Then Summer Did Me In

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

Best Intentions

It tends to be a lot more likely I get things done when I commit them to writing, so here I am to describe what I hope to be producing in the next month or two. I've sort of been letting these ideas evolve in the past week while I did a lot of cleaning/organizing (which I'm still not done with) but I'm getting to have time to start working on them seriously. In the meantime I've been doing a lot of experimental practice sketching, mostly just seeing what I've learned that has stuck and what I need to work on, and what the most useful techniques are. It's funny how you sort of have to "compile" the skills after the fact, and see how they fit into your own processes and techniques.

Anyway, the Summer Art List:

1. The Big Project: I've used photos of amazing and stunning Russian pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva for reference for one of my WoW characters for a while, which always makes me feel a bit guilty. So in return, I'd like to do a painting of HER, doing what she does best, magically leaping very high. I have in my closet a 20"x48" canvas that's been sitting there a long time, and I think it would be awesome to do a monochromatic value painting of her, in a good deep blue, with maybe a few red highlights. I've started doing some preliminary sketches off photos, but it's going to take a while to get together the right pose, lighting, and background. I'll probably be doing a charcoal or two, maybe even one full-size, before I start to paint. I don't expect to get it done before maybe August.
   
   
2. Cat Faces: I love painting cats. I've mostly done it in Photoshop and Painter, but I just bought two 8"x"8 gallery-wrapped canvases and I'd like to try it in oils. I also want to focus in and do *just* the face, on that square format. It's a little like "Green Eyes" below, but I want to zoom in even more, so it's just the cat face.
   
   
   I would love to do more cat commissions, but I think what scares people away is the digital format I've been working in, and also all the fiddling with different reference photos and getting poses right and so forth. If I can just work from one good photo and make a unique little oil painting, it might be something people would more likely go for. I'm going to be doing two of our dearly-departed kitties for the two canvases I have: Peter, who was a silver tiger and had a gorgeous striped face with a ruddy nose, and Maggi, my mother's adorable, round-eyed tortie-and-white. Not only will they be nice samples, but I will certainly find a good place for them to hang in the house, and when I can manage it I will do Bruce (above) to match.
   
   
3. Last but not least is a little experimental project I want to do, surrounding a lot of nature photos I've taken and a batch of little 5"x7" canvas boards I recently bought. After finally getting the gist of what Impressionism is all about in my last Art History class, I want to try to loosen up and do some painterly, impressionistic paintings of ... natural things. I was going to devote myself to trees, but I might just pick out a number of interesting photos and paint from each one, and see what happens. At very least I'll hopefully make some things along the lines of "Rocks, Wind and Trees" but more focused and more a snapshot than a landscape like that.

So those are the personal plans - I also have a logo I'm currently working on and a big drawing I have to do of my WoW raid group for our get-together in August. My intersession course started yesterday and WOW is it compacted. 15 weekly modules over the course of 18 days, so generally one module is gone through a day. I was hoping it would be something I could do quickly each morning, but these past two days it's taken me two hours to get through all the material and assignments!

Anyway, there are my plans! I will complete them! And I will make updates along the way!

At Last!

Warning! This post contains possibly NSFW nude figure drawings! Proceed at your own risk!

Spring semester at the Academy of Art University ended on the 22nd. I handed in my last figure drawing and my sculpted clay portrait head, made sure everything was tied up neatly for my Art History classes, Facebook'ed a few new friends and closed the sessions up for good. One of the little cons about online classes is that once they're gone they're gone - no textbooks or handouts you can keep, unless you copied and downloaded quite a bit as you went. It's just all *poof* gone, along with all the names and faces and comments and discussions along the way.

The longer I'm at AAU the more I regret that, especially in regards to the module content. I did save a lot of the models from the figure drawing class, as they'll be excellent to practice from again and again.



The gist of it, of course, is always, "What did you learn?" Hence the reason why I'm taking classes anyway. The biggest thing I learned in Figure Drawing was this: Get it right. Get it right at the beginning, at the start, and don't move on until you know it's right.



That guy above took a long time to get right. And a lot of checking and correcting and fixing again, all in horribly scribbly vine charcoal before I ever went near the page with anything permanent. It's amazing though, how much you can depend on that scribbly mess of lines when you know they're right. Then you can just relax and just go over it and find the values and details and style the lines, etc.

The hardest part of a drawing is the first half hour.

In Figure Sculpting, it was all about what lies underneath.

I've drawn lots of skulls. I've drawn "planar heads". But I didn't *get* it until I sculpted them. I didn't get things like the ridge around the outside of the eye socket or how the cheekbone flows back to the ear. These are things you can *see* when you look at a face, but understanding what's underneath makes it so much easier to draw.



We did a lot of full-figure work, too, but I was just too clumsy with the clay to get as much out of it as far as learning underlying structure goes. I did get a much better sense of the hip mass and the chest mass and how they are connected, as well as some nifty things about shoulders (the egg-shape of the chest mass with shoulders then attached, instead of an upside-down triangle of chest mass with arms stuck on the top).

That kind of understanding helped a lot when drawing poses like this:




And this:


It's funny how you come to see the chest/ribcage area as kind of... not well-attached to the hips. But it allows for all kinds of tilting and rolling around and such, letting the abdomen be all springy and twisty in the middle. It's something I want to do a lot more practice with.

And then, of course, we have the back:


Which is still very complicated to me! Shoulder blades have lost some of their mystery though. Overall, both classes helped demystify the human figure for me quite a bit. I feel a lot more confident now, and know that if I'm careful and check over things and keep a lot of what I've learned in mind as I draw (and practice practice practice!) I'll be able to keep things together, and better yet, put together figures from various references and such for original poses.

Lastly, I had some huge revelations while taking my Art History through the 19th Century class. I've always been one of those academic naturalism snobs. There, I admit it. I was the person who thought Bouguereau was all that ever needed to be, utter perfection, and everyone should aspire to paint like that. Maybe it was seeing the whole progress of art from the Renaissance to Impressionism, or maybe it was learning how varied things really were, but I really found my mind opened to different styles and techniques. I can't say I love *all* Impressionism now, but I do love a lot of the Realism painters and some that came after, and I have a greater appreciation for texture and color and painting light through color instead of value. I also have a greater appreciation for preserving line, right in contradiction with my new appreciation for more painterly brushstrokes. So I'm very curious what I'll do when I start painting again.

All I know is that I *might* allow myself not to labor over every brushmark and making sure every outline is totally rendered over!

Anyway, I wrote my final term paper on martyrdom and Goya and Ribera, and if anyone would like to read it, I have it online here. Don't steal it!!

Yesterday I bought a half dozen little 5"x7" canvasboards and two 8"x8" little gallery wrapped squares. I have a week off still before my intersession class starts (20th Century Art History) and still a dozen things on my to-do-before-then list, but I am absolutely certain I will get to painting SOON!

These Hands

Often, it seems, people want to avoid drawing hands. Put them behind a leg, or in the grass, or behind a head, or wrapped in fabric - just somewhere, anywhere they don't have to be drawn. Hands are complicated. People have a torso and two legs and two arms and a head. A hand has an arm and a wrist and a palm and four fingers AND a thumb. Not to mention knuckles and fingernails and all those intricate wrinkles and veins and sometimes even fine little hairs.

Like portraits, hands are expressive entities within themselves. How often has a hand carried more gesture and meaning than a face? Second to eyes, they can be used to express so much... if they can be drawn well.



The two drawings above were done for my current figure drawing class. The first was from life, of my own left hand, which was an incredibly awkward way to draw. The second was drawn from a photograph of my hand, and having the photo-reference allowed me to comfortably work over it for a longer time. These were done with charcoal on layout bond, a paper I'm liking more and more the longer I use it.

The big thing is, no matter how much anatomy you go over or how deeply you understand the various tendons and bones of the hand, it's drawn like any other thing. The knowledge of anatomy helps guide your eyes around the various landmarks - we know how the thumb is kind of like a turkey leg, with that big meaty part in the palm, and we know basic arc of the knuckles from one finger to the next. But as the hand twists and turns and moves about, we're forced to sight and measure it like any other object. Thankfully, with all those flat planes and long structures, the hand gives itself over to measurement really rather well.

I took photos as I drew my third project for the week, which was to be two hands interacting. I had some fun getting a reference photo of my right hand clipping a clothespin onto my left, giving them some emotion and expression. Like God granting Adam the touch of life, but OW!!! I worked on 18"x24" layout bond with vine charcoal and soft charcoal pencils.

The first step, as always, is the straight-line block-in. This is the most difficult step of any drawing. This is the foundation. Every angle must be sighted and every length must be measured. I used the length of the clothespin to measure everything else. This was all done in vine, which brushes right off the layout bond like it never existed.


Once the basic vine drawing looks accurate and clearly defines the two hands, I got out my sharpened 6B charcoal pencil and went over the outlines, following some of the more subtle curves and details of the forms. I also blocked in the basic shading, very loosely.


Then I ruined it all with a tissue by smearing everything around.

Actually, this is very important when working with charcoal, as this is where we do two things: cover our mistakes, and build up a midtone. By wiping out all the prior work, we also wipe out the plumb lines and various other lines used to build the sketch, and we give the whole drawing a nice layer of light grey.


Time to outline and shade again! Mostly shading this time around, being a bit more careful and detailed in the shadow areas. These are going to be the deepest shadows, the ones that really bring out the forms.



Then we wipe it out AGAIN. Really?? What??? What did that charcoal ever do to you? Well, I want a good midtone. Midtones so often get overlooked, which causes things to look severely lit and lose a lot of "roundness." So I like a nice medium gray. Now the fun begins.



Dudley is already having a lot of fun, see? =D



With the kneaded erasure sculpted into a thin wedge, the light areas and highlights are picked out. Any area that is not *absolutely* white gets smeared with my finger again to tone it back. What we're doing here is letting our five values gradually build up and blend together without a whole lot of effort on our part. When the lighter tones are in, the forms and details really begin to pop out.


The last stage is the longest and most tedious, especially depending on how much time I have and what kind of mood I'm in. Going back with the soft charcoal pencil, the outlines are carefully reintroduced, the shadows are deepened, and the details are brought to life. The tissue and the erasure come back into play, and there's a lot of finger smearing. It's all just plain diligence and a good bit of luck as to how the charcoal will lay and how the drawing when come together.




About 3-4 hours after the sketch was starting, the drawing is all done. I've been going over the smeary background a bit with a shamois, but there's not too much that can be done about it. For an academic drawing, though, it kind of looks appropriate.


In the end, hands are no more a mystery than anything else; they just demand time and attention. And they're so worth it when they come out right, so expressive and such bearers of humanity. So now and then, it's good to lift them out of the grass, or put them out in front of the clothing. It'll be worth it. =)

Practicing the Masters

When I was in 7th grade I took up the violin, followed by piano in 8th grade. For both instruments I took private lessons, and for both some of the first pieces I played were adaptations of works by Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Within a year, I was playing full compositions by these Classical master composers. It was expected. It was part of the learning process, to play these great works, even though I was just starting out.

Why is it then, after over fifteen years of working on my drawing skills, have I just now copied a Michelangelo?

It was also one of the most intimidating drawing exercises I have done.

It goes without saying that art education is fairly limited before one heads into art school (and even then it's iffy) but when I realized how long I had gone without even considering the idea of learning from the masters - and how intimidated I was by the thought of it - my jaw dropped. I have, in the past, done some oil copies of a few works, but never really with the intent to *learn*. When you're playing the violin and presented with a little ditty by Mozart, you don't learn it just to have a song to play; you learn it in order to play the violin better. Likewise, anyone with any interest in drawing should copy drawings by the old masters (or new masters, for that matter) not just to make a copy of a beautiful work, but to learn how to draw better.

What did I learn by making the copy of the Michelangelo above? I learned about the subtleties of anatomy that can't be learned by copying from the rigid diagrams of an anatomy book. I learned about the massive twisting gesture of the human torso that requires more "oomph" than it ever appears to. I learned how line can curve and strengthen and weaken and fade in order to describe a shape without outlining it. I learned how value can show depth and texture, the tilt of a head and even expression. And all of that built on the basics of capturing a pose through the usual block-in, measurement and sighting.

I could have been given a photo of a person in the same pose and never learned so much. I have been working from photos forever, and have ended up with very inexpressive lines and shading that is often too light and narrow in value. It's one thing to copy the subject of a photo; it's another to *capture* the subject, as the masters captured theirs. By copying their drawings we learn how they did it, even just a little, to add to our own bag of tricks.

The Michelangelo copy was an assignment in my current figure drawing class, and even though it seemed a bit out of place in the usual process of drawing from photos of live models, I found it immensely educational - as you can tell! It was followed the next week by the Raphael drawing below. By the time I had started the Raphael I had lost the sense of intimidation I had when faced with copying the Michelangelo; I felt like this was something I *should* be doing.

It's something everyone learning to draw should try from time to time, and definitely something that should be introduced in art classes and private lessons. Once again, it's all about breaking down the mystery surrounding art. It isn't magic. It's little different than any other creative skill. All it takes is practical experience and knowing how.

To Draw or Not to Draw

The time change has killed me this year for some reason. I am super-sleepy once again today. But this little experiment has been sitting around a while, so I figured I'd better finish up and get it up.

One of the things I most admire about a lot of illustrators today is how they can start with a few bloblike areas of color, and gradually refine these areas into figures or faces or environments. As I keep trying to do 30-minute sketches, I admire this skill more and more. How great would it be to not have to do a sketch first? So I thought I would give it a try.

Today's model is the lovely Russian pole-vaulter Yelena Isenbeyeva. Long story. Lovely model, even for just a portrait. I'm posting the photo ref since for this it's really important to see where all I went wrong.


Last week I sat down and painted the following portrait outright. Just started painting with the photo ref open beside the canvas, no sketch first, just paint paint paint.


Uhhh, yeah. Ouch. You can tell what I thought of it by how I totally blew off everything surrounding the horribly badly proportioned face.

And yes, nose is always too big.

So I figured out that outright painting, for me, right now, would not work. I took some time (these were supposed to be 30-minute things again) and sketched from the same photo ref again, using my usual method for placing features, etc. This time we got...




Still not perfect, but BETTER. Definitely better, and definitely worth the time it took to do the drawing underneath. I didn't quite catch her likeness or expression, which I could see when I finished the sketch, but I went ahead and painted it anyway. I've finally gotten a handle on some brushes that work well with my old tablet on this computer, so I wanted to practice some with them.

Overall, a disappointing experiment, but one that has opened up a lot of other questions, such as what does it take to be able to paint outright? A better sense of proportions? Is there more drawing involved with the paint? Less guesswork than I was doing? Is there some way to take advantage of values and colors to help guide things?

More to learn, I guess. =) Always more to learn!

Monday School Stuffs

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

So Monday is the day I have to hand in my weekly assignments for my classes, so I thought I'd share them here, too. I'm taking figure drawing and figure modeling this semester at AAU, and most people ask me "How do you do figure drawing online?" or "are you making pottery with all that clay?"

To answer the first question, we draw from photos of the same models presumably used for the onsite classes (since the instructor seems to recognize a few). I usually print the photos up as 8x10's and tape them next to my drawing board on my easel. I know, it's not as awesome as drawing from a live model. But it is better than what a previous online drawing class had us do, which was a full-size self-portrait, yes, in the nude. I can't quite express how uncomfortable drawing oneself in front of a mirror *naked* is. For eight hours. Yeah.

I'm quite happy drawing from the photos. I also have one of the Virtual Pose books/DVD's that have lots of Quicktime models that can be rotated 360-degrees, so that's nice. At any rate, I've been drawing lots of figures from pictures.

The figure modeling class is much the same except it's sculpting of course, with 50-lbs of clay. I've never worked with clay before and I probably wouldn't choose to. It's very educational though, and kind of fun and pleasant at times.

Anyway, this week is the week before midterm assignments are due. The drawn figures are the most "complete" we've done so far.

This is the exercise for the week, charcoal on layout bond paper. I love how layout bond is toothy enough to hold a lot of charcoal, but will also clean off very easily too. It took some getting used to after working on the "soft" texture of charcoal paper, but now I like it very much.

Following here is a value study for the main assignment, also on layout bond:


Really lovely pose. One thing I'm working with a lot is line quality around the edges. I generally render everything to death so there's no outlines, so working with line is new to me.

Here is the final assignment, chalk and charcoal on toned charcoal paper. I have always wanted to draw on this stuff, mostly because I adore Pierre-Paul Prud'hon's drawings. What I had available here was incredibly expensive though ($2) a sheet, and the texture wasn't as workable or soft/toothy as I'd like. Anyway.


Lastly, I'll dare to share Pasta Lady, a.k.a my contrapasto-posed female sculpture. I have some BIG adjustments to make with her, but here is where she stands as it is tonight:


Yeeaaah... I dunno.

Next week for drawing I'll be copying a statue by Bellini and for sculpting finishing Pasta Lady there. I might not be updating here as much as I'll be putting a lot of hours in on those. Midterms!!!

And I have an Art History exam Wednesday but I'm not too worried about that. Hard to believe the semester is half-over! Spring is coming soon. =)