing points and such, I found myself pushing to go back farther and farther, and nearer and nearer. The drawing isn't anything to write home about, but the creation of space was liberating to me.
And to be able to show characters interacting within an environment was even better. To create a *scene*. Yes, it took a lot of work. The image below was built up over the course of four drawings, done on top of each other on tracing paper, slowly refining everything while being sure the perspective was correct. Then of course there were the 6-8 lighting thumbnails. Well worth it in the end.
I got to have some fun with things, too. It had been suggested that I draw Tinkertown, the gnome refuge in Ironforge, and some other WoW players had thrown out some ideas. So for the two-point vertical project I drew up some of their crazy, crowded tenements. Again, it took a lot of time. I think overall just the inking on this one took 6 hours. But I'd never drawn anything like it before. I never imagined I could.
Last but not least, our final big project was to create a storyboard or comic. I'm not a big fan of comics. I appreciate the artwork, but I have trouble reading them - there's some disconnect in my brain between looking at pictures and reading words: I want to do one or the other, not both at the same time. But I found more value in it while creating my own comic, and found it really terribly thrilling to create all these images that sequentially told a story. I worked like crazy on this, drawing as fast as I possibly could to get it all down, and I can't imagine now the kind of mad skills some comic artists have to spew out this stuff with deadlines. It really does almost demand that you have a kind of template for bodies and faces and such. Me, I'd rather spend the 30 hours on one well-rendered scene. These two pages were utterly exhausting!
That last project though, drawing all those people as quickly as I could with no time for references, really benefited from my clothed figure drawing class. I want to, from here on out, try to take a figure drawing class each semester, just to keep developing that kind of instinctive feel for the human figure, so I can draw it quickly and easily when I need to.
The clothed figure drawing class was a bit revolutionary for me, because it focused on direct drawing. I have always leaned on sketching basic structure first - the little stick man, or mannequin figure, to make sure my proportions and gesture is correct before I begin detailing the figure I'm drawing. This class threw that out the window and just said, "DRAW THAT PERSON." Start at the head and work down - or at the feet and work up if it suits you. Just draw. Just draw that person immediately and as quickly as you can.
For several weeks I boggled at this and struggled, especially with the timer ticking away beside me. Then it began to click, and I began to apply all the relationship lines and plumb lines and gestures and proportions in my head as I drew. And I found out I could JUST DRAW, which was an amazing boost to my confidence.
Most of the work in the class was done with charcoal on newsprint, so I really have very little to show. Most of the drawings were, in essence, just large, quick sketches. After Spring semester and the long, tedious figure drawing I'd done, of beautiful, fully-rendered bodies, I was a little disappointed not to have anything solid and developed to show. Near the end of the class I started drawing on layout bond again, just to have a few "finished" pieces to show from the class.
Composition still gets me, as in the above work. The drawing is pretty good and pretty finished, but the composition is kind of sucky and it was done for the module on composition. I'm hoping that the "design" part of Color & Design that I'm taking in the fall will help with that.
On the other hand, I'm very happy with where my figure drawing is now. For the most part we drew from photos, with some drawing-from-life thrown in, but I still tried to challenge myself when working from photos. The above drawing was done from two separate photos that I wanted to bring together into a believable scene. The girl with the sword was drawn from her head to her feet, then to get the proportions and relationships correct, I drew the girl with the staff from the feet up. I honestly didn't know I could do such a thing and get a decent drawing from it!
Last but not least is my final from clothed figure drawing, using myself and my mom as models. She posed a lot for me during the class, so I thought I owed her some payback, in the form of a nice Rockwellian image of me presenting that long-awaited diploma. OH is she surprised! Well, we tried. It's actually very difficult to pose just right, and a lot of time in this class involved taking reference pics.
So, two months of intensive work for a new understanding of space, a huge amount of fresh confidence in drawing, and a whole new bucket of tools. It almost drove me crazy, but was well worthwhile!In the fall, I have intermediate figure drawing and Color & Design to look forward to. I'm really hoping that those two classes help me polish up a lot of my weaker points, like composition, natural, interactive and intuitive poses for figures, and of course ADDING COLOR. By spring of next year I'll officially be a Junior, so things should really start hopping.
In the meantime, I still want to do all the things I mentioned in my last post. I still want to do some oil paintings, some cat faces, and yes, Yelena jumping to hang over my couch. I have a baby portrait oil painting that is first on the list, however, but I'm going to try to keep drawing and sketching, especially using the Micron pens with linework. I'd very much like to get a nice, quick, "easy" way to sketch characters together in order to offer some low-cost commissions. It's taken a while, but I'm finally beginning to be able to pare down my tedious, time-consuming over-rendering habits.
Might just make an artist out of me yet. =P
